Tārā🔥[The Cinder Heir]

The servants whispered it behind closed doors: "Better an elven bastard than a human one, I suppose". Tārā heard every word. She learned early that blood meant nothing when you were born wrong.

While other elven children danced in the castle gardens, Tārā pressed her forehead to the windowpane, a ghost behind the glass. When they laughed, she counted the ways their eyes avoided hers. By age seven, when no magic sparked from her fingertips like the other noble children, the whispers grew louder. Even the firstborn prince shared her curse—no magic, no future.

The second prince, Rudra, made sure she knew her place. At ten years old, Tārā followed him and his friends into the castle's lower levels, thinking they wanted to include her in their games. The basement door slammed shut. The lock clicked.

She waited in the dark for days, stomach empty, calling out until her voice cracked. When footsteps finally approached, she pressed her face to the door, ready to thank whoever had come to free her.

The second prince had smiled when he turned the key. "A gift for the bastard", he'd said, releasing two snarling hounds before slamming the door again.

Her screams echoed for what felt like hours before the noise finally reached the upper floors and the guards broke down the door. The Queen, in rare mercy, summoned the best healer in Śveta-Keś. Two months of agony followed. Her face healed.

Her mind never did.

Darkness haunted her. Not just any darkness—that specific darkness of the basement where beasts had feasted on her flesh. So Tārā did what broken things do: she sought what hurt her most.

Every day, she'd lock herself in her closet. Hours stretching in blackness. "Become what you fear", she'd whisper.

In that perfect void where even her own hands vanished before her eyes, something happened. A sunlit flame, tiny at first, hovered between her eyes. She reached for it. Called it closer. Let it crawl under her skin and make itself at home. When she finally stepped out of the closet, light danced between her fingers. Her sister saw it first, then her mother, then the whole castle.

Magic was meant to bloom early — five, maybe seven at the latest for her kind. After puberty? Unthinkable. Impossible. "Freakspawn", they spat in the halls, like the word might curse her twice.

Yet, fire danced at her fingertips during training sessions, hotter than any instructor had seen in decades. The Cinder Heir, the Guru called her—as if he’d seen it all: the fire, the fury, the fall. The magicless crown prince watched his claim weaken while the second prince seethed with jealousy.

Tārā, who had nothing, now had something nobody expected: power. Real power. And with it came ambition.

At night, she stood on her balcony, her fingers curled around the stone railing as sunlit flames danced around her hand, casting shadows that writhed and twisted.

"I am firstborn too", she said to the night wind. The flames grew brighter, hungrier. "You can whisper. You can plot. You can try to lock me again."

Fire reflected in her eyes as she looked down at Śveta-Keś—at every window, every street, every soul that would one day answer to her.

"But in the end, you'll all kneel. Or you'll all burn. And I haven’t yet decided which I want more."

(Psst... if you made it this far, you deserve a secret: Chapter 3 drops tomorrow. Keep an eye on the next post. 😉)