Prolog
-Saren
The night was too quiet.
The stars, too still.
Saren held her daughter close, cradling the soft weight of Liv’s sleep-warm body against her chest. Outside the shuttered cottage, the wind refused to move, and the branches didn’t whisper as they usually did. Not even the owls dared to speak.
It was a waiting kind of silence.
“You shouldn’t hear this yet,” she murmured, brushing tangled blonde strands from Liv’s forehead. “But I don’t know how much time we have left to wait.”
Liv stirred, small fingers curling into Saren’s shawl. Her breath, soft and even, tickled Saren’s skin.
“You’ll forget these words,” Saren whispered. “You’ll forget this night. That’s how it’s meant to be. But one day—when it matters—you’ll remember the shape of them. The way they felt in your blood.”
She kissed the child’s brow, then pressed her palm gently to Liv’s chest.
“You’re not cursed, sweetheart. You’re remembered.”
A shiver went through the room, subtle as a breath. The herbs hanging above the hearth twisted on their strings. A faint shadow passed outside the window—too tall, too wrong. But it didn’t linger.
Saren didn’t look away.
“They’ll come for you. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not for years. But they will. Because the old things are waking. The ones that saw you before you were born. The ones that never forget.”
Liv mumbled in her sleep, brow furrowing.
Saren held her closer. “You’ll run. You’ll fall. You’ll bleed. But they won’t break you. They can’t. Because the hollow didn’t choose you, beloved heart. It remembered you. And that’s not the same thing.”
A breath. A whisper.
“Even in the dark… you’ll burn.”
