Deep in the heart of Sylvarion, where, – so the old ones say – starlight has kissed every leaf and where the wind isn’t wind, not truly. It is music, threaded through leaves of spun glass and petals that change depending on the mood of the day. The trees are impossibly tall with their trunks pale like moonstone and their roots entwined like lovers beneath the earth. Blossoms bloom without warning, often mid-sentence. They say that it’s as if the land itself is eavesdropping and moved by the story it hears.

Even at twilight, when most courts quieted, Sylvarion keeps humming with that sound of the wind. Eladrin stepped light-footed along intertwining branches, the sound of their laughter almost as soft as the falling rain around them. Pools reflect not only the sky but your thoughts. And light, the kind that doesn’t belong to any sun or moon, filters through the canopy like lazy silk, warming the soul rather than the skin.

Everyone knew, without question, that everything in Sylvarion was alive and listening. The air itself felt enchanted and was sweet with blooming citrus and cold mint, depending on where you stood and what you needed.

Nymira Vexwyn had always belonged. She could tell you the tone of each hum of the season, which light was flickering through the elder boughs, or detail the way that spring folded into summer almost as smoothly as breath turned into song. She was, at her heart, sharp, curious and ambitious – some would say dangerously so. 

While others danced in circles of predictability, Nymira chased the edges of magic, always looking for where the light thinned and something new might break through.

And Sylvarion, for all its beauty, had edges.

Nymira was not born into nobility, but she was born into wonder. Her mother was a well practiced conjourer of illusion-magics who could make starlight shimmer in the hands of children. Her father was a bark-skinned ranger. Together, they lived in a treetop home on the edge of Sylvarions twilight border – a place where the seasons changed more subtly and the veil between realms was said to be thin. 

Even as a child, Nymira asked many questions. Though, unlike most, she demanded answers. “Why do some trees hum when you sleep near them?” “What happens if you chant a bloom spell in reverse?” “Where does time go when we dream?”

The elders were fond of her spirit, though frequently would advise her to slow down. Of course, she didn’t. At age seven she disassembled an enchantment circle and rebuilt it to run backwards. At age ten, she was caught in the archives after moonbell. At age twelve, she attempted to time-freeze a fruit to taste it at it’s ripest while also accidentally putting her entire kitchen into stasis. 

It was the Timekeeper Thaelis who truly saw her potential. After watching her reconstruct a fractured hourglass with raw mana, he offered her the rarest of paths: an apprenticeship in chronomancy. 

Most Eladrin studio elemental magics such as the arts of growth or decay. Chronomancy however was different. It was dangerous. It was looking at what might have been and what should never be. 

Nymira had accepted before he even finished making the offer. 

“I don’t want to change time,” she once told Thaelis, “I just want to understand why it moves”

He had smiles then, a rare thing. “And that, Nymira, is why you’ll survive it”

She never forgot those words. 

Caerith Velorin and Nymira had been best friends since they first learned to shape light into music. He was more thoughtful, more patient, but he never once tried to tame the flames of her curiosity. Where she carved glyphs into tree bark, he would etch them into snow. When she leapt without thinking, he would catch her – shaking his head with that half-smile only he wore.

They studied together under Thaelis, growing through rites, seasons, and spells, their hands nearly always stained with ink and laughter. He called her “Star-wicked” because she always managed to step outside the court’s grace. She called him “Moon-blind” because he saw only the good in others, even when he shouldn’t.

Caerith rose with grace, of course. He was meant for it – wise, measured, respected even by the old ones. When he was chosen to speak for the High Circle, no one was surprised. Nymira had kissed his cheek the night before the appointment, proud beyond words.

“You’ll change everything on that tribunal,” she whispered.

He smiled.

“Only what needs to be changed.”

Back then, they still believed that love – no matter its shape – could endure anything. Especially truth. They moved through the world like two halves of a thought, always side by side.

And yet, tonight, she was alone and in a place that no apprentice should go. 

“I’m telling you,” she whispered to the air, “the rift is thinning. I can feel it”

Magic prickled along her fingers and the grove around her bent unnaturally. Not in fear, but in anticipation. Leaves twisted toward her, branches leaned ever so slightly, and the air grew thick. Something ancient was paying attention. She had followed the ley lines for weeks, sketching signals, ignoring the warnings of Thaelis. 

“You’re not ready, Nymira” he had told her. “The Shadowfell is not merely shadow. It thinks. It feels… and it wants.”

She smirked at the memory. It was the same smirk that had gotten her into trouble since childhood. She was always ready, even if others didn’t see it. Especially then.

But tonight, the trees didn’t hum. They were holding their breath. 

She stepped past the last circle of runes and into the heart of the glade. There, reality faltered. A jagged tear hovered in the air and was pulsing like a wound, black as pitch and rimmed in silver veins that pulsed with a dim, otherworldly rhythm. It was a rift yet it was not wide, nor deep, but it was hungry.

And at its centre, cradled in invisible threads of force, floated an obsidian seed.

She stepped closer with the glyphs dancing in her eyes. It was as though her soul was calling out in recognition. Her hand extended, and the moment her fingers brushed the seeds surface – 

– Her lungs burned. Her blood iced and her vision fractured.

Something ancient and wrathful screamed through her mind. But it wasn’t in words. It was crawling, seeping… and it bound itself to her. 

She screamed. 

And the seed vanished. 

Nymira didn’t die. She didn’t fall down or burst into flame or vanish through the rift into another realm. 

