Introduction: A Child of Want
Eira Meredydd grew up on the Welsh coast in a close-knit family where honesty was not just a virtue but a survival strategy. Meredydd women had a reputation for speaking truth directly — gently, but uncompromisingly — and for choosing independence over any bond that threatened their autonomy. Eira was no different.
She met Seren’s father — Daniel Llewelyn — during a brief, bright period of her life. He was charismatic and full of grand ideas, but uncertain of his direction. Eira admired his enthusiasm; he admired her clarity.
They never married. They didn’t need to.
Seren was born on a rain-soft morning in a small hospital on the west coast of Wales, the kind of place where time moves slowly and the sea is always close enough to hear. Her birth was mundane, but the world around her shifted subtly when she arrived in it, as if the gravity of a distant star had re-entered orbit. Her mother, Eira, whispered that she had “old eyes” — but the truth ran deeper. She came into the world with those eyes wide open, the golden motes of Desire flickering faintly around every person she saw.
The Father Who Could Not Stay
Seren’s father, Daniel, was ever a man of gentle intentions and fragile aspirations – the sort of person whose dreams lived quietly in notebooks and half-formed plans. He visited constantly in her early months, rocking her, humming out-of-tune lullabies, and speaking to her in the soft, vulnerable voice of a man suddenly responsible for a future he wasn’t ready to claim. He loved her. That was never in question.
But one night, when Daniel was soothing her while Eira slept, he whispered hopes he had never said aloud before, fears he had always ignored. Seren blinked up at him, and suddenly holding her felt like holding a mirror that showed every failure, every unrealised dream, every hunger he couldn’t satisfy.
The next day he began pacing the house, muttering about grand plans he had not mentioned in years. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. He couldn’t look at Seren without feeling the burning rise of old ambitions climbing up his spine, and it made his eyes shine with a feverish intensity Eira had never seen in him.
Within days, he left. Not suddenly cruel, not angry. Just overwhelmed.
“I can’t be here,” he told Eira, shaking.
Eira didn’t chase him. Meredydd women never begged. They faced the truth, even when it cut: Daniel loved his daughter, but he could not withstand her.
“Sometimes people feel things too sharply. It’s not your fault,” she soothed to her infant daughter. It was the first time she spoke those words, but certainly not the last. Seren would grow up with a single mother, but never with a sense of abandonment – only an early, instinctive understanding that some people break when forced to face their own longing.
For a Vidient child of the Golden Glimmer, the first unintentional burn is always the deepest.
I: A Childhood of Quiet Seeing
“People don’t mean what they say, Seren. They mean what they feel.”
Like the women before her, Seren was raised in Aberaeron, a seaside town of bright houses and steady winds. She grew up in a small terraced house that always smelled of tea and sea salt, with a mother who worked two jobs but still found time for long conversations and uncompromising honesty.
Seren’s earliest memories are of brightness no one else could see. Gold dust drifted from her mother’s chest like motes in sunlit air whenever she reached for her. She thought this was normal – that all children saw the world in hidden sparks – but by four, she understood she was different. Other children did not comment on the “little lights.” No one else asked questions like: “Why does your heart want something bigger?” or “Why does your wish stand straight up like a fire stick?”
Adults laughed at her odd phrasing but also grew uneasy. Seren quickly learned that her observations frightened people. Her mother never told her to stop, only said gently: “Not everyone wants to know the truth, cariad.”
Seren listened. She learned silence, but not ignorance. And she kept watching the lights.
Even back then she understood how most people were performing — pretending that their wants could be contained, that ambition could be disciplined. She could literally see the unnerving gap between what people said and what they truly wanted. She saw neighbours smiling while their eyes glimmered with quiet ambition, and noticed a parent’s quiet resentment disguised as routine care. Desire, for Seren, was the only honest language. Yet the world around her seemed obsessed with hiding this truth beneath a veneer of manufactured conformity.
The Meredydd Temperament
Her mother taught her the family principles: truth without self-denial, observation without distortion, questions without fear. When she was old enough Seren wrote them in her journal, not as commandments, but as her own refinements:
Tell the truth gently, unless someone tries to take yours.
Other people’s feelings are not your responsibility
No one is allowed to tell you what your inside should be.
She embraced these ideas not out of obedience, but recognition. Seren adored conversation, disagreement, and discovery – even as a child. By the time she was ten she realised she was different from others, though she could not yet articulate why. It wasn’t just that she could see things others didn’t. It was that people frequently acted strangely around her.
The Uncontrolled Glimmer
Teacher reports noted Seren as a gifted but inconsistent student, brilliant where her interest was captured, indifferent and distracted where it was not. They labelled her a disruptor, though no one could really pinpoint why. For Seren, school was a constant and overwhelming sensory map, each classroom containing hundreds of drifting motes. Her early chaos was entirely accidental, the hallmark of unmanaged Desire.
When she felt strong emotions herself, others’ sparks leapt, their desires unintentionally stirred. Arguments would flare, passions would ignite, and yet Seren remained oblivious to the cause. Without conscious intention she always radiated a subtle influence. Denied feelings became harder to deny around her. Friends quit clubs abruptly. Teachers confessed inappropriate ambitions to empty rooms. Parents in her neighbourhood divorced out of nowhere.
At six, a classmate envied another’s pencils. Seren watched the desire blaze, the sparks around him shooting upward like tiny golden streaks. Curious, she looked at him too long, and suddenly the boy acted: he grabbed, shoved, took. The teachers blamed impulsiveness, but the other children remembered Seren staring at him right beforehand.
At eight she had a music teacher who quietly longed for recognition, a dream buried deeply under exhaustion. Whenever Seren watched him, the golden motes around him brightened and swirled. He became consumed – staying late, overworking, burning himself out. He thanked Seren for “reminding him of his passion.” She had done nothing knowingly. But she had seen too hard, and his longing caught fire.
She didn’t understand that she was amplifying desire. She just knew that people changed around her, dramatically, and not always for the better.
Her mother only said: “You make people wake up, Seren. It scares them.”
She called it the Yr Awydd. The Wanting. Their family had always carried a small way of reading people — a sensitivity to human longing that once belonged to the Meredydd women. Seren grew up believing that.
And for a long time, it held.
The storm outside was rattling the windows again — the big kind, the kind that made the tide chew at the rocks. Seren had always liked storms. They made everyone feel the way she felt inside: pulled, humming, restless.
Eira was shelling peas at the table, quiet in that particular Meredydd way — the kind of quiet that meant she was thinking too loudly to speak.
Seren climbed onto the chair opposite her. “Mum,” she said. “Why do people listen when I talk? Even grown-ups.”
Eira didn’t look startled. That frightened Seren more than if she’d gasped.
Instead, her mother set the peas aside and folded her hands. “You’re old enough now,” she murmured. “Old enough to hear our rules.”
Seren sat straighter. Rules meant something in their house. They weren’t punishments. They were… shape. Eira reached across the table and touched the back of Seren’s hand, very lightly.
“The first rule, cariad: You must never tell someone what they want. Even if you can feel it. Even if they are begging you to.”
Seren frowned. “But sometimes it’s so loud. It’s like they’re shining.”
“I know.” Eira’s voice softened. “That shine is not for you to touch.”
She took a breath, steadying herself.
“Second rule: Never choose for someone else. Not even a little. Sometimes our family… helps people step toward their own courage. But you mustn’t push. A push becomes a shove without you noticing.”
Seren looked at her small hands. “But I’m not pushing.”
“You don’t have to mean to,” Eira said gently. “Yr Awydd is older than meaning.”
Seren swallowed.
“And the third rule, Seren fach: When the world feels too loud, you come home. Even just for a night. We do not carry other people’s want alone.”
A wave struck the cliffside, booming like a drum. Seren stared at her mother, suddenly aware that Eira’s eyes were shining with something unspoken — worry, maybe. Or memory.
“Am I… bad?”
“Oh, Seren.” Eira gathered her close, storm-light flickering over both of them. “You are a Meredydd. You are a tide. You are honest. You are good. But your gift is sharp. And sharp things need care, not shame.”
Seren pressed her ear to her mother’s chest and listened to the steady heartbeat. She didn’t understand everything then. But she remembered the rules — and the weight in her mother’s voice when she said them.
And she remembered thinking: if Mum is scared, it must be something real.
