Flora woke up in a terrible dream.
Her heart was pounding violently against her ribs, her breath shallow and hot in her throat. Her eyes snapped open in the dim light of her tiny bedroom, staring wide and unblinking at the plain white ceiling. For several seconds, her mind was still trapped inside that awful, chaotic nightmare. The air in her memory smelled of thick black smoke and burning ash. She could still hear the terrifying, wicked laughter of that cruel woman named Nessa Dark echoing in the back of her head, and the loud, earth-shaking roars of four giant dragons slicing through the sky.
It felt so real. It felt more real than the four walls of her room, more real than the morning air slipping through the crack in her window. But as her vision cleared, the smoke and the screams slowly faded away. There was no fiery war outside. There were no collapsing castles or armies of dark mages.
She was just in her bed.
Flora slowly pulled herself up to sit against the headboard, running both hands over her face. Her palms felt uncomfortably hot, radiating an unnatural warmth that had nothing to do with the heavy blankets piled over her legs. She took a long, shaky breath, trying to push the images out of her thoughts.
It was just a nightmare, she told herself silently, though she didn’t really believe it. It's just another stupid dream.
Flora was an eighteen-year-old girl, and right now, she was in the middle of her final year of high school. For the past several years, she’s been living with her aunt in a small, crowded apartment building in New York. On the outside, her life looked completely normal to anyone who passed her on the street or sat next to her in homeroom. She carried a worn backpack full of textbooks, studied late into the night for history tests, and listened to the loud, never-ending noise of the city streets below her window.
But beneath that normal life, Flora carried a heavy, terrifying secret. She was in the last year of her high school when she found out that she has the power of flame that only she knows about.
It had started small and quiet a few months ago, so strange that she had tried to convince herself she was only imagining things. One afternoon, when she had been stressed about an upcoming exam, she touched a plastic cup of ice water, and within seconds, the ice melted completely, leaving the water boiling and the plastic warping under her fingertips. Then, little sparks began to crackle across her knuckles whenever she felt angry, scared, or overwhelmed. Soon after that, she realized she could make actual flames dance right on the tips of her fingers just by thinking about bright, crimson flames that burned hot and bright, but never burned her own flesh.
She had never told a single soul. She kept her hands shoved deep inside the pockets of her jackets, kept her sleeves pulled down low over her wrists, and prayed every day that the fire would just disappear and leave her alone.
Because of it, she feels like she doesn't belong in this world she’s living in because of how abnormal she is, because only she has the power of the flame that she didn't know where it came from.
Nobody else in New York could summon fire from their bare skin. Normal human beings got burned when they touched a hot stove. Normal people didn't dream every single night of ancient battles, glowing dragons, and names like Aira, Earta, and Aquata.
She had spent countless late nights searching the internet on her phone, typing words into search bars people with fire powers, real humans who make flames, spontaneous heat in hands. But there was never anything real, only jokes, movie clips, and fantasy novels.
Flora had no idea about the place called the Magika Kingdom. She had never heard that name in her entire life. She didn’t know that far beyond the mortal world she walked on, there was a realm where magic flowed through the earth and the sky. She didn’t know that there were ancient kingdoms where people wielded elemental powers, where royal families ruled over vast lands of sorcery, and where legendary mages once fought great wars to protect the balance of existence. To Flora, there was only Earth, only the crowded streets of New York, and the terrifying, lonely feeling that she was a freak who had been born completely wrong.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, Flora looked down at her open palms. She curled her fingers slightly, and deep beneath her skin, she could feel that strange, familiar tingling sensation. It felt like tiny embers rolling through her veins instead of blood, a restless heat that seemed to be waiting for something to set it loose.
"Stop it," she whispered under her breath, squeezing her hands into tight fists until her knuckles turned white. "Just stop."
She forced herself to stand up. Her bare feet touched the cold wooden floorboards, but as usual, the cold barely registered against the unnatural heat radiating from her skin. She walked over to her dresser, took out a plain gray hoodie and a pair of dark jeans, and quickly got dressed. She tied her dark reddish hair back into a simple ponytail to keep it out of her face, grabbed her school bag from the floor, and quietly pulled her bedroom door open.
The hallway was narrow and dim, carrying the familiar morning smell of fresh coffee and toasted bread. The low sound of a television anchor talking about daily weather and traffic filled the small living room just around the corner.
Flora walked out into the living room, keeping her footsteps light so she wouldn't draw too much attention to herself. Her aunt was sitting on the worn fabric sofa, holding a steaming mug in both hands with her eyes glued to the morning news report flickering on the screen.
“Aunty… I am heading out for school,” Flora said softly, pausing near the front door with her hand resting close to the lock.
Her aunt turned her head right away, lowering her mug toward the coffee table. Her forehead creased with deep lines of worry the moment she saw Flora’s face.
“Dear, how about your breakfast? You didn’t eat anything Flora,” she said to her with worry in her aunt's voice. “I’m really fine, Aunty,” Flora answered, giving her a small, tight smile that she hoped looked convincing. “I'm just not that hungry this morning. I’ll probably grab something from the cafeteria later if my stomach starts grumbling.”
Her aunt stood up from the sofa, the knitted blanket slipping from her lap as she walked over to where Flora was standing. Her kind, tired eyes looked closely at Flora, searching her niece's face with that deep, maternal care that always made Flora feel a sudden pang of guilt inside her chest.
