Broken Star
I should’ve known today would go wrong. Bad luck didn’t just follow me—it lived in my bones, predictable as the turning seasons. Twenty-nine years of dropped dishes, twisted ankles, split seams at the worst possible moments. My mother used to laugh about it, back when laughter still existed in our house. Born under a broken star, she’d say, kissing my forehead. But even broken stars still shine, my love.
Then the war came, and she stopped saying much of anything.
The forest breathed around me with that peculiar stillness of late autumn, when trees held their breath waiting for winter’s first bite. Kneeling in a patch of frostmint, I pinched stems carefully between my fingers. The herb’s sharp, medicinal scent burned cold in my nostrils. It bruised easily; Maevyn had drilled that into me a hundred times. Gentle hands, Evanna. The plants won’t give up their magic if you bully them.
My apron pouch hung heavy against my hip, half-full of the evening’s gathering. Valerian with its earthy, almost rotten sweetness. Stitchleaf that smelled like green wood and rain. And now frostmint, its cooling menthol bite so strong it made my eyes water. The scents mingled with the forest’s own perfume: decomposing leaves, damp earth, the green-dark musk of moss growing thick on stones. Somewhere above, a crow called out, its harsh cry swallowed by the dense canopy.
The light had that amber quality that spoke of borrowed time. Sun sinking fast, shadows stretching long and hungry across the forest floor. But Maevyn needed these herbs for tomorrow’s patients. Old Petyr with his rattling cough that wouldn’t ease. The baker’s daughter with fever spots blooming across her cheeks like poisonous flowers.
And tomorrow was—
No. Don’t think about tomorrow.
An old tune my mother used to sing while she worked hummed through my lips, something about summer and starlight and promises that lasted forever. The melody felt thin in my mouth, hollow without her voice to anchor it. But it kept the darker thoughts at bay, kept me from counting down the hours until dawn.
Until the Harvest.
The temperature dropped as the sun continued its descent. That first edge of true cold pressed against my exposed skin, autumn’s reminder that winter was coming whether we were ready or not. My breath misted in front of my face. I tugged my threadbare cloak tighter and reached for another cluster of frostmint.
A strand of honey-colored hair escaped my braid, catching on a thorn as I leaned forward. I tucked it behind my ear with practiced impatience—it was always escaping, always in the way.
My boot came down on soft moss—
Click.
The sound was small. Insignificant. Metal kissing metal with a sound like a door latch catching.
Then the world became teeth and iron and screaming.
The trap’s jaws erupted from the moss in an explosion of rust and violence. Iron teeth punched through leather and skin with a sound like kindling snapping. They bit down to bone.
White-hot agony shot up my leg, so sudden and absolute that thought shattered. My scream tore free, raw and animal, the kind of sound you can’t control or contain. It echoed through the trees, sending birds erupting from branches in a panic of wings.
The impact jarred through my shoulder as I crashed sideways, barely catching myself on a low branch. My teeth clacked together hard enough to taste blood. The trap held fast, an iron parasite locked around my ankle, already slick with red.
My blood. So much of it, spilling hot across the frozen earth, steaming in the dusk air like something alive trying to escape.
“No—no—please—” The words came out as desperate gasps, barely recognizable as language.
No hunter nearby. No wandering villagers this far from the village proper. Just me, the rising wind, and the forest beginning its nightly transformation from refuge to hunting ground. Already the daylight birds were falling silent, replaced by the rustling of things that moved through shadows.
Of course this would happen. Of course.
Vision tunneling, gray creeping in at the edges. The pain was exquisite, specific: iron grinding against bone with every infinitesimal movement, torn flesh screaming its damage in waves that made my stomach heave.
Focus. Focus.
Teeth gritted hard enough to crack, I collapsed onto my knees beside the trap. Fresh agony lanced up my leg and I bit back another scream—letting it out would waste breath I couldn’t spare. My hands—small, work-roughened, now slick with blood—fumbled at the mechanism. Maevyn always said my size made me better at delicate work—gentle hands for gentle herbs—but there was nothing gentle about forcing open iron jaws.
The metal was cold as a corpse beneath my fingers. The spring was stiff, designed to hold struggling prey, to keep teeth locked until the hunter returned. My fingers kept sliding off the release, painting it red. The smell of iron filled my nose: blood and rust mixing into something primal and wrong.
Focus. FOCUS.
