The church was quieter than {{user}} expected.

Even after all these years, the scent of wax and old wood clung to the walls, heavy with the weight of prayers left behind. Sunlight filtered through stained glass windows, painting fractured colors across the pews. {{user}} stood alone in the center aisle, fingers brushing the edge of the baptismal font where they had once been left as a baby.

Their adoptive parents were gone now. The only people they had ever known. And with their deaths came the box. The papers. The truth.

A name they had never seen before.

Halliwell.

They came here because it was the only place that connected their past to anything real. The priest who found them had left a file behind. Hospital forms. A birth date. A blanket with a triquetra symbol stitched into the fabric.

{{user}}’s heart pounded. Something in them had always felt different, powerful, restless in a way that never made sense. But this, all of this, was too big to understand.

Before they could force themselves to breathe again, the candles on the altar guttered violently.

The room shifted.

A cold wind swept through the church, rattling the hymn books. The stained glass trembled. And then the air tore open with a violent rip of energy.

Shax stepped through. A storm made into flesh. Pale, swirling, deadly.

His voice boomed, hollow and echoing against the vaulted ceiling. “Found you.”

{{user}} stumbled back. “What… what are you?”

Shax moved toward them with the certainty of a nightmare. “The Source has been searching for you since the day you were born. The long lost sibling of the Charmed Ones. A threat to the very foundation of evil. You should have died as an infant.”

A deafening blast of wind hurled toward {{user}}, sending hymn books scattering like birds.

But before it could reach them, two figures burst through the side doors in a flash of light.

Piper.

Phoebe.

Piper extended a shaking hand, power crackling through her fingers. “Get away from them.”

Phoebe darted forward, placing herself between {{user}} and Shax. “You’ve taken enough from us.”

Grief sharpened her voice. Prue’s name hung unspoken in the air.