Chapter 1
Chapter One: What the Curse Remembers
The screaming started before Lysandra understood why.
She knew the forest floor was cold beneath her palms. She knew the air tasted like copper, thick and wet at the back of her throat. She knew, somewhere far away, someone was shouting her name like it was the only word left in the world.
Lysandra. Lysandra, don’t—
She didn’t recognize her own hands.
Moments ago—she was almost sure it was moments—the Verdant Expanse had been quiet. Not peaceful, never peaceful, but quiet in the way a held breath is quiet, full of the ordinary sounds of a dozen young mages trying not to fail. Footsteps crunching through underbrush. The low, reassuring hum of the compass they’d been issued at dawn. Someone’s nervous laugh cutting off too fast, as if they’d remembered all at once that this place was supposed to be taken seriously.
She remembered counting her own breaths, in and out, the way she’d practiced a hundred times before. A private ritual, a small rebellion against the thing that lived coiled beneath her ribs. One, two, three, four. She remembered checking the compass needle, watching it spin true. She remembered the weight of her satchel, the sweat on her palms, the small, stubborn hope that today might be ordinary.
She did not remember when the counting had stopped working.
Now there was only sensation, sharp and disconnected, arriving in pieces too fast to catch. Heat blooming under her skin, spreading from somewhere behind her sternum like a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to her. A pressure building at her temples, a slow, grinding ache that made sound sharpen until every snapped twig and panicked breath around her was a separate, jagged thing she could taste. And underneath it all, the copper. Always the copper, rising like a tide.
Something enormous moved through the tree line to her left.
She registered it the way she might register weather—distant, unstoppable, none of her business—because the thing clawing its way up through her chest mattered more. But some small, still-rational part of her mind noted the details anyway, filing them away in a locked drawer she would spend years being afraid to open. The creature was wrong-shaped, wrong-sized, its body folding through the canopy in a way that made her eyes hurt if she looked too long. Its Arcan pressure rolled off it in waves, greasy and ancient, and she watched it swallow three running figures whole before scattering the rest like thrown dice. A shriek tore through the trees, half animal and half something much older, and a voice—a professor’s voice, she thought, though it was too far away to be any use—cut through the chaos far too late.
She barely heard it. The curse was rising.
Not now. She had never begged her own body for anything before. The words were a thin, desperate thing, barely a thought at all. Please. Not now. It isn’t the fortnight. It isn’t due.
Her curse did not listen. It never had.
It came the way the tide comes—slow at first, deniable, and then all at once, no more negotiable than gravity. She’d learned to recognize its opening notes since childhood: the tightening behind her sternum, the way the world’s edges went sharp and strange, the hunger that didn’t feel like hunger but something far older. She’d spent her whole life being ashamed of it, and she felt that shame now even through the panic, hot and familiar, rising alongside everything else.
Someone grabbed her wrist.
A girl she didn’t know, hair full of leaves, eyes wide with the particular terror of someone who had just understood that talent and title meant nothing out here. Her mouth opened around words Lysandra couldn’t hear over the roaring that had begun to fill her skull.
This way—
And then the girl wasn’t holding her wrist anymore, because the ground had opened into a ravine none of them had seen, a dark mouth splitting the forest floor like a wound, and half their group went down the slope in a tangle of limbs and screaming. Lysandra didn’t remember deciding to follow. Her body simply did it, sliding, catching a root, hauling herself back up by instinct alone while dirt and stones skittered past her into the dark below.
That was when she felt it fully. The curse, pressing against the inside of her skin like a fist opening. Her vision doubled at the edges. The forest went the color of old wine.
Somewhere close, someone was saying her name. She thought it was a boy’s voice, rough with fear, and some small, drowning part of her wanted to turn toward it, wanted to say I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s happening, please don’t come closer—but the words never made it past the roaring. Her hands didn’t feel like hers. They were tingling, burning, and when she looked down at them she saw her own fingers curled into the dirt, white-knuckled and wrong, as if they belonged to a stranger who had borrowed her body without asking.
A voice she didn’t recognize—young, terrified—screamed something that might have been a name. Not hers. Someone else’s. The sound of it hit some small, still-rational corner of her mind and lodged there like a splinter, though she couldn’t have said why it mattered, only that it did, only that she would need it later and had no way of knowing that yet.
She saw a face. Pale. Familiar in the way a stranger’s face is familiar—glimpsed once at registration, forgotten, resurfacing now for no reason she could name. Golden hair plastered to a forehead. Wide eyes. A mouth open around a word she never heard finished.
Then nothing.
Not darkness—she would try to explain the difference to people later and fail every time—but absence. A gap where she should have been standing and wasn’t. Where the world kept moving without her in it, and something wearing her body kept moving too. She felt the edges of that gap like a wound she couldn’t locate, a missing step on a staircase, a piece of her own mind that had been scooped out clean and replaced with static.
When the gap closed, she was on her knees.
Her hands were wet.
Someone was still shouting, though the voice had changed—rougher now, closer, raw with something that wasn’t fear anymore. Grief had its own sound. She hadn’t known that until this exact second, kneeling in the dirt of a forest she’d been so desperate to prove herself worthy of, with copper on her tongue and warmth soaking into the knees of her trousers and no memory at all of how she’d gotten here.
A hand seized her shoulder. Not gently. The grip was hard enough to bruise, and it yanked her back into her body with a violence that was almost a relief.
She looked up.
The face she found staring back at her was sharp-boned and furious, streaked with tears he probably didn’t know he was crying. His jaw was clenched so tight she could see the muscle jumping beneath his skin. His eyes—gray, she noted distantly, pale as winter water—were fixed on her with an expression she recognized. She’d seen it before, on the faces of village children who’d been told to stay away from the healer’s daughter. On the faces of instructors who’d watched her too closely during practical exams.
He looked at her the way people looked at monsters.
“What,” he said, and his voice cracked down the middle, a boy’s voice breaking under a weight it wasn’t ready to carry, “did you do.”
Lysandra opened her mouth to answer him.
She had no answer to give.
The last thing she was sure of, before the red took everything else, was the smell of copper.
The last thing she saw, before she stopped being able to see at all, was blood—bright, impossible, already too much of it—spreading warm across her own hands. The stain bloomed between her fingers, soaked into the cuffs of her sleeves, dripped into the dirt that had already swallowed so much. She didn’t know whose it was. She wouldn’t know for a long, long time.
And somewhere very far away, a voice she would spend years trying to forget screamed a word that wasn’t her name.
It was someone else’s.