II: The Years of Unintended Fire
As Seren entered adolescence, the Glimmer intensified. A restless person grew reckless around her; a dissatisfied one became desperate; driven people burned incandescent. Her friends sometimes sensed the ways they changed. They called it “luck,” “charisma,” or “inspiration,” never knowing that Seren was the cause. In her journal, she wrote fragments like: “Every heart is a lantern, and some flames are hidden even from the bearer. I see them. I cannot touch them yet, but they reach for me.”
By thirteen Seren was learning to listen to the world in layers: what people said, what they tried to want, and what they actually wanted. Puberty sharpened everything, including her perception. She began to recognise distinct architecture in the golden motes: the way they clustered, the density of the glow, the movement itself. Eventually she started identifying the patterns, connecting them to meaning. She wrote it all down:
— drifting sparks: mild longing
— spirals: romantic desire
— vertical flares: ambition
— shattering motes: longing trapped under fear
It was with some thrill that she realised it was a language she could learn. She did not question whether anyone else saw these things. She had learned long ago that they didn’t.
The Contagion of Ambition
People’s hunger could become contagious. She realised it one afternoon during mock exams, sat behind a girl whose golden motes were burning and clustering in a frenzy. As Seren watched, distracted, she felt a flicker — and then it climbed her own spine like an electric shiver. Her own heart raced, her hands shook, her thoughts spiralled. The girl’s ambition to succeed — her desire to prove herself — had jumped into Seren like a spark between wires.
It wasn’t the only time it happened. When a friend was desperate to make the sports team, suddenly Seren felt driven to train. A classmate terrified his family would be disappointed in him filled her with the same dread for days, and when she watched a teacher yearning for escape, Seren found herself daydreaming of leaving town for the first time.
She wasn’t absorbing emotions. She was absorbing want. Sometimes she literally woke burning with ambition that was not her own, driven by the fever of others’ desires. Some nights she felt overwhelmed, as though the wants of others were climbing her spine and reshaping her from the inside. Other nights she felt too empty, drained from suppressing herself to keep others and herself safe.
The danger became clear. Still, she refused to hide from people. Meredydd blood detested fear and she would not become a ghost. But she learned boundaries with surgical precision: when to look away, when to close off her attention, and when to choose quiet instead of connection.
First Kisses, First Fears
Despite her care, Seren’s teenage relationships became disasters of intensity.
When Seren liked someone, the Glimmer brightened around them. When she looked at them too long, their own wants grew sharper. Too sharp. Too loud.
A shy girl in Year Nine kissed her behind the English block and within hours became infatuated to the point of obsession — texting constantly, skipping school to wait for her. Seren ended it gently, and the girl collapsed into grief so sudden teachers thought something terrible had happened at home.
A year later, a boy she’d grown close to kissed her after walking home in the rain. Within days, he told her he needed to “find himself,” and abruptly moved to live with a distant uncle in London, chasing ambitions he had never once mentioned before.
She didn’t yet understand her effect, only that she broke things she touched. For a time she began to fear intimacy, not because she was cold, but because she felt powerful. Seren was magnetic to those around her. It wasn’t because of beauty, but because of the way she unconsciously reflected people’s desire back at them, and it was frequently mistaken for flirtation. Only Seren wasn’t flirting. She was simply seeing them, raw and unfiltered.
The Girl Who Asked the Wrong Questions (or the Right Ones)
Seren didn’t feel isolated, though she often chose to be alone. Eira’s steady presence was anchor enough. But she did feel apart, as if she lived one step sideways from everyone else. In her struggle to find a way to exist amongst her peers, her relationship to authority grew complex. She rebelled quietly, refusing direct confrontation but subtly undermining control which felt too tight. School rules, parental expectations, and social rituals felt like transparent cages she could not reconcile with the immense potential she saw flickering in the world.
She disputed rules without hostility. She challenged teachers with calm, incisive questions. Seren intensely disliked being told what to do — not rebelliously, but philosophically. When adults demanded obedience, she asked: “Why?” And when their reasons didn’t match the lights she saw drifting around their hearts, she simply…didn’t comply.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just with gentle, unbreakable refusal.
People called her stubborn. Seren called it truth. She loved clarity the way others loved comfort, and believed that want — honestly acknowledged — was the foundation of every real choice.
I don’t understand people who want approval. Approval is too flimsy to build a life around. I’d rather someone dislike the truth than love a lie.
By seventeen Seren’s distrust of authority had crystallised into something principled. She walked out of assemblies where speakers used manipulation. She defended classmates who were punished for wanting different futures. Her acts of defiance became quiet, elegant, and razor-sharp. She simply said no — with a conviction that made adults furious and peers devoted.
She wasn’t trying to lead. People simply began to follow, and she hated that. Want was sacred, and no one should gather ambitions like currency, not even her. So she pushed away attempts to idolise her. She redirected praise. She encouraged independence.
Still, people sought her out. She could not help being mesmeric: the Glimmer was never seen by others, but its effects were unmistakable.
Her journal, once a record of truth, became a safe space to speak freely, an outlet for the tensions of a world she could feel but not yet influence safely. She only knew she always knew what people wanted, and people reacted to her presence with strange vehemence. Friends idolised her or drifted away. Crushes became obsessively attached without cause. Teachers encouraged her to pursue leadership roles she didn’t want.
“People get weird around you,” a friend once said.
She didn’t disagree.
First Glimmers of Control
As she matured, the pattern of her effect became harder to ignore. Ambitions she had accidentally stoked now followed real-world consequences: friendships strengthened or fractured, ideas gained traction far beyond expectation, and individual determination occasionally escalated to collective action. A boy confessed to her and then dropped out to pursue art with reckless intensity. Study groups dissolved into arguments about purpose whenever Seren attended. But her understanding continued to grow. She discovered she could predict patterns, sense discontent, and detect hypocrisy with unerring clarity.
Only then did she begin to suspect that the motes of gold were more than a perception.
She finally noticed that when she looked at people too closely, the lights were responding. They brightened. They gathered. They climbed or fell still. Her attention was a catalyst, and she’d been instinctively shaping all along, led blindly by her own emotions. The realisation horrified her. Seren did not want to influence anyone, and she detested the idea of being responsible for changing people without their consent.
She began practising restraint — not emotional repression, which hurt her, but mindful witnessing. She taught herself to observe desires without pushing them, to watch ambition without feeding it. The effort was exhausting, requiring constant attention, and even then some consequences could not be avoided. Restraint alone could not erase the truth of who she was. Some lights grew simply because she was near, no matter how hard she tried to stem her influence.
The timid became braver in her presence. The uncertain grew restless, sensing possibilities they hadn’t dared to imagine. And people who were lost — the ones with dim or tangled Glimmers — seemed to gravitate toward her without understanding why. Their longing stretched toward her like a flower turning to light, not because she pulled, but because something in her helped them recognise their own hunger.
That was the shift. Not a breaking, not a surrender — but a realisation: that illumination alone was not influence. Recognition was not control. Clarity was not coercion.
Seren could offer truth without touching anyone’s choices, if she was careful.
Once she understood this, she allowed herself to test the gentlest edges of her gift. Not to direct, and never to correct, but to let people see themselves with the same precision she saw them.
A friend admitted she wanted to write. Seren listened, quietly, and asked what she feared. The girl entered a competition a week later — and won. A classmate confessed he hated his degree. Seren asked what future he’d choose if no one watched. He switched courses and became steady for the first time since childhood. A burnt-out teacher wondered if she mattered. Seren reflected the woman’s hidden love of her subject back to her — and the woman returned to her classroom with joy rather than exhaustion.
Seren did not ignite these desires. She simply revealed them.
I tried something today. Only watching. Not touching. Not pushing. I listened to my friend talk about applying for the writing competition. Her lights were all tangled. I breathed out slowly and her lights settled. Then rose, steady as a candle flame. She applied. Not because of me, but because she finally saw herself clearly. Maybe my job is not to ignite. Maybe it is to clarify.
It was the Meredydd gift her mother’s stories spoke of in its most ethical form: not as shaper, but as lantern. She learned that when she used the Glimmer with intention — sparingly, thoughtfully, with consent and care — she was not influencing a person’s inner world. She was giving them language for what was already burning inside them. So she did not push; she illuminated. She did not lead; she reflected. She did not choose for anyone; she cleared the fog so they could choose for themselves.