She just.. Woke up. 

But she was changed. 

The court couldn’t see it, at least not at first. Not when she smiled. Not when she bowed. But her magic felt… wrong. Her seasons bent strangely. Flowers wilted beneath her steps on hot summer days. Light spells flickered out into cold flames. And when she meditated, something else was there. 

A voice. 

Hers… but not. 

“I am the part you denied, little star. I am the rot beneath the bloom. You gave me your hand and now you will grasp.”

This wasn’t a simple whisper, the words coiled, wrapping around the edges of her thoughts like ivy through stone, sinking in places where even her magic dared not go.

She had named it Vhaelyx in a dream one night. Though… she suspected that it had named itself. 

The transformation didn’t come all at once. It came at different stages. During grief or rage or pain. 

When she tried to resurrect a fallen moon-elk and scorched its bones into ash. 

When she lashed out at a fellow mage during a duel and watched voidfire coil up his arms. 

When she saw her own reflection sneer back at her. 

And it came in silence, too. In moments that no one saw. When she lay awake beneath glowing branches and could no longer tell if the voice in her head was the invader or just herself, finally speaking truths that she had buried.

It grew in her. Like roots. Like rot.

At first, it lasted seconds. Then minutes. Then whole nights. 

She would return with ash beneath her fingernails and no memory of where she’d been. The court noticed. And they were afraid. 

Whispers threaded through boughs like spider-silk. Touched by shadow. Marked and cursed. Elders spoke her name only behind sealed doors. And children? Children were told not to meet her eyes. Even the trees, once warm to her presence, began to lean away. 

Thaelis led the tribunal. She remembered standing before him, her palms open with her tattoos glowing faintly under her skin. 

“She is two souls now,” he declared. “One Eladrin. One… another”

A murmur rippled through the gathered elders. No one met her eyes.

“I am me!” she shouted, her voice cracking. “Still me. Still Nymira.”

“Then be only you,” he snapped and turned away. 

Her fingers trembled as Thaelis turned his back. Her breath hitched and then… stopped. For a heartbeat, the world held still.

The Gorget at her throat cracked with a sound like breaking ice. Her tattoos, once softly glowing with living ink, flared violently and then split open, releasing tendrils of shadow-magic that danced across her skin like smoke caught in a storm.

A low, guttural hiss curled from her throat. It was inhuman, primal, a sound dredged from somewhere far deeper than flesh or memory. Her skin darkened, iron-grey spreading from her chest outward in waves, consuming her like a living shroud. Her hair, once rich with the golden hue of springlight, leached of all colour, turning bone-white under the torchlight, each strand lifting and wrapping as if caught in an unseen wind.

And then her eyes ignited. They were no longer Nymira’s. Twin infernos roared to life in her gaze, flickering with bloodlight and ruin. Not fire. Not magic. Hunger.

The chamber fell silent. Even the stones recoiled with their ancient enchantments dimming beneath the weight of what now stood among them.

“I warned you,” Vhaelyx snarled, her voice a silk-laced threat was low and slow – every word curved like a blade drawn across the skin. “But you demanded the mask.”

Chairs scraped violently across the marble as figures rose in alarm, instinctively drawing sigils in the air, their magic flaring in fractured bursts. Shields, restraints, wardings… but it was all too late.

Because something older than spells had already awakened.

She stepped forward, barefoot on the marble, and the light recoiled from her touch, shrinking back into the high windows like a frightened animal. The floor cracked faintly beneath each step, as though the building itself questioned her right to exist.

The air changed. It was denser, colder, scented with iron and smouldering myrrh. Shadows no longer obeyed the room’s geometry. They twisted and stretched toward her, not in fear, but in devotion.

Caerith rose from his chair, not with fear, but with sorrow. “Nymira,” he breathed, taking a single step toward her, “please…”

Her eyes – no, its eyes – burned with fire not born of this world.

“She’s not here anymore.”

And then the chamber screamed.

When the doors were opened the next morning, the room smelled of scorched ozone and charred myrrh. The marble floor was cracked like dried earth, spiderwebbed with ruptures that pulsed faintly as if still remembering the violence. Enchanted torches that once burned with steady blue light now flickered weakly, as though in mourning. The seats of judgment stood empty. Ash dusted the tribunal’s high dais like snowfall.

No bodies were found. Only silence.

But in the centre, lying untouched among the ruins, was Caerith’s moon-pinned brooch. The one Nymira had gifted him in spring, long ago. It glinted faintly in the dim light, a symbol of friendship that had once seemed eternal. There was no blood. Just the brooch, cold and alone.

Nymira was gone. Ripped away.

And the heart of Sylvarion felt it.

The trees no longer leaned in to listen. The flowers no longer opened at dawn. Pools once clear as glass now reflected shadows, even at midday. Music in the wind was replaced with a low, tonal hum that sounded like mourning when it passed through the leaves. The laughter of the Eladrin grew quiet. The light, though unchanged, somehow seemed dimmer.

The High Circle never reformed. The tribunal seats remained empty, a sacred space now avoided, roped off by ancient wards and silent fear. Children were no longer taught magic near the forest. They whispered instead, inventing stories about the creature in the dark – not realising they spoke of one of their own.

And in the roots of the realm, in the veins of its oldest trees, something remained awake. The forest remembered. It knew her name.

The wind had changed its tune. It was no longer a song, but a warning.

A name, carried in rustling leaves and flickering shadow, etched into memory and myth alike:

Vhaelyx.