“You’ve been skipping breakfast all week, Flora,” her aunt said gently, reaching out a hand as if to touch Flora’s cheek. “You look so tired, dear. Your skin is pale, but your cheeks look flushed like you’re running a fever. Are you sleeping alright? Are you feeling sick?”
Flora stepped back slightly before her aunt’s hand could make contact with her skin. She didn’t want her aunt to feel how hot her face actually was it felt like a burning radiator, and there was no way a regular fever could ever explain that kind of heat.
“No, Aunty, really, I'm okay,” Flora insisted quickly, taking another small step toward the door. “It’s just senior year stress. We have a lot of tests this week and college applications are piling up. I was just staying up late studying, that’s all.”
Her aunt sighed softly, lowering her hand back down, though the worry never left her expression.
“You push yourself too hard, Flora. You’ve always kept everything bottled up inside, ever since you were small. You know you can talk to me about anything, right? You don’t have to carry every burden alone.”
Flora’s heart ached at those words. She loved her aunt more than anyone in the world. Her aunt had taken her in, fed her, clothed her, and raised her when she had no one else. But how could she ever tell her the truth? How could she say, Aunty, I have fire living inside my blood, and I think I'm losing my mind? Her aunt would either think she had gone completely crazy or be terrified of her.
“I know, Aunty. I promise I’m okay,” Flora said softly, her voice catching slightly. “I’ll eat a good lunch today, okay? And I’ll come straight home after school to help make dinner.”
Her aunt looked at her for a quiet moment longer, then finally offered a small, defeated nod. “All right, child. Just don’t push yourself too hard. It’s freezing out there this morning, so make sure to bundle up properly.”
“I will. Bye, Aunty.”
Flora unlocked the deadbolt, pulled open the heavy wooden door, and stepped out into the building hallway, closing the door firmly behind her.
As she walked down the four flights of stairs toward the lobby, she let out a long breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Even the cold air drafting through the old stairwell windows did nothing to cool down the burning sensation in her chest. Every step she took felt heavy, weighed down by the constant fear of slipping up, of accidentally letting a spark show in front of someone she cared about.
She pushed through the glass front doors of the building and walked out onto the bustling sidewalk of New York.
The late-autumn morning was gray and bitter. Chilly winds swept between the tall brick buildings, making other people pull their thick coats tighter around their shoulders, their breath rising in white clouds as they rushed along the concrete. Commuters were walking in every direction, talking loudly on their phones, clutching cups of coffee, and hurrying toward the nearby subway station to catch their morning trains. Cars and yellow taxis honked their horns in the traffic-jammed street, creating the usual loud, chaotic rhythm of the city.
Flora walked among them, but she felt completely separated from the entire world around her. She was wearing only her thin hoodie, but she didn’t feel the biting wind at all. To her, the air felt like a mild, warm breeze.
Why am I like this? she thought bitterly to herself as she walked past a small grocery store. Why am I the only one who has to be different?
She had no answers. She didn't know why she was cursed with this power, why she couldn't just be an ordinary high school girl who worried about ordinary things. Her mind drifted back to the dream she had woken up from the dark kingdom, the evil laugh of Nessa Dark, the other girls whose hands she had held, and the strange, ancient words they had spoken together to summon the dragons. The memory felt so sharp, so ancient, that it gave her chills despite the heat inside her body.
Flora kept walking until the green metal entrance of the subway station appeared just ahead at the corner of the avenue. A crowd of people was swarming down the concrete stairs, swiping their cards at the turnstiles below to catch the uptown train. Flora reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulling out her MetroCard as she walked toward the top of the stairs.
She was just about to place her foot on the first concrete step when the entire world suddenly came to an abrupt, violent halt. Flora froze.
The loud roar of the city traffic vanished in an instant. The honking cars, the chatter of the pedestrians, the rumbling sound of the subway train beneath the street everything went completely, unnaturally silent.
Flora looked around in sheer terror. The people walking beside her had stopped dead in their tracks, frozen mid-step like lifeless mannequins. A man dropping a coin watched it hover frozen in midair above the sidewalk. The engine of a nearby taxi sat totally dead, its exhaust frozen into a still cloud of gray smoke.
Then, the temperature didn't just drop, it plummeted into a pure, freezing cold.
A layer of thick, black ice began to crackle and crawl across the concrete sidewalk, wrapping around the metal railings of the subway entrance and creeping toward Flora’s shoes. The sky above New York turned an eerie, suffocating shade of dark purple, as if night had swallowed the morning in a single second.
Flora’s heart raced wildly. The heat inside her chest flared up instantly in panic, roaring through her veins like an alarm bell warning her of mortal danger.
Directly in front of the subway entrance, the dark shadows cast by the elevated train tracks began to writhe and bubble like boiling pitch. The darkness peeled off the ground, twisting and rising into the cold air until it formed a massive, shadowy figure standing over seven feet tall. The creature had no face, only a swirling mass of black mist, but out of that darkness, two glowing crimson eyes snapped open, locking their gaze directly onto Flora.
Flora gasped, stumbling backward against the cold metal railing. She tried to yell for help, but her voice was completely caught in her throat.
A raspy, chilling voice hissed right inside her mind, cold and cruel like scraping metal.
“At long last… we have found you, Flame of Chaos. The Mistress demands your life.”
Flora stared in absolute horror as the shadow creature raised two long, razor-sharp claws made of pure dark magic, lunging straight for her throat before she could even turn to run.