The Dawn the Rose from Fire

Day Three of Novel November- Returning Home Triumphant, Alenyah Faces Great Loss

DOOM.



A great thud shook the ground around them, and the world groaned under some unknown onslaught. Felki bucked and snarled, ears flattening. Merath and Alenyah looked at one another in alarm.



“What WAS that?” Alenyah barely managed to say before-



DOOM.



It happened again- the loudest beat of a drum, the kind felt deep in the ribcage that shook bone marrow. Vesper paled, and she twisted in her saddle looking…skyward? Alenyah followed her gaze upward- panicked.



“VESPER!” She demanded. “What-”



DOOM.



Clouds roiled, rushing to block the sun, and darkness fell. Her braid whipped up into the air as a great rush of air barrelled into them. Her hair slapped her face, and Alenyah grabbed the end, pulling it downwards. Her eyes watered at the sudden sharp stink, burning her nose.



“Menerith.” Vesper breathed. Menerith? The name tasted like ash on her tongue; every child in the Reach knew it meant the End, He was a boogeyman, an ancient. And as far as Alenyah knew- incapable of making THAT noise in the stories.



“That’s not some dead god!” Alenyah snarled. Her gaze snapped to the Ironwoods and The Crags. She could see the outline of the Crag’s Great Gate swinging shut, and the trees creaked and shuddered, leaves cascading downwards in the wake of…whatever was coming.



Alenyah kicked Felki into a run, hoping they wouldn’t fall and break their necks tumbling down the slope. The next DOOM never came. Only the silence that followed her down.

It wasn’t a natural quiet. It pressed against her skin, thick and pulsing. The Song—the constant hum beneath the world—shivered, then fell flat. The melody she’d always felt in the trees and stone and sky stuttered into discord, as though every living thing forgot its note at once.

Felki’s claws struck loose stones that scattered behind them. The others followed, their Fylgja barking in fear, but Alenyah barely heard them. Something vast was moving, and the Song twisted around it, folding in on itself. The green of the plains, the breath of wind—all of it bent beneath a weight too immense to name.

A shadow slid across the dim glow of the sun.

Her heart caught, every pulse echoing with that impossible rhythm—slow, deliberate, immense. Wingbeats. The air itself seemed to recoil.

She could feel the wyrm before she could see it: an emptiness inside the Song, vast and cold and devouring. Life faltered in its wake. Grass curled inward, brittle as ash. Felki’s hackles rose, and a low whine built in her throat.

Alenyah reached instinctively for the Song—to weave harmony back into the broken chord—but her voice caught. The notes she found were swallowed before they ever left her mouth. The wyrm’s presence consumed every sound, every color, every heartbeat.

The doom was wingbeats.

And she was the only Singer left who could hear how the world screamed beneath them.



Wyrms gained their name because they spawned with no limbs or wings. Only time, taint, and decay grew a wyrm’s strength into claws and eventually wings. Only whispers around fires told of the beasts evil enough to burst limbs into being. Yet, above, wide as a mountain, black as shadow, this one swooped towards the Reach.

Alenyah could not reach the city in time. She reached upwards futilely, a broken note tearing her throat. Felki’s feet kicked up dust on the road twisting towards the trees. The thud of wings pressed the air, spun the wind into dust devils. She felt Merath’s presence, and the others at her back.

The Fey’ri felt more than saw the beast inhale.

The air itself was drawn inward, a terrible pause in the world’s breathing. The Song stuttered—notes tangled, strangled—as though creation itself had forgotten its rhythm. The Ironwoods went silent. Even the earth held its voice.

Then the wyrm exhaled.

The Song shattered.

Flame erupted from the monster’s maw, thick and molten, and every chord of life screamed at once. The fire poured downward, coating the Ironwoods in rivers of orange glass. The green burned out of the world.

Alenyah gasped, clutching at her throat, the discord bleeding through her veins. She could feel the melody’s ruin inside her—ash replacing breath. Felki’s paws struck the road in a desperate rhythm that could not match the Song’s collapse.

The Reach roared.

And over it all, the wyrm’s presence howled through the broken harmony—a dissonance vast and triumphant, consuming every other sound.

Even from miles away, she could hear the music of death: voices rising, strings snapping, the final chords of her home unspooling into silence.

“Mother,” she whispered, the name a cracked note in the cacophony.

Then the wyrm turned.

Its shadow wheeled toward the city again, blotting out the sun. Alenyah’s feet moved without thought. She dimly heard Merath shouting her name, felt hands seize her tunic and fail to hold her. “We have to help them,” she said, voice hollow, toneless. “She needs me—”

Merath’s face filled her vision, brown eyes fierce. “You enter the Reach, you die!”

“I can fix it,” she rasped. “I can tune it—”

“You’ve tamed one wyrm, Alenyah! One lesser!” His shout trembled with fear, not anger. “The Queen will—”

But even as he spoke, the wyrm wheeled again.

Flame met the palace. The Ironwoods split and screamed as their hearts turned to cinder. The discord rose so violently that Alenyah dropped to her knees, hands pressed to her ears as if that could keep the ruin out.

The Song was gone.

Only silence remained—heavy, ashen, absolute.

Alenyah screamed into it.

The group could only bear witness, covering their mouths as the air fouled with the stench of bubbling flesh and rot. Despair carried on the wind. It was hard to breathe; harder still to see through the haze of burning ash.

A single boom rolled through the smoke, scattering it enough to glimpse the horizon. The wyrm had landed, gouging furrows into the plains as it dragged its mass southward. If she squinted, Alenyah could just make out the glint of weapons flung hopelessly upward, sparks against the dark as the beast rent the Crags’ great gates wide and disappeared into the cliffs.

The Stoneborn could not withstand what her own people could not.

And where—where—was her mother?

Where was the Singer Queen whose voice could bend storms and beasts alike?

Why wasn’t she stopping this?

Hours passed like moments as the Reach burned. Through the smoke, she thought she saw Stoneborn fleeing the cliffs—tiny shapes, scattering like ash. But Alenyah did not care for them then. She only wanted to hear her mother’s voice in the Song again, to feel some thread of harmony still alive.

There was none.

The world’s melody had gone still, and even the silence hummed wrong. The pitch was too low, too empty.

When night came, the Singer and her retinue stood vigil. The wyrm did not emerge from the Crags. Flames burned to embers, and a cold wind swept from the Wastes. Someone built a small fire that hissed in the ash; someone else pressed a waterskin into Alenyah’s soot-blackened hands. She drank mechanically, her throat raw from smoke and screaming.

It was unfair that the night still passed.

That the sky remained moonless and starless while her world smoldered.

That the horizon could still bleed red with dawn.

When morning came, Vesper roused them. Someone lifted Alenyah onto Felki’s back, the Fylgja stepping through ash and ruin with silent precision. The air was heavy, every breath thick with iron and sorrow. Along the road, they found what was left behind—collapsed bodies, Stoneborn and Fey’ri alike, warriors and children, their faces gray and still.

The Song should rise here, Alenyah thought numbly. It should mourn them.

But nothing stirred.

Smoke still curled from the Crags’ shattered gates as they neared. She paused, straining to hear the faintest hum of life within the stone. Nothing answered. She told herself the Stoneborn must have fled deeper—through tunnels, to some hidden exit in the hills.

But the silence was absolute.

There was no refuge here.





And when Alenyah found her Mother, there was no sympathy for the Stoneborn either.

The age of Song ended in smoke and ruin, and a century of silence began.