In The Flames Of The Fallen Novel – Ember: The Fallen God Ember: 10 Years Old Khaos: 6,089 Years Old Beware of he who lurks in the dark woods. **Valiant—Dream Cave** “Once your sister is born, the Old Ones will come and take you away, Ember. There’s no place for you here. Not as my daughter, and certainly not as a Witch.” The forest beyond the coven was not a place for children.
It was a place for things the witches had long stopped naming. Still, Ember ran into it—barefoot, bleeding, and burning with the ache of being unloved. She had nothing left to fear. Soon, her coven would cast her out. Not with fury—but with quiet disdain. She had been told all her life that she was too small, too strange, too powerless to belong among them. A mistake of fate. A flame too weak to catch. So she ran away from her mother’s Palace of Flames like the vast disappointment she left behind could possibly cease to exist with her exit.
But her purpose was hardly to escape—but to create a temporary bubble of safety for herself. The night Ember had been born as the only daughter of Valata AshFall, High Priestess of the Azure Witches; the only one coven that dared practice the sorcery of flames, her birth had been celebrated with great cheer for all but five seconds. That was until the Velth Reader cradled her little, newborn body at the time and made a painful declaration, “She’s an Echo Witch. She possesses no Velth at all.” Velth is the soul-fuel of witches. All witches are born with it.
So Ember not possessing it was a rarity that made her stick out. The ten years that followed after that declaration saw Ember morphing deeper into the disappointment that was expected of her. Reduced to the status of a servant in her mother’s own coven, she had been confident that she would at least live out the remainder of her life peacefully. But even that hope vanished when her mother took in nine months ago. And in anticipation of the birth of her sister, Ember was forced to count down the remainder of her days as a member of the Azure Witches.
Once her sister was born, she would be cast out to the old ones—recluse ancient witches whose cruelty knew no bounds in their attempt to forge witches out of ‘Echoes’. So Ember wandered deeper in the forest, hoping perhaps to temporarily forget it all. The trees thickened, dark as bone beneath moonlight, and the earth thrummed with an ancient pulse as if to signify that something lived here. Something that watched with otherworldly eyes. Certainly not something that Ember was scared of.
Then the sky split. A sound like ruptured heavens cracked the noisy-quiet of the forest. Then something fell. No—someone. A body crashed through the canopy like lightning given flesh, slamming into the ground with enough force to silence the entire forest. The earth shook, the trees danced, and every other living thing that dared to breathe in the dark woods took flight and escaped. Birds, crickets, squirrels…they all suddenly ceased to exist.
Ember froze. And from the broken trees the being had crashed into emitted dust like smoke; particles like ash almost representing dying fireflies. And there—at the heart of the ruin—lay a being that seemed to have survived a fall no ordinary person would have survived… a vampire. At least, he seemed like a vampire except there was an air of extraordinariness around him. This man was no ordinary vampire. He seemed to be the kind that has existed with time itself, and those kinds were regarded as gods.