This was her earliest mastery: not dominance, not manipulation, not intervention — but truth made visible.
And for Seren, truth was the highest form of respect.
As she grew into a young woman, Eira’s influence continued to shape her more deeply than any power she inherited: her mother taught her that no one — not even family, not even destiny — had the right to define her inner life. Seren took that lesson and welded it to her nature like iron. She grew into someone steady, perceptive, and quietly defiant. Someone who would never coerce desire — but who would not let anyone lie about it, either.
III: The Illusion of Reinvention
Seren left Aberaeron with a rucksack, a half-filled journal, and her mother’s whispered reminder: “Don’t shrink yourself to keep others comfortable, cariad.” It was the year she turned eighteen and she was filled with the quiet hope that distance would dilute whatever force inside her made people unravel. She had no grand plan — only a restless instinct to keep moving before she shaped any more lives too sharply.
She chose Cardiff for university because it was far enough to breathe, yet close enough that Eira could still reach her if everything collapsed. She enrolled in Psychology, almost on a whim, telling herself it was “useful.” In truth, she was trying to understand why she felt like a pressure point in everyone else’s life.
There were hundreds of students in that hall, teeming with ambition so loud it felt like a storm in my skull. Wanting degrees, wanting new identities, wanting to impress each other. It was unbearable. Beautiful, in a way, but impossible to endure. Everyone else is living in one reality. I’m living in another layered on top of it. There’s the world as it’s spoken… and the world as it’s desired.
Cardiff was louder than Aberaeron, faster, crowded by thousands of private wants she could feel buzzing in the air even if she tried not to look. For the first few months, the city exhausted her. The city was noisy with longing — students reinventing themselves, chasing futures, falling in love with ideas and each other. Every lecture hall was a constellation of shifting glimmers; every conversation, a minefield. Seren walked through all of it like a tuning fork struck too sharply, her senses vibrating with the shimmer of everyone’s futures colliding and expanding.
And yet, for the first time, she felt delight. No one in the city knew her. No one expected her to be the strange, unsettling girl who made people quit clubs and abandon careers. She could pretend she was normal — until the truth caught up, as it always did.
University: A Study in Want and Disillusionment
Seren was brilliant in the subjects she cared for — human behaviour, emotional regulation, social theory. She devoured case studies, and spent too many late nights in the library chasing research that hinted at “intuition phenomena”. Her essays were incisive, her observations unnervingly precise. But education systems have never been designed for those who question every premise.
She soon clashed with lecturers who treated psychological models as gospel. Seren’s quiet defiance — the calm, sharp questions that undermined entire modules — made her both admired and resented. She refused to accept any theory that ignored the messy honesty of longing.
He cornered me after seminar, lecturing about “discipline” and “rigour” as if he owned the concepts. His desire spiked under the surface — not sexual, but commanding, the need to reshape me into something that reflected well on him. I felt it swelling and almost walked out. But something inside me snapped. I pushed back, not with my ability, but with my voice. Firm. Unapologetic. He didn’t expect resistance.
Authority hates the unexpected.
And then there was the other problem.
The people around her kept changing.
She made friends easily. Too easily. Other students gravitated to her, drawn to the way she listened, the way she asked questions that made them feel seen in places they’d buried. In her first seminar, a quiet girl named Alys confessed she’d always wanted to study abroad, something she’d never told anyone. Three weeks later she had withdrawn from the course, applied to a programme in France, and booked a one-way ticket. When she hugged Seren goodbye, she whispered, “I think I needed you to say it was okay to want something big.”
Seren had not said anything of the kind. She had only listened.
The pattern repeated.
A flatmate ditched medical school after an emotional midnight conversation in the kitchen. A study partner’s admiration grew into something bright and unsteady within days, and Seren had to pull away before he mistook reflection for reciprocity. Even one of her tutors — a man in his forties — abruptly left academia mid-term, claiming he could no longer ignore the novel he’d abandoned a decade earlier. Seren studied human behaviour, but human behaviour was studying her right back — reshaping itself in reaction.
And then came Elin.
The Love She Couldn’t Keep
Elin was a year above Seren at Cardiff — a sharp, bright, self-contained literature student who carried herself like someone who had already learned how to be alone without being lonely. Seren noticed her before they ever spoke. Not because Elin’s desire flared but because it didn’t.
Elin’s internal world glowed faintly, steadily. No sudden spikes of longing, no tremors of insecurity, no hidden hunger reaching toward Seren. She was… still. Whole. Self-governing. For Seren, who lived in a world of flickering wants and shifting constellations of desire, Elin was a kind of peace she’d never known.
They became friends slowly, then intensely. Late-night coffees, shared essays, walks through Cathays in the rain. Seren fell in love quietly, with the kind of deliberate awareness she applied to everything in her life: she felt herself going under, and kept her eyes open.
Elin liked her in return — deeply, steadily, warmly — but Elin was not in love with her. Seren could see it with painful clarity: Elin’s Glimmer never shifted shape around her. It was the solid glow of affection, trust, admiration — but never desire.
For the first time in her life, Seren found she wanted something she had no right to want. That was when the dangerous thought occurred: What if I nudged it? Just a little? Just enough?
The thought hit her like a physical blow. Not because she could act on it — she already knew she couldn’t create what wasn’t there — but because she had wanted to. The wanting itself was the betrayal. The very possibility of it frightened her. She, who had built her entire identity on transparency and autonomy, had felt the faintest ache to bend someone’s desire toward her. To tip a scale. To make the world give back something she longed for.
It was the first crack in her certainty that she was always safe, always principled, always in control. Her Glimmer had always been an external pressure on others’ ambitions. With Elin, it became internal: the mirror that showed Seren her own capacity for selfishness — not enacted, not spoken, but real. Human. Dangerous.
I finally understand the danger. Not the danger of being wanted — I’ve lived with that all my life — but the danger of wanting someone back. For a breath — one single, terrifying breath — I wished I could push. Just a little. Just enough to tilt her heart toward mine. I never realised my desire could be the threat. I thought only other people’s hunger was dangerous.
Seren never acted on the impulse. Instead she recoiled from it, examined it the way she examined everything: honestly, unsparingly, refusing to hide from the truth of herself. They remained friends, but Seren created distance; not because she feared rejection, but because she refused to let her own desire tempt her into even subconscious influence. She did not confess — not out of fear, but because Elin had never consented to carry Seren’s longing.
Elin never knew. Seren never let her guess.
But the wound carved something essential into her:
Want could corrupt. Even hers.
Especially hers.
If you want someone, step back. If you fear influencing them, step further. If they still choose you, believe them.
The Touchstone of Home
After that, Seren’s relationships — romantic, platonic, academic — became too intense to bear. One night she closed her books with steady hands. The room was quiet, the sunlight soft, and nothing dramatic happened. She simply felt the truth settle inside her: she could not stay here. Not while she didn’t trust herself. For someone else, it might have been a passing impulse. For Seren, whose nature could shift people’s internal compass, it was a warning of what she could become.
A Meredydd woman had once said it in a story Eira used to recite:
“Every spark begins as a comfort. Only later does it remember it can burn.”
Seren felt the burn.
That night she withdrew from university.
She told Elin very little. She didn’t confess the fear — not of harming Elin, but of discovering something dangerous inside herself. That she worried not about losing control, but about choosing not to. Leaving wasn’t running away. It was deciding not to become the thing she feared.
I loved her. Or wanted her so fiercely that it felt like love. I could have nudged the threads of her heart. Not enough to create something new — I know I can’t do that — but enough to magnify the seed she did have. Enough to tilt her deeper. I didn’t. Walking away from her was the first time my restraint cost me something real. And that cost has shaped everything since.
Seren packed a bag, wrote a brief note for her flatmates, and took the last train home. She told her mother she needed time. She did not tell her she wouldn’t be going back. Eira welcomed her without question. That was their relationship: gentle truths, space when needed, and love that did not push or pull.
IV: Restlessness, Revelation, and the Shape of Desire
Seren left university not with a plan, but with a direction: outward. Leaving Cardiff and the temptation of Elin tore open an old wound — the question of her father. Seren had always feared his departure was her fault; that something about her had pushed him away. Eira always insisted it wasn’t true. But by now Seren knew very well how people’s desires tilted around her. She knew how easily a person could be distorted in her orbit, just because she was there.
