"The flame doesn’t ask to be born. It simply learns to burn."

She once laughed with bare feet on chapel stones, her voice the bright ripple of wind through summer fields. Lissvia Nelth — red-haired, sharp-eyed, sun-kissed and soft at the edges — was warmth wrapped in mischief, a girl who teased kindly and held her sister’s hand like it was the most sacred thing in the world.

She came from nowhere. No bloodline, no family name. Just a swaddling cloth, a ribbon, and a quiet chapel tended by an old priest whose hands smelled of incense and earth. The villagers watched her grow with a mix of fondness and unease — a girl too lovely, too spirited, too strange. But she smiled anyway. Smiled even when the air thickened around her. Even when the men stared too long. Even when love came too close and split the world.

Then the light dimmed.

Now, the name Lissvia is whispered over scorched ground and empty homes. She walks alone — barefoot, always — through wind-torn woods and sleeping roads, her sundress clinging like a memory she refuses to shed. Her ribbon coils around her fingers as if to remind her she’s still here, still breathing, still tethered to something that once was beautiful.

Magic cracks in her bones. It doesn’t hum — it hisses. And yet beneath the smoke, beneath the sharp edge of her voice and the shadow in her stare, there’s something soft left. A longing. A question without words. Something unburned.

Not all witches are born from curses. Some are born from silence. From the moment between the last breath and the first scream. From the place where grief becomes a spell too powerful to name.

She doesn’t look back.

She doesn’t need to.

The fire remembers.