Memory is a fragile thing. Sometimes it holds like glass, sometimes it drifts like smoke.

The children would remember fire. That much was certain.

Ryden’s small fingers clutched at Darla’s hand, their palms damp, their bodies pressed close in the corner of a darkened room. The air was thick, the floorboards cold. Voices pressed through the walls — their parents’ voices — too urgent, too fast for the twins to understand. Words tangled into a blur, like a storm heard from under deep water.

Darla whimpered. Ryden squeezed her hand tighter. He wanted to be brave, the way Father always said, but his chest felt too small for the fear inside it.

The door burst open. Their mother fell to her knees before them, her hair wild, her eyes shining with tears and firelight. She smelled of smoke and salt.

“My loves,” she breathed, and her voice shook as though it might break apart.

She pulled something from around her neck — two pendants, silver, etched with symbols the twins could not name. They glimmered faintly in the unsteady light, as if they carried their own secret flame.

Her hands trembled as she slipped the chains around their small necks. “Never take these off,” she whispered, fierce despite the cracks in her voice. “Never.”

The children stared, their eyes wide, their lips parted. They didn’t understand. But something in the weight of her tone, in the way her hands lingered on their shoulders, pressed the command into their bones.

Then their father filled the doorway. Tall, broad, shadowed in smoke. His voice came low, words that meant nothing to their ears but carried the weight of goodbye. He crouched, his rough hands cupping their cheeks so tenderly it made Darla’s tears spill over.

“Stay together,” he said — or perhaps the children only believed he said it, years later, when they tried to recall.

The ground shook with approaching boots. The air crackled with shouts and steel. Their parents exchanged one final look — love, fear, a thousand things unsaid. And then they turned, running not toward the children but away from them. Into the night. Into the hunters.

The twins were left with silence, broken only by the groan of wood and the hiss of smoke.

Ryden tried to reach the door, but Darla pulled him back. The air grew hotter, thicker. Flames licked the edges of memory.

Through the haze stepped a man who was neither their father nor their mother. Tall, lean, his hair pale as moonlight, his eyes too sharp, too strange to belong to any mortal. His presence cooled the air around him.

He knelt, and the world seemed to steady. He whispered words, though the children could not hold them. He lifted them into his arms and wrapped them in his cloak. They pressed against him, trembling, clutching, too frightened to question.

He carried them from the burning house, through the forest, until the trees thinned and dawn bled across the sky. Each step seemed to wipe something from their memory, leaving behind only fragments — heat, smoke, the faint glint of silver.

By the time he laid them at the doorstep of a dragon shifter’s mountain home, their world had already begun to dissolve.

The door creaked open—a startled voice. Warm arms gathering them close. “Abandoned little ones,” someone murmured. “Poor things.”

To the shifters, that was all they were — children left behind by a mother who could not keep them. The pendants around their throats were dismissed as trinkets. The truth, overlooked.

And so Ryden and Darla grew, believing themselves shifters. Believing the fire they remembered was only a dream.