[Cassandra’s POV]

I move through the battlefield like a blade through silk.

The fighting has shifted — the eastern assault broken, survivors too focused on their own survival to notice one more figure in blood-splattered armor. The southern fleet is wavering on the horizon, ships turning in ragged sequence.

None of it matters.

I am not here for battles or fleets or the petty arithmetic of war. I am here for the prophecy. I have always been here for the prophecy, since the day the witch spoke the words that defined my existence.

The eastern shore opens before me — rocky ground descending toward the sea, smoke drifting from a dozen fires. And there, fifty yards ahead, I find what I’ve been searching for.

Evelyn.

She stands near her dragon on a flat stretch of scorched rock. The white beast is grounded — wing damage visible even from this distance, the membrane torn, the creature exhausted and unable to fly.

Evelyn is alone except for the wounded dragon behind her. Her armor is bloody, and her silver hair streams wild in the wind.

Around her fingers, moonlight flickers like a failing torch — guttering, unsteady, the power that should have made her invincible reduced to fitful sparks.

She looks exhausted but powerful, exactly like the woman the prophecy warned about.

I step into the open. No concealment or ambush: the prophecy demands a confrontation, and I will give it one.

Evelyn sees me the moment I emerge from the smoke. Her body goes still — not with fear, but with recognition.

She knows what this is, and she’s known since the day I arrived at this compound that it would end with the two of us facing each other across bloody ground.

Thirty feet separate us. Thirty feet of scorched rock, of war’s debris, of everything our father built and everything he destroyed.

“Cassandra.” Her voice carries across the distance, steady despite the exhaustion written in every line of her body. “I wondered when you would find me.”

“I’ve been looking for you for years, sister. Every time Father looked at you with disgust, every time he reminded me that one of us would survive and one would not, every time I trained while you cowered — I was finding my way to this moment.”

“Then you’ve spent these years preparing for something you don’t understand.”

“The witch spoke the words, and I have spent my entire life becoming what the prophecy requires.”

“What do you think the prophecy requires, Cassandra? Tell me exactly what you believe you were raised to do.”

I recite the words that have shaped every moment of my existence, the words I have carried like a second heartbeat since I was old enough to understand them.

“The cycle ends in blood, and what was divided is made whole.” I grip my blade tighter. “The stronger sister destroys the weaker one, and that’s what I was trained to fulfill.”

“You believe you’re the stronger sister.”

“I am! Father made certain of it. Every advantage was by design — the training, the resources, the cruelty that forged me into a weapon while you were kept weak and afraid. I am what years of preparation created.”

Evelyn doesn’t draw a weapon. She stands with her hands at her sides, moonlight still flickering around her fingers, and looks at me with something that might be pity.

“The prophecy has been misread, Cassandra. Deliberately, I think. By Father, or by whoever told him what he wanted to hear.”

“Father heard it directly from the witch’s mouth.”

“He heard what he wanted to hear—a reason to destroy one daughter and elevate the other.”

“Just consider that they might have been. I’m asking you to look at the evidence and make your own choice instead of following the path Father carved for you.”

Years of training and cruelty and absolute certainty, years of knowing exactly who I was and what I was meant to do.

And now my sister stands before me offering a different truth, path, and ending.

The doubt spreads through me like poison, corroding the foundations of everything I’ve built my identity upon.

But years of conditioning is stronger than one moment of uncertainty. Twenty years of Father’s voice in my head, telling me what I am and what I must do.

Years of being shaped into a weapon cannot be unmade by words, no matter how true those words might be.

I raise my blade.

“You may be right about the prophecy.” My voice sounds strange to my own ears — hollow, distant, like someone else is speaking through my mouth. “But I am what Father made me. I don’t know how to be anything else.”

Evelyn’s expression shifts — hope dying, replaced by something that looks like grief.

“Cassandra, please. You can choose differently. The prophecy doesn’t have to end in blood.”

“The prophecy ends however I decide it ends, and I have already decided.”

I lunge.