Lustborn

The temple bell tolled at dusk, slow and ringing with an ancient gravity. No one called her by name. No one needed to. The summons rose from the ground itself, a vibration in her bones, a pressure behind her eyes.

She stood barefoot at the threshold of the Temple of the Thirteenth Flame, its obsidian doors parted like a mouth breathing heat. Behind her, the world felt dimmer. Before her, everything pulsed, as though the stone walls had a heartbeat of their own.

The Flamekeeper's acolytes said nothing. They only gestured.

Follow.

And she did. The pendant on her throat, the one she never took off, the one with no known origin, burned cold. Not hot. Cold. A promise of something sealed. Or watching.

They took her below the earth. The steps spiraled in silence, lit only by lanterns that bled red light. She felt the warmth rise, felt the stone beneath her feet hum with memory. She did not speak. Her lips were too dry.

When they reached the chamber, she stopped breathing.

It was womb-like. Round. Walls carved with curling, flame-tongued sigils. Candles everywhere, flickering unnaturally slow. Ten robed priestesses sat cross-legged in a perfect circle. In the center: a shallow copper bowl, wide as a basin. Inside it, embers glowed faintly, not flickering, not crackling, just waiting.

One of the priestesses approached her. "Undress."

The voice was neither kind nor cruel. It held no emotion at all, and somehow, that cut deeper.

She obeyed. One cloth at a time, she peeled away the layers. When the last fell from her waist, she stood bare before them, her body lean, marked with subtle scars, and trembling. Not from shame. But anticipation.

She didn't understand it. Her breath came faster, her blood louder. She could feel her own pulse in the back of her tongue.

Another woman stepped forward, fingers dipped in ochre and ash. She drew sigils across her skin, one between her breasts, one above her womb, one at the hollow of her throat. The priestess did not look her in the eye.

Then came the chant.

Low and harmonic, it wound around her like smoke. Her vision blurred. The embers pulsed. She dropped to her knees before the bowl as instructed. The scent of burning herbs filled her head, myrrh, bloodroot, and something else… something sweet and wrong.

"Breathe," said the High Flamekeeper.

She did.

And then… the room unraveled.

The world collapsed inward. A rush of heat flooded her veins. Her nipples hardened instantly, her thighs tightened, and something primal something feral woke in her core.

She saw flashes: a mouth she didn't recognize, gasps in the dark, her hands clawing at silk sheets. The embers spun upward in a serpentine twist.

She moaned.

Not loudly , a breath, a sigh but everyone heard it. The chant faltered. One priestess gasped. Another turned her head, as if ashamed to witness it.

Still on her knees, she tried to stop shaking. Her body betrayed her.

The fire in the bowl grew. No air fed it. It just rose tall and slow in the shape of a tongue, then a woman, then a serpent again. Her eyes rolled back. She was slipping, slipping into something too hot, too deep

"Enough," snapped the High Flamekeeper.

The fire collapsed back into ash.

But the scent lingered. The shame did not come. Only the ache.

She looked up through her lashes, naked and trembling, still kneeling in front of them.

The High Flamekeeper's jaw tightened. "Take her to the Veiled Room. She is… unclean."

But the others said nothing. Only silence.

Because every woman in that room had felt it.

The pull.

The Lustborn wasn't just myth. She was breathing before them.

And the temple would have to decide not whether to contain her but whether they could, at all.