So she went looking. Not for connection — but for evidence.
For the truth.
The Search for the Man who Left
Seren told herself the search was logical — responsible, even. She needed to know the realities of her impact. But beneath the reasoning lay a quieter admission: she wanted to see if she had broken him.
She returned to the story of her origins with the precision of someone chasing truth rather than hope. Eira had always been honest when Seren asked about him, but their conversations took on a deeper clarity now — woman to woman, not mother to child.
Her mother spoke of a man named Daniel Llewelyn, a gentle dreamer who had always carried a quiet longing beneath his skin. Eira had loved him deeply, and for a time Seren suspected her mother still did, in the distant, forgiving way one loves finished chapters. He had left when Seren was still a baby, overtaken by a sudden, overwhelming conviction that he needed to chase something bigger.
Eira admitted she had always known his leaving wasn’t personal. She had simply never understood it then.
Seren did.
The search took months: online archives, job records, old acquaintances, the digital crumbs people leave behind when they reinvent themselves. Seren followed them without expectation, guided only by the quiet ache of curiosity. She found him living quietly in Leeds — working at a bicycle repair shop, volunteering in community projects, living with a partner. He hadn’t chased greatness. He hadn’t become a visionary or a ruin. He’d run because the sudden flare of ambition in Seren’s presence had terrified him — and once he’d left, the fire had gone out. He’d returned to who he was before the Glimmer touched him.
Seren found the shop. She watched him from across the street. His golden motes were faint and drifting — calm, small desires that never lifted more than an inch from his heart. He looked content. Peaceful. Normal.
She stood outside the shop for half an hour, watching him laugh with a coworker, watching a woman drop by with lunch for him, watching the man he grew into — healthy, functional, ordinary. She realised approaching him might ignite all of it again. Might unravel the peaceful life he’d built, and cause more harm than healing.
So she left without speaking to him.
But she wrote about it in her journal:
He didn’t abandon me.
He escaped the fire inside himself.
I think… I am finally old enough to forgive him.
It clarified something crucial for her. She was not cursed. She was not toxic. Her gift was not always destructive. Her father left not because she broke him — but because he wasn’t strong enough to meet his own buried desires.
And Seren’s absence had healed him.
A Compass but Never a Map
Coming back home felt strange now, like stepping back into a childhood she no longer fit inside. She had seen her father. She had watched him living quietly, contentedly, the Glimmer he once carried returning to its soft, steady rhythm after years of absence. He had not been broken. He had not suffered because of her. And yet the fear — the knowledge that she had the capacity to influence, even harm — lingered.
Eira took one look at her and saw everything. Seren had always known that her mother’s sight ran deeper than most people realised, even if she didn’t have Seren’s kind of vision. They sat at the kitchen table, the kettle still steaming between them, the air thick with the closeness of unspoken truths.
Eira had always been Seren’s constant. She had raised her with truth, autonomy, and a love free of ownership, never hiding her own mistakes or fears. She gave Seren language to understand what she saw long before either of them understood the nature of the gift, and as a little girl, Seren had been her shadow. Eira was the only person whose desire had never overwhelmed her: her golden motes were soft and steady, built from quiet hopes rather than hungers.
Seren told her mother everything: Elin, the fear that had ripped through her, the impulse she hadn’t acted on but couldn’t forget.
“I don’t want to become someone who bends people,” she said. “But what if that’s what I am?”
Eira was silent for a long time before she spoke. Not hesitant, gathering courage.
Finally, she told Seren what she could.
She spoke of the Meredydd women, how they had always had a reputation in the old villages for “knowing things about people.” Not secrets, not sins — desires. It was said they could see what people wanted even before they admitted it to themselves. Some sought them out for guidance, some feared them. Most dismissed the stories as fanciful rural superstition.
Eira had, too. Until Seren, whose sight grew too clear to ignore, her influence far beyond a gentle nudge.
They spoke about the Yr Awydd — the old whispering name for the women whose insight could stir something in the hearts around them. Not magic, not curses, just the kind of intuition that felt too precise to be natural. Eira had told a thousand stories about it during Seren’s childhood: about the fabled Meredydd women, stubbornly independent, frankly honest, feared by gossips and loved by the lost. But none of the real women Eira knew — not her mother, not her grandmother, not her aunts — had ever displayed anything like Seren’s influence. They guided; they didn’t change. They saw; they didn’t illuminate.
Seren was the first.
“I don’t know what you are,” Eira said softly. “But I know you’re not wrong. And you’re not cursed. You’re simply… more.”
The words didn’t give Seren answers. But they gave her permission to seek them.
That night, lying in her childhood bed, she realised that understanding herself wasn’t optional anymore. It was necessary — for her sake, and for everyone she might touch. She had seen her father’s life continue, unbroken. She knew now that her influence could awaken or guide, but it could also coexist with autonomy, peace, and happiness — if she approached it with care.
Seren left Aberaeron with her notebook, a few folded maps, and the quiet conviction that she needed to see the world in order to understand herself. She began in cities she had always been drawn to: Cardiff first, retracing her university streets, observing the quiet constellations of ambition that had once made her burn with exhaustion. She sought spaces where she could watch desire play out without triggering it — small cafés, libraries, thrift shops — always noting patterns, collecting whispers of the world’s hungers.
I love hostels for the anonymity. No one here expects me to be anything. I can sit at a table with twelve different kinds of desire and none of them belong to me. It feels like freedom. It feels like relief.
The Jobs That Didn’t Stick
Seren didn’t immediately leap into some grand quest, instead she moved through the world with purposeful transience. She began to follow hints of her Meredydd lineage, talking to older women, gathering stories, tracing folk tales that whispered of uncanny insight, and she took whatever jobs allowed her to keep moving: bookshops, temp agencies, tutoring, museum shifts. Anything that let her study people without being bound by them.
But wherever she lived, the pattern stayed the same.
She watched the gold motes of desire in others — blooming, fracturing, colliding — and tried to ensure she didn’t accidentally bend them. Whenever she sensed her presence sharpening someone’s want or quickening their choices, she stepped back out of principle. Autonomy was sacred to her. Influence, even accidental, was something she treated like a dangerous inheritance.
In Swansea, customers made impulsive decisions mid-conversation — quitting jobs, dumping partners, announcing revelations. Seren knew the signs. She left after the week ended, leaving the manager a kind note and the truth in the simplest form she could offer: “Some people draw out ambition. I draw out too much of it.”
In Bristol, a temp office position disintegrated when two coworkers began tearing into each other for a promotion neither wanted until they spoke to her. Seren recognised the turning of the tide — the sudden urgency that wasn’t theirs — and resigned the same afternoon. She couldn’t stay once a truth had revealed itself.
She became good at departing gently. Clear-eyed. Without apology. She learned restraint the way dancers learn balance: through repetition, through near-falls, through constant correction.
I’m learning to see the difference between what people want and what they think they want. I can see when someone’s desire is deep-rooted versus sparked by the Glimmer bouncing off their own hidden hunger. I’m not perfect. But I’m not dangerous anymore. Or at least… I’m less dangerous, I think.
Whenever her mother worried, Seren answered with a steady conviction: “I’m not running from anything. I’m giving people space to be themselves.”
She believed that. She lived by it. She never stayed long enough to distort anyone’s life without their consent, or to give herself room for the temptation.
Desire, Distance, and the Cost of Being Understood
Her search for answers deepened in parallel. What began with old books and folklore circles stretched into more distant cities and nameless libraries. Every myth she chased crumbled into metaphor. Every lead turned out to be superstition in new clothing. But the pattern of her own experience sharpened.
She learned people more deeply than university had ever allowed — the rhythms of want, the quiet shapes of longing, the ways desire settled differently in every soul. She discovered greater nuances in when to step back, and when simply to watch. She never interfered with what she saw, though she could. Instead she only ever illuminated, and even then only when it felt right. And as she studied others, she studied herself too — noticing the lines where her curiosity became instinct, where her ethics guided her, and where her desire could brush against a quiet selfishness she had never admitted to herself before Elin.
