Suddenly, something decided.

  Chains slammed into existence around her.

  No rattle, no warning—just impact. One moment she was walking forward, the next her limbs were yanked in all directions. Cold iron coiled around her wrists, her ankles, her throat, her waist. Links thick as bones locked with a single, heavy click that reverberated through the tower.

  The weight was impossible.

  Her shoulders screamed as they were dragged upward. Knees hit the floor, then kept going, as if gravity had been multiplied only for her. Each chain pulled in a different direction, trying to stretch her into a shape the body was never meant to take.

  There was no one beside her.

  No voice. No presence. No witness.

  This moment belonged to her alone.

  Pain bloomed in her chest.

  Not sharp at first—just a hot, insistent pressure beneath her sternum, where the symbol had been etched into her flesh. It swelled, growing heavier, hotter, as if a coal had been lodged inside her and someone had begun to blow on it.

  Then it spread.

  Heat rolled outward from that single point, crawling along her ribs, up her throat, down her spine. Each pulse sent another wave through her, turning her insides into raw wire. Her breath hitched, but she didn’t try to call out. The instinct was there, buried somewhere under the pain, but this place had already taught her how pointless a plea would be.

  Her lips wouldn’t have allowed it anyway.

  Something thick slid over them—slow, suffocating, sealing her mouth shut. She tasted bitterness and ash. When she tried to part her lips, the substance resisted, clinging, hardening.

  She looked down as much as the chains allowed.

  Her skin was gone.

  Or rather, it was hidden—smothered under a slick, black layer that hugged every contour of her body. It moved in tiny, sluggish waves, like oil disturbed by something rising beneath it. It caught the red light in dull streaks and smelled of burned earth and smoke.

  Tar.

  She was wrapped in tar.

  The pain in her chest sharpened, stabbing now, each pulse like a nail hammered from the inside. It throbbed in time with a rhythm that wasn’t quite a heartbeat—too uneven, too deliberate.

  It burns, she thought, the words trapped behind sealed lips.

  The symbol beneath her skin flared once—brighter than ever before.

  She didn’t see it, but she felt it, a final, blinding surge that made her vision white out at the edges. The chains rattled as her body arched against them, every muscle locked, every joint straining.

  Then something broke.

  Not outside.

  Inside.

  The heat that had been focused in that one place exploded, racing through her like a storm. It filled her skull, her fingers, the hollows of her bones. Her spine arched again, this time not from the chains, but from something pushing outward between her shoulder blades.

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  Her bones moved.

  They didn’t dislocate; they reformed.

  There was a grinding, snapping, wet shifting sound she felt more than heard. Vertebrae lengthened. Ribs bent, changing their curve. The structure of her back strained, then rearranged, as if invisible hands were rebuilding her from the inside out.

  The tar began to crack.

  Lines split across her chest, her shoulders, her arms—thin at first, then widening. Steam hissed from the fractures, curling upward in pale threads that smelled of hot pitch. Everywhere the steam touched, the tar loosened, blistering, flaking.

  The chains started to fail.

  Hairline fractures spread along the metal, racing link to link like lightning caught under the surface. With each pulse of pain, another section gave way. The collar around her throat split. The bands at her wrists crumbled. Shards of chain hit the floor and dissolved into black dust the instant they touched it.

  The burning in her chest peaked, then—suddenly—vanished.

  Not eased. Not faded.

  Gone.

  In the shocked silence that followed inside her body, she felt it clearly: the mark that had been carved into her, the broken sun she’d seen glowing beneath her skin—simply… wasn’t there anymore. No pulse. No heat. Just smooth, raw sensation, as if the flesh had never been touched at all.

  What replaced it was not emptiness.

  It was other.

  The last of the chains snapped.

  She dropped.

  Knees met the floor first, then her hands, tar smearing across the polished surface. The tower’s hungry ground drank it in at once, the blackness thinning as it was pulled down, leaving only a faint, oily sheen behind.

  She didn’t try to stand.

  Not yet.

  Her body shook—part pain, part shock, part the unfamiliar weight pulling at her back. Something heavy dragged against the floor behind her, catching and folding in on itself with each small movement.

  The red glow in the tower shifted.

  It gathered overhead, condensing into a brighter circle, then poured down in a column of light that widened until the floor around her turned mirror-dark again.

  Slowly, she lifted her head.

  Her reflection stared back at her.

  For a heartbeat, she didn’t recognize it.

  The tar still clung in torn, uneven patches across her skin, but where it had cracked and fallen away, she was… clean. Not the sickly pallor of her first awakening, not veined with black, not marked.

  Just pale.

  Smooth.

  Unblemished.

  No symbol. No lines. No veins visible beneath the surface. Her chest was bare and empty of any sign that something had once burned there. Her skin looked almost too perfect, as if it had been poured and set rather than grown.

  Her face was hers.

  The cheekbones. The mouth. The line of the jaw.

  But the eyes—They glowed.

  Not from around the edges or in reflections, but from within, deep in the irises. A steady, smoldering red that made the reflected pupils look like small, dark pits sunk into coals. When she blinked, the light didn’t dim; it followed, unbothered, as natural as breathing.

  Her hair had changed completely.

  It spilled around her shoulders and down her back in uneven strands, heavy with the tar that hadn’t yet flaked away. Underneath the grime, its color was startling—a deep, cool green that caught the red light and twisted it into strange shades.

  Jade.

  The word rose unbidden.

  She watched it move in the reflection as she shifted her head, the mineral sheen making her look unreal, carved from something precious and cold.

  She lifted a hand.

  The skin on her arm was plain now, pale and smooth where the tar had split open. No dark tracery, no visible veins, no symbol ghosting beneath. Just flesh that didn’t quite look like it remembered ever being human.

  Her fingers touched the floor.

  The reflection met them.

  Behind her, something unfurled.

  She felt it first—the sudden, dragging pull along the muscles of her back, the strangely natural instinct to brace, to spread, to open.

  Two vast shapes rose into view behind her reflected shoulders.

  Wings.

  They were black as the tar had been, but cleaner, sharper. A framework of long, dark bones arched outward, jointed in ways her mind stumbled over. Thin membrane stretched between them, opaque and glossy, catching the red glow in slick highlights. They were neither feathery nor delicate; they looked built to cut through smoke and darkness, not air.

  They shifted as she breathed.

  They were hers.

  Although the figure in the reflection still wore a roughly human form—two arms, two legs, a face she could name as her own—there was no mistaking the absence behind the eyes. Whatever had stared out of them in the world above was gone.

  Something else watched now.

  Calm.

  Cold.

  New.

  She parted her lips.

  Tar cracked and fell from their surface in small, brittle flakes. Air touched the raw skin underneath, cool and bitter. No name rose to her tongue. No plea, no question, no call to anyone at all.

  Just a single, quiet understanding, settling in her bones like cooled metal:

  She was not a guest here.

  She was an answer.