Liora Reborn

"Liora Reborn"

Book III in the “Till Death and After” series

I. The Withering Spring

One year after the ash tree bloomed, the village of Edevane began to rot from the inside.

Livestock were born without eyes. Wells turned black. People whispered of figures watching from mirrors and heard lullabies drifting through locked doors.

Clara Whitlock felt it first.

The journal she had hidden away—the one Liora had written—was changing. Pages once blank were filling themselves in with red ink. And in every entry, one phrase returned again and again:

“I let him go. Now I am empty.”

Clara, once a skeptic, was no longer sure if she had done the right thing. She had freed Elias—but what had she left behind?

The ash tree now stood taller. Its blossoms, once white, had turned crimson. Beneath it, flowers grew with petals shaped like mouths.

Something was growing.

II. Hollow Birth

The dreams returned.

Clara would wake with dirt beneath her fingernails. Her reflection would smile when she didn’t. And always, she heard a voice from behind the veil:

“I gave you your life. Now give me mine.”

She sought help from an old priest, the last relic of the village's fading faith. He listened, and when she showed him the journal, his hands trembled.

“This isn’t a haunting,” he whispered. “It’s a gestation.”

Liora hadn’t died.

She was becoming.

Using Clara’s blood. Her body. Her soul.

III. Liora Reborn

The transformation began slowly—Clara’s shadow moved on its own, her voice echoed twice when she spoke. She began waking in strange places, drawn to the forest like a moth to flame.

And one morning, she found herself pregnant.

There had been no lover. No moment. Just a single dream, where Liora’s spirit entered her through a kiss of smoke and sorrow.

Nine nights later, under a lunar eclipse, Clara fell unconscious beneath the ash tree.

The villagers heard a scream that shook the sky—and then silence.

When they came, they found Clara alone, her body cold… but breathing. In her arms was a child.

A girl.

With grey eyes and a heartbeat that pulsed in reverse.

IV. The Return

The girl grew unnaturally fast. By age three, she spoke in full sentences. She didn’t blink. She never cried.

She called herself Lyra.

And she didn’t call Clara “mother.” She called her “Vessel.”

At night, Lyra would hum the same waltz Liora once danced to. And in her drawings—always in blood red—she depicted a shadow bride holding hands with a faceless man beneath a bleeding moon.

Clara tried to love her. But Lyra didn’t need love.

She needed a kingdom.

V. The New Bride

At sixteen, Lyra stood beneath the ash tree, now taller than the steeple in town, its blossoms whispering secrets only she could hear.

“I remember,” she said aloud, “what he did to me. I remember the blade. The betrayal. The fire.”

She turned to the forest—and it bent to her will.

Clara, aged beyond her years, watched from the edge of the clearing, tears frozen on her cheeks. She had birthed the curse anew.

Liora had not just returned.

She had been reborn in blood, body, and memory. And this time, she would not be bound to one lover.

She would bind theWorld

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