Seren had never been afraid of her own desires. Her earliest encounters with attraction had been soft, clumsy, and hopeful in the way of most teenagers. Sixth-form kisses behind buildings, hands held too tightly, confessions whispered between breaths. She liked intimacy. She liked discovery. But even then, she sensed the unnatural quickening in others — the way desire sharpened like metal heated too fast. When she touched a wrist or leaned in too far, her partner’s want sharpened suddenly. Not always into lust — sometimes into possessiveness, sometimes anxiety, sometimes a starburst “realisation” that they needed her more than they had thought moments before.
She didn’t understand the Glimmer as well then, but she still recognised distortion when she saw it. And she hated the way it made people tilt people towards her. With her teenage crushes she always ended things early, not out of avoidance or fear, but because she valued truth. She would not stay in a relationship where she could not trust the authenticity of desire. She refused to play god with someone else’s heart — even accidentally.
She tried to cool her influence twice, long before she knew what she was doing. It was how she discovered the spectrum of her gift worked both ways, that she even could. She was trying to offer a counterbalance to her own unintentional effect, wondering if it might loosen her allure if she dispersed the golden motes. But both times the aftermath was worse than heartbreak. Her partners weren’t devastated, they were unsteady, hollow, as if a small flame inside them had quietly gone out.
It happened again. I felt Rhodri’s wanting spin out of control when he kissed me, quick and greedy. I meant to push him away with my hands, but I pushed his Glimmer down. Hard. And he pulled back like he’d been doused with cold water. I saw shame in him — not mine, his. The kind that scars. I didn’t know I could do that. I think my ability isn’t a gift. It’s a blade. And I’m the only one who can feel the edge.
It wasn’t Seren they missed in that moment — they missed a version of themselves she had unintentionally dimmed, a feeling they couldn’t name and couldn’t get back. Dampening desire wasn’t any more harmless than accidentally inflaming it. They recovered quickly once she stepped away, but it felt dangerously like editing someone’s heart, and watching that loss — artificial, unchosen — carved an unbreakable rule into her:
Better to leave honestly than stay and quietly reshape someone’s want.
Better a clean wound than a distorted heart.
The only way to preserve integrity, both theirs and hers, was to leave.
Sex, Want, and the Storm of Intimacy
By the time she reached her twenties, the stakes were higher and the risks sharper. Physical intimacy amplified everything the way puberty once had. Seren occasionally sought casual intimacy — not for escape, and not for validation, but to understand whether closeness was possible without distortion. She liked sex. She liked the honesty of it, the immediacy, the way bodies told the truth even when mouths faltered.
But safety was rare.
With partners she trusted, she was honest: “People feel strange around me. I don’t know how to turn it off.”
They always said they understood.
None truly did.
I think sex is dangerous for me. Not because I’m afraid of bodies. Because I’m afraid of becoming a mirror. Fear of being swallowed. Fear of swallowing someone else. Desire is a wildfire, and I am a gust of wind.
Sexual want burned hotter than any other emotion, and when she was intimate with someone the gold motes brightened, swirling thick and fast around her partner. She saw every flicker, every spike, every hesitation, and sometimes, when she wasn’t careful enough, their want pulled at her own, blurring the boundaries between her feelings and theirs. For someone who saw desire as vividly as sunlight, it was like stepping into a storm bare-skinned.
So sex was complicated. Intimate. Risky.
She never used her Glimmer to manipulate. In fact, she sometimes tried to dampen herself, which exhausted her and sometimes left her feeling… less. Her fear was not of desire. Her fear was losing clarity — confusing someone’s intensified longing with her own genuine want. She wanted to be wanted for who she was, not for the surge she triggered. So her relationships remained careful. Slow. Boundary-led. Not avoidant — but principled. She would rather feel lonely than untrue.
V. When Leaving Becomes a Truth, Not an Escape
By twenty-two, her life had become a mosaic of cities and experiments. She wasn’t rootless — she was self-protecting, and protecting others. Every departure was an act of clarity: leaving when things bent too sharply toward her, moving on when the air around her grew too charged. But beneath the rhythm of constant motion, her deeper hunger was ever growing.
The Quiet Future She Couldn’t Yet Hold
Seren met Rowan in Dublin, at a folklore lecture. She’d been travelling across Ireland, tracing hollow rumours of people who could “see energetic disturbances” — stories that always fell apart upon inspection, leaving nothing but coincidence and wishful thinking. Rowan stood out immediately. Not because of his desire; his want gathered around him slowly, like snowfall. Quiet. Soft. Persistent. He stood out because he didn’t rearrange himself unconsciously in her presence. He didn’t flare or fold or overreach. He didn’t start wanting her instantly, madly, overwhelmingly. He was steady. A harbour rather than a tide.
They first spoke after the lecture, when she introduced herself and Rowan blinked with mild surprise.
“Meredydd?” he repeated, with that quiet academic curiosity she would come to know well. “There’s a Welsh family by that name in some of the border manuscripts I work with — tied to old tales about intuition, or… insight into human nature.” He smiled lightly. “Folklore nonsense, probably. But a beautiful name.”
It was a small moment, nothing more than a flicker — yet Seren felt it settle somewhere inside her. Someone outside Aberaeron, outside her mother, outside the weight of childhood stories, had spoken her name without superstition or fear. Just interest. Just gentleness.
Their attraction formed quietly, the first she had truly nurtured since Elin. There was no spike of longing, no vertical blaze. Just a gentle, steady pull — a gravity she felt even when she tried to ignore it. He worked at the National Museum archives, cataloguing medieval manuscripts with a reverence usually reserved for relics. He first walked Seren around the city as if he were introducing her to a friend he loved. They shared brown-bag lunches in St Stephen’s Green, rambling conversations in crowded pubs, slow Sunday mornings with their knees touching beneath the blankets.
Rowan softened around her in ways he didn’t for the world — his humour warmer, his silences easier, his attention wholly present. And Seren liked who she was with him. He made her laugh. He made her feel safe. He wanted her gently, sincerely, without the sharp pull that so often distorted people around her. For a while, she allowed herself to believe he was the answer she ought to want — the soft landing, the quiet future, the steady warmth she had never quite been able to hold.
Rowan was the first person she ever met who didn’t fall for an imagined version of her; he loved her exactly as she appeared, not for what she reflected. He admired her but did not worship her, wanted her but did not consume her, and he believed — deeply — that real love required real compromise. So when he began trimming little corners of himself to make space for her, he did it consciously — willingly. He rerouted routines, postponed opportunities, began sketching the outline of a future that curved gently toward her. All choices he made freely, believing real love involved two people meeting in the middle.
For the first time since university, Seren questioned her usual boundaries. Not because she wanted to use her gift, but because she wanted to stay.
Rowan’s love was the kind that asked, quietly, without words: What if we just keep going like this? What if we don’t stop?
It frightened her more gently than the fear she’d felt with Elin, but more deeply. Because this time the danger wasn’t that she might influence someone, but that someone might reshape themselves willingly for her. She had not yet learned how to stay without absorbing other people’s longing when it matched her own. If she remained with Rowan, she wondered whether she might shape her own future around his needs before realising she had done it — that she would quietly become the person he needed, even if it meant losing parts of herself.
Rowan wanted a future. A home. A life built with intention and routine and roots. His longing grew slowly, then steadily — warm, settled, trustworthy.
Seren wanted him. But she also wanted the parts of herself she had not yet understood. Her own journey remained unfinished, unanchored. She couldn’t promise a life when she didn’t yet understand what kind of life she could safely build.
His desire doesn’t leap or glare or swell unnaturally when he looks at me. It sits. Warm. Steady. A campfire, not a wildfire. Sometimes I think I could love him forever just for that. But there’s a restlessness in me. A sense that I am borrowing calm rather than inhabiting it. Sometimes I see his want bend around me to become what he thinks I need, and it scares me a little. He says that’s what love is. But I don’t want someone reshaping themselves just to keep me. I want someone who remains themselves entirely.
Their ending wasn’t dramatic. Just quiet, aching honesty.
“You’re not finished yet,” Rowan said, cupping her face like it was something he wasn’t allowed to keep. There was no bitterness in him — only clarity. “And I don’t want you to shrink yourself to stay.”
He didn’t ask her to choose. He didn’t ask her to try. She loved him a little more for that. He simply kissed her forehead and said, “Come back if the world lets you.”
She left Dublin with a heart steadier than before, and far heavier. Rowan had taught her what loving someone steady felt like — and why she could not yet stay.
Wandering, Wanting, and the Hunger for Truth
Seren left Dublin with Rowan’s gentleness pressed into her bones and a quiet ache she tried not to name. She didn’t regret choosing the road over him — she couldn’t have stayed without lying to them both — but the steadiness he offered lingered like an afterimage. For weeks afterwards she felt split between two desires: the part of her that craved the peace Rowan had shown her, and the deeper, sharper instinct that urged her forward.
My heart feels bruised. Not broken — Rowan would never break me — but scraped clean, like something has been carved away. I keep thinking: he is what I should want. But ‘should’ is someone else’s desire, and I promised myself I’d stop living according to those.
Her search for answers intensified. Seren read obsessively. She devoured social media threads about “people who change others by accident,” joined folkloric forums discussing Welsh seers and touchstone spirits, sought out psychology communities debating “empaths” and “influence radiators,” and followed mythology blogs referencing Crochan Llawen, the north-Welsh tale of a woman who “saw the hunger in men’s hearts.”
In Glasgow, she met a woman in a smoky pub who claimed she had once seen “seen a girl whose presence made people abandon their lives overnight.” The account was vague, half-legend, likely exaggerated — but it was enough to make Seren keep searching. She followed rumours, stories, odd patterns. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Comfort? Understanding? Someone who wouldn’t be changed by her? All she knew was that she was finally ready to run toward something. Something true. Something hers. Even if she didn’t yet know what shape that desire would take.
Travelling for Answers
Travel suited her. Seren treated each place as a conversation rather than a destination. She continued taking short-lived jobs — hostels, gardens, kitchens, anything that allowed her to earn quietly and leave cleanly. She observed people the way some study weather systems, watching desire rise, break, reshape itself. She kept to the edges of every town: not lonely, but attentive.
In Lisbon, she watched artists argue about ambition, noticing the fine line between inspiration and imitation. In London, she found whispers of women who knew hearts and destinies, unmistakably similar to the Meredydd tales Eira had told her — except none of them fit Seren’s intensity.
In Amsterdam, she tasted the thrill of fleeting connections and the discipline required to step back before anyone tipped too far toward her.
Her understanding deepened: desire was everywhere, and the temptation inside her remained like a fog in the back of her mind. Every city taught her something. Every encounter sharpened her sense of the boundary between illumination and influence. She felt herself transforming — not into someone new, but into someone truer.
They burn so easily here. Desire flickers and spreads like sunlight on water. I watch, I note, I step back. I do not touch, I do not bend. And yet it tempts me — the thought of easing the tension, guiding the sparks. I resist. I cannot forget the cost. Autonomy is a fragile thing; I am its guardian. My hands must remain empty.
The further she travelled, though, the more she felt a hum beneath her ribs, like a compass stirring. Not danger — recognition. A sense that something ancient was turning to face her. She began moving more deliberately: Berlin to Copenhagen, Copenhagen to Warsaw, Warsaw back to the Celtic fringes. She sought out folklore groups, esoteric societies, “energetic practitioners,” anyone whose words vibrated with the same frequency as her Glimmer.
But every explanation she found was too mystical, too metaphorical, too theatrical. No one saw what she saw. No one felt what she felt. Still, the searching steadied her. It gave shape to the space inside her that Rowan had once tried, gently, to fill.
The Pull of Something Fiercer
By the time her wandering carried her back through Europe, Seren had changed in ways she hadn’t fully noticed. Years of restraint had made her careful, disciplined — but also tired. Tired of holding herself at the exact distance required to keep others safe. Tired of managing every flicker of influence as though she were defusing explosives. Tired of finding no answers.
Another person pulled apart by their own wanting. After three days they looked at me like I was a doorway. I am not a doorway. I will not be the place someone escapes through. I am not responsible for the dreams they remember when they see me.
She had learned so much about other people’s desires, but almost nothing about what she wanted for herself.
And gradually, without any single moment marking the shift, she began letting the edges of herself loosen. Not recklessly — just… less tightly. She allowed herself to stay in conversations longer. To accept invitations she would once have declined. To follow curiosity rather than caution. She still didn’t push people, but she no longer fled the moment she felt the air change around her.
It wasn’t a divine pull. It was exhaustion, and hunger, and the quiet, growing belief that she deserved to feel something unfiltered — even if only once.
I’m tired. Not of people — I love people, even when it hurts — but of the constant bracing. Holding myself back. I don’t want to change anyone. I never did. But I want — God, I want — to stop living like I’m a storm everyone needs shelter from.
So when she eventually collided with someone who matched her intensity rather than buckling under it, someone impulsive and bright and unembarrassed by wanting, she didn’t step back the way she usually would. She let herself stay. She let herself test what it felt like not to be the only one forever holding the line.
That someone was Theo.
And with him, restraint was not the first thing she reached for.
The Fire That Nearly Consumed Them Both
She met Theo almost a year after Rowan, in Prague — a city that hummed with ambition in a way that thrilled and overwhelmed her. She’d taken a month-long sublet and was spending her nights wandering galleries and fringe artist spaces, searching for threads of truth in the chaotic pulse of creative desire. Theo was already painting when she entered the abandoned warehouse for an open-studio night. He was barefoot, splattered in colour, muttering to himself about light and hunger.
He looked at her once and froze.
Seren felt it instantly: the flare. His Glimmer flared like a struck match, bright, volatile, and unguarded. People with intense desires were common; what was rare was someone who didn’t shield them, didn’t try to hide the sheer force of what they wanted. Theo never hid anything. Not his longing, not his ambition, not the hurricane of restlessness he carried behind his ribs.
He approached her as if drawn, not compelled — and Seren felt it immediately: not influence, not distortion, but recognition. Theo lived his life entirely in the open flame of his own wants. He didn’t self-edit. He didn’t trim his edges. He wanted what he wanted, fiercely, and he assumed everyone else lived the same way. Seren, who had spent years in careful restraint, felt something inside her uncoil with that promise of truth. Being near him was like stepping into a space where she didn’t have to be careful — not with her sight, not with her presence, not with her desire.
For the first time in her life, she let herself want without self-analysis.
Their connection struck like lightning: bright, immediate, and terrifyingly mutual. Where Rowan had been gentle gravity, Theo was pure heat. Where Rowan listened, Theo pursued. Where Rowan held space, Theo filled it. His desire for her wasn’t quiet or patient — it cracked open inside him the moment they kissed, a wildfire of certainty he didn’t question. He didn’t understand caution, or measured steps, or the way she needed to breathe between emotions. He loved intensity the way other people loved sunlight.
She stayed longer in Prague than she ever planned — not out of obligation, but because he made want feel like a language she was finally allowed to speak fluently. Dinners turned into nights, nights into weeks. His longing didn’t twist or warp because he held nothing back. It grew brighter, sharper, illuminated by her presence rather than evolved by it.
Theo sketched her constantly — the curve of her cheek, the tilt of her hands, the way she watched people with quiet, searching intensity, like she read the script of souls. He adored her with the ferocity of a man discovering colour for the first time, and being near him felt like leaning over a balcony in a lightning storm: exhilarating, unwise, irresistible.
“You don’t just look,” he said once. “You see. No one’s ever seen me back before.”
For a brief, impossible period, Seren let herself be the storm too. With Theo, intensity wasn’t a threat to navigate — it was his truth. And truth was the one thing she worshipped.
Theo is a storm. A cathedral on fire. Standing next to him makes me feel alive, incandescent, terrified. He keeps sketching me. Half-finished things, frantic strokes, charcoal everywhere. He looks at me like I’m a cliff he wants to jump off. Like he’s already in the air. His desire is… god. It fucking moves. It’s alive. It creeps into me and wraps around me and I don’t know where my edges are anymore. This is a bad idea.
I want it anyway.
But love — or something like it — burned differently for Theo.
His Glimmer around her was relentless: spiralling, bright, hungry in ways that had nothing to do with malice and everything to do with the sheer force of who he was. And though it wasn’t caused by any direct manipulation on her part, it began to worry her — because it still started looking too much like what she had feared becoming after Elin. Theo was not careful with himself, and he wasn’t careful with her. He didn’t mean harm; he simply lacked brakes. When he loved, he loved at full velocity — and expected the world to move with him. Seren saw all the ways she could break him. All the ways he could burn her. All the ways desire could become a cage even when freely given.
His longing for her grew not distorted, but consuming. He rearranged his life around her, not because she pushed him, but because he didn’t know another way to love. He discarded obligations. He forgot meals. He abandoned projects. People became afterthoughts.
His desire for her grew to a muse-level obsession, and his world narrowed to a single point: her.
It was suffocating, though she craved it sometimes too: his longing entangled itself with hers until she could no longer tell where one began and the other ended. She tried to step back. To restore balance without breaking anything. But desire like his, once illuminated, could not be quieted. Theo was not in love with a fantasy — he was in love with the part of himself she let him uncover.
One night he stayed up painting her all the way until dawn — ten portraits of her in one fevered burst. The eleventh canvas was blank, except for a smear of gold across the centre.
“This is what you are,” he whispered. “A miracle.”
And that was when she knew she had to leave.
She wasn’t a miracle. She was simply a mirror, and he was in love with the reflection she woke inside of him.
Their breakup was not gentle like Rowan’s. It was loud, aching, emotional — the kind of ending that leaves echoes. Theo begged her to stay, not because he would ever demand it, but because he didn’t know how to want less. Leaving him broke something inside her. But staying would have shattered them both.
Theo’s best works came after she left — a whole exhibition of women made of light and longing, eyes like lanterns, hair threaded with gold. People called it visionary. Transcendent. He called it Emanation.
She saw glimpses of it online months later. She never clicked the articles.
Theo taught her the second lesson she feared: that even without meaning to, she could become the kind of woman the old stories warned about.
The Shape of What Remains
The days after she left Theo were strangely quiet, as though the world itself had exhaled. After months of living inside the intensity he brought alive in her — the rush, the hunger, the unfilteredness she had allowed herself for the first time in years — the silence felt almost physical. Not empty, but echoing. She felt the ghost of him when she passed a gallery window, or saw a smear of gold paint, or heard the fevered longing in a stranger’s voice. She found it hard to let go, like the want still lingered in her soul, but she couldn’t tell if it was truly her own, or a remnant of his.
But she didn’t collapse. She didn’t drown. Seren didn’t do dramatic ruin; she did careful disassembly. She unpacked what had happened the way she unpacked everything: alone, slowly, with a notebook and too much walking.
I keep wondering: If I didn’t have the Glimmer, would he have loved me at all? Or would he have walked right past me? I don’t think I’ll ever know. I don’t think I should.
What unsettled her wasn’t Theo’s desire or her own. It was the way she had stepped beyond her usual carefulness: the fact that she hadn’t contained herself, hadn’t measured the temperature of the air before stepping inside it. She had walked willingly into something overwhelming and let it take her with it.
Part of her mourned. Part of her was relieved. Most of her felt… altered.
She had finally let herself be known — not the neat, tightly controlled version she offered the world, but the whole of her: the hunger, the glow, the gravity that had followed her since childhood. Theo hadn’t been frightened of that. He had wanted her because of it, not despite it. And wanting someone who matched her intensity had been intoxicating in a way she had barely known how to survive.
But Theo wasn’t the life she wanted. He was the lesson she needed, though.
She wrote it plainly in her journal: Want is not a home. Being seen is not the same as being held. I cannot lose myself.
Theo had taught her something else important: that intensity was not the enemy — misunderstanding was. He had loved truthfully. Dangerously. Completely. But he’d wanted her illumination so badly he mistook being seen for being chosen, and his own want for destiny. Through him Seren learned that she did not want to be anyone’s answer. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
But she would not trade knowing him. He woke the fire inside her that she had long denied, and she carried the memory of him like flint — not a flame to rekindle, but a spark she knew she was capable of striking. She didn’t fear love after Theo either, and she certainly didn’t fear intensity. But he showed her just how thin the line was between illumination and ruin.
The Quiet Middle
Seren stayed in Prague for two more weeks — long enough for the air to settle around her, long enough to walk streets without remembering him at every corner. Long enough to inhale the city without the aftertaste of him still on her tongue. The first café she returned to felt raw. The first gallery felt sharper. The first night she slept deeply felt like a small mercy she didn’t expect.
But grief, like want, was a pattern — and patterns could be studied.
She gave herself long walks and cold mornings and notebooks full of questions she didn’t pretend she could answer. She spoke to no one deeply, and let no one interpret her silences. She knew every flavour of desire except her own. That realisation alone was enough to keep her moving.
For the first time, I’m not afraid of fire. I’m afraid of my hunger for it. That frightens me more than hurting anyone else ever could. I don’t want to be someone whose longing becomes a weapon.
When the heat in her chest finally softened into something steady, she booked a train west. No destination, not really — Prague to Plzeň, Plzeň to Nuremberg, Nuremberg to wherever the next whisper carried her. She didn’t need a plan. Plans were walls; direction was a compass.
And hers had always been tuned toward truth.
A Return to Movement
Distance did what distance always does: it clarified.
Theo’s presence faded into a story she could carry without flinching. She could finally think of him without feeling her pulse spike. She could recall the way he first saw her — not the fevered muse, but the woman beneath it — and recognise it as something real, even if it wasn’t sustainable.
The first time she passed a street performer painting in broad, confident strokes, she didn’t freeze. She didn’t ache. She didn’t turn away. She watched for a moment, breathed out, and kept walking. She was learning not to fear the parts of herself he had awakened. Not the hunger, or the heat, or the capacity for surrender.
Love without honesty is just performance. Love without autonomy is just hunger. If I love someone someday, it must be someone whose wants don’t spill over when I look at them. Someone who can hold themselves steady. Someone who doesn’t mistake being seen for being chosen.
In the wake of Theo, she became more disciplined, not less. Not out of fear of repeating their intensity, but because she understood now exactly how easily she could fall into someone who burned brightly enough. She knew now what it cost her, what it cost them. She promised herself she wouldn’t lose that much of her own shape again until she understood the force she carried.
She no longer pretended her search was academic, either. She was no longer only studying desire in others — she was studying what happened when she stopped shielding people from her own.
Her dislike of authority found new edges. Institutions felt even more hollow in the aftermath — rigid structures trying to explain human behaviour with paper logic. Academic theories, healing frameworks, spiritual systems — all of them flattened the complexity she had tasted. They felt small, reductive, almost arrogant. Seren had walked through something feral and vast; no institution could tell her what it meant.
She trusted only what she saw, what she felt, what she could test for herself.
She travelled because stillness felt dangerous now. Movement kept her honest. So she kept moving. New towns, new temporary jobs, new conversations where she watched desire flare and fade across strangers’ faces. She stayed careful with people but not closed. She had been overwhelmed once; she would not let herself become frightening again.
He stood across the street and didn’t want anything. Not love, not curiosity, not fear. Nothing. A blank hungerless void. That’s impossible. Everyone wants something. Unless they’ve been trained not to. I left before he could cross the road.
Cities became waystations for reflection. Barcelona, Vienna, Bratislava, Vilnius — each place a pause long enough to feel the edges of her own desire settle into something steadier. She wrote to Eira more often, and Eira responded with gentle reminders of their lineage: Meredydd women had always sought clarity over control, and in that pursuit, the Yr Awydd was both a gift and a burden.
Despite the exhaustion, part of her felt more alive than she had in years.
A Settling Instinct
By the time Seren returned to Cardiff, notebook full and mind aflame with observation, she had learned two things: first, that she could survive her gift when she respected boundaries; second, that the world was full of people who could reflect her light — but few who could do it without danger. Rowan reminded her that steadiness existed, that love could be quiet, that desire could exist without catastrophe. Theo reminded her that intensity could illuminate truths, that danger could teach, and that sometimes leaving was the most ethical choice.
I’m beginning to see my contradictions. I want no one to depend on me, and yet I yearn to be seen. I want autonomy, and yet I ache for someone who can meet me without bending. I want to be safe, and I want to burn. How do you reconcile two desires that refuse to hold the same shape?
Her journey had become a mosaic of experiences — love and loss, chaos and calm, observation and participation. And through it all, Eira’s lessons were the compass: truth first, autonomy always, desire to be observed and guided but never owned.
She spent a stretch of autumn in the Brecon Beacons, living in a rented room above a quiet pub, working odd shifts, hiking long winding paths that let her think without effort. Her thoughts circled the same questions: not who am I? — she was tired of that — but what am I doing with this? What was the point of seeing desire so clearly if she had no way to live with it without harming herself or others?
She didn’t have answers. But she was done pretending she didn’t need them.
And Thus the World Was Changed
The world changed quietly, and then all at once.
It wasn’t rumours which finally broke the boundary between myth and reality. It wasn’t shaky videos or impossible coincidences. It was a single, orchestrated broadcast from the most powerful man on earth — the Ascendancy himself.
Seren was in a hostel common room in Edinburgh when it happened, a mug of tea cooling in her hands as the TV crackled to life. The Ascendancy spoke calmly, with the measured certainty of someone accustomed to global attention. And suddenly magic wasn’t metaphor anymore. It was policy.
The announcement stunned the world. Nations scrambled. Scientists argued. Religious leaders reeled. Institutions activated protocols for a future they had not prepared for.
But Seren’s reaction was quieter, deeper — a pulse of recognition followed by disorientation. What she had lived with her entire life was not this. Her sight was intimate, soft, woven into the architecture of human want. What the Ascendancy wielded was loud, elemental, disruptive.
But his existence drilled a single truth deeper into Seren’s bones: If this is happening, maybe I’m not alone.
After years searching with no real answers, she had begun to believe she was singular — an oddity, an aberration, something fragile and potentially dangerous. But seeing the world expand around her, seeing others step into strangeness entirely unlike her own, made a new, unsettling thought unfurl in her chest:
If others are awakening… someone might understand me.
Something about Moscow, the seat of the Custody’s power, had always repelled her. She found Nikolai Brandon’s climb to such great, unquestioned power morally inimical, all the more now he admitted to a supernatural advantage which cast a long shadow on that climb. But now Moscow tugged ruthlessly at the part of her that had long stopped hoping for answers. It wasn’t destiny, or a sign. It was that internal resonance. As she reread her notes late one night, she realised what the feeling was: this was her desire. Not someone else’s. Hers.
It hit her with the force of revelation. Not the desire for a person, or a place, or a life someone could share with her — but the desire to finally understand herself on her own terms. Her first true want. Raw. Unborrowed. Uninfluenced. And Seren, who never ignored the truth of want, knew exactly what she had to do. Love had taught her what she didn’t want to be. Loss had taught her what she feared becoming. Now she needed to learn what she was.
So she packed her bag one last time.
And she bought a ticket to Moscow.
Someone watched me today. Not the usual kind of watching — not desire. Something colder. Sharper. Their want was unreadable. Or absent. As if they had trained themselves not to want. That frightens me more than any hunger ever has.
VI: Personality and Ethics
Seren is defined by an unshakeable devotion to truth, not as blunt honesty but as clarity. Lies and pretence repel her instinctively; she values transparency even when inconvenient. She believes all choices — hers and others’ — must be grounded in a clear understanding of desire. For her, want is not shameful; it is the compass of human nature. Every ambition is a story waiting to be read.
She has an instinctive aversion to control, coercion, hierarchy, or systems that tell people who they “should” be. For Seren, autonomy is sacred. She refuses to shape someone’s desire unless she knows they genuinely want change.
She is perceptive, steady, and principled — a Vidient who sees the fire but will never steal the match. Her entire life lives at the tension between I want to exist freely and My existence changes people.
Temperament
Seren rarely reacts impulsively. She watches, listens, and studies the gold motes of longing around people, mapping their patterns before speaking. Her presence is calm, intelligent, and quietly intense. She notices when someone’s desire is fractured, when ambition is bruised, when longing is buried beneath fear. This perception makes her slow to judge and quick to understand. She will comfort someone who is lost, but she will not let them lie to themselves.
She does not command. She does not impose. But when she decides something is true or right, she is immovable. Seren’s quiet voice becomes a boundary. When she says no, it is final. When she says this is wrong, she means it. Her defiance is gentle but absolute. If someone tries to force their will on her or others, she sharpens into moral iron.
Her insight is honed. She tends to ask questions that land like revelations — the friend who notices the dream someone never said aloud, or the goal they secretly gave up on. She doesn’t push, she invites. People confide in her instinctively, even when they don’t want to.
She distrusts institutions, rigid hierarchies, leaders who demand allegiance, and rules that exist “because that’s how things are done.” But she is not a rebel for rebellion’s sake. She simply believes no one should be given power over another person’s inner life. When responsibility falls onto her, she accepts it — on her terms. If someone tries to control her, define her, limit her, or idealise her — her entire being recoils.
Powerful, ambitious figures always notice her. Some are inspired. Some become obsessed. All become dangerous.
Flaws
Because Seren sees desire so clearly, she constantly holds herself back, and is not fully cognisant of the cage she has placed around herself. Seren’s restraint is iron: her anger is rare, her passion is suppressed, her desires are quieted. When she finally does want something for herself — truly, fiercely — it may be explosive. Her own ambition has never been fully born. The day it is, the world will shift.
She thinks she wants a quiet, free life of her own. She secretly longs for an equal; a reference point outside her influence, a relationship where she can stop self-monitoring, and a person she doesn’t have to protect from herself. But she’d never admit it. Her true, most buried desire is to choose her own fire — and let it burn. This is what she fears. This is what she avoids. This is what the world has never allowed her to do. She does not want to be neutral, she wants to want.
But she can’t trust herself with it.
Appearance
Seren is one of those people who doesn’t immediately command attention, but becomes unforgettable once you’ve spoken to her. She looks like someone you almost know, but cannot quite pin down, and it makes her simultaneously approachable and disarming, ordinary yet otherworldly. Her presence hints at the fire within, though no one would guess the depth of insight, the untamed autonomy, or the latent power she carries. People often realise hours later that they remember her eyes more vividly than her face.
She’s in her early/mid 20s, though the energy she carries feels older, wiser, and untamed. 5’7″ – tall enough to move through a crowd with quiet presence, yet unassuming until you notice her. Her eyes are her most defining feature: hazel that shifts between gold and green, depending on the light. Her gaze is steady. People often feel as though she “looks through them,” even though she’s only seeing their desires.
Dark brown hair, almost black in winter, and sun‑lightened with faint copper streaks in summer. Thick enough that wind off the Welsh coast tends to rearrange it for her. Pale complexion with a coastal undertone — a natural pinkness on her cheeks and nose from years of wind and sun, and freckles in the summer. She carries a faint, permanent warmth to her skin tone that makes her look alive even when tired.
Seren dresses like someone who prioritises truth and comfort: soft jumpers, dark jeans, slightly oversized coats. People think she dresses plainly, but she dresses intentionally. Nothing constricts; nothing demands attention. She speaks with a soft Welsh accent. Her expressions don’t hide what she feels; she values clarity too greatly for masks. Her quietness is never passive — it feels like a choice. There is an almost imperceptible magnetism around her. People notice subtle changes in motivation or mood when she is present — restless energy, sudden inspiration, fleeting ambition — even if they can’t explain why.
VII. The Golden Glimmer
For Seren, desire is not poetic or symbolic — it is visual fact. Every person’s longing drifts around them like gold motes in sunlight, and she can read their movements, structure, and brightness. This ability makes hypocrisy corrosive to her, manipulation revolting, self-deception tragic, and genuine ambition radiant.
Her presence naturally amplifies desire and ambition in those around her on a low level, particularly anything hidden or buried. It’s like a reflection, and some individuals are more susceptible to it than others. She cannot control it, though she has tried. Her actual abilities to manipulate, either to intentionally amplify or to suppress, she refuses to use. She will illuminate, but only when she thinks someone is ready for the change.
She is vulnerable to catching others’ ambitions. The gold heat climbs her spine when someone burns brightly near her. Sometimes she must step away from people who want too intensely if it feels like their fire threatens to override her own. And because she can absorb strong desire without meaning to, she is sometimes left to question her own. It’s precisely why autonomy is so sacred: because her own can be fragile.
VIII: Rebirth
She does not remember the High Ones.
She does not remember the Sanctuary.
She does not remember Lucifer.
She does not remember the golden bonfire of ambition that once consumed humanity.
But her soul remembers the shape of freedom.
And the modern world is full of cages.
Where the soul of Lilith walks, the locks begin to rust.
0 Comments