I wedged my thumbs against the jaws and pushed. Metal groaned, a shriek of stressed iron that made my skin crawl. My wounded leg protested, the movement making the teeth grind deeper. The world narrowed to this single point of pressure: muscles shaking, breath held, every fiber of my being focused on opening this cursed trap.
Please. Please. PLEASE.
The trap snapped open with a sound like breaking chains.
I yanked my foot free. The teeth pulled from flesh with a wet, sucking sound that made bile rise in my throat. For one mercy-brief moment, there was no pain. Just shock. Just my body trying to understand what had happened to it.
Then I made the mistake of looking.
The leather of my boot had been shredded like parchment. Beneath it, my ankle was a ruin: skin peeled back in ragged flaps, exposing the glistening white-pink of tendon. Blood welled from the wound in steady pulses, too much blood, pooling in the moss and turning it crimson. And there, visible through the gore like some terrible secret revealed, gleamed bone.
White. Clean. Impossibly fragilelooking.
My stomach lurched violently. Bile rose, bitter and burning at the back of my throat.
But panic was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Not out here. Not with night coming and the forest changing and things that hunted humans beginning to wake.
Training kicked in, steadying my shaking hands. Thank the stars for Maevyn and her relentless drilling. Again, Evanna. Draw it again. You need to be able to do this blind, fevered, dying. Again.
I lifted my trembling, blood-slick fingers and drew the shape in the air. The movements were automatic, burned into muscle memory through countless repetitions. The sigil took form, that familiar curving spiral, like water circling a drain, like the first unfurling of a fern.
Shimmering green light followed my fingertips, luminous and soft in the growing darkness. The rune hung suspended in the air like smoke given form, pulsing with its own gentle heartbeat. Beautiful. The one beautiful thing in this moment of horror.
The words came through gritted teeth:
“Mend.”
The magic answered.
This one thing, this single gift in a life otherwise cursed, never failed me. The green light flowed from the rune into my leg, washing over the mangled flesh in a wave of tingling warmth. Muscle fibers reached blindly for each other across the gap, finding purchase, pulling together. Skin crawled back into place like living cloth being rewoven. Blood vessels sealed themselves shut with tiny kisses of heat.
The pain receded from screaming agony to a dull, distant ache. Then to a fading throb. Then to nothing.
Within moments, the wound was gone. Only a tender pink scar remained where the trap had nearly destroyed my ankle, and even that would fade by morning, leaving no evidence this had ever happened.
For a long moment I sat there, breathing hard, watching the scar finish forming. The magic left its own sensation behind: a peculiar tightness in the newly healed flesh, a warmth that would linger for hours. My hands still shook. Blood still covered my fingers, my apron, the ground around me.
But I was whole. Alive.
Lucky, in the only way that mattered.
I wiped my bloody hands on my already-ruined apron—Maevyn would have words about that—and gathered the scattered herbs with trembling fingers. Valerian, stitchleaf, frostmint. The familiar textures grounded me in reality. Real. Solid. Proof that the world still made sense, even when it tried its best to prove otherwise.
The sky had changed while I’d been trapped. The sun sagged between the trees like a drowning man going under for the last time, its light gone copper and strange. Long shadows stretched across the forest floor like grasping fingers. The temperature had dropped another few degrees, settling into the hollows, pooling in the low places. My breath came out in white puffs.
Dusk. The changing hour. The dangerous hour.
A howl rose through the trees, distant but clear, that distinctive keening pitch that bypassed the brain entirely and went straight to the hindbrain where all prey animals lived. Shadow wolf. Which meant the Hellbeasts would be prowling soon, all fang and hunger and eyes like hot coals in the darkness.
And worse than any beast: the Vampyres.
The monsters who’d won the old war and butchered the human kings. The same kings who’d conscripted my parents twenty years ago and sent them to their deaths without a backward glance. Now the Vampyres ruled the Kingdom of Dusk and Dawn with blood-soaked hands.
They rarely ventured to Hollowspire’s edges—we were too far, too poor, too insignificant. But with my luck? Testing fate seemed inadvisable. Not tonight. Not ever.
I clutched my cloak tight around my shoulders and hurried back toward the distant glow of village lights, my newly healed ankle holding steady beneath me. Each step sent phantom echoes of pain up my leg: memory, not injury, but enough to make me wince. The forest seemed to press closer with every yard I covered, the spaces between trees growing darker, more solid, more aware.
But even as I walked, even as I focused on the path and the fading light and the growing cold, my thoughts kept circling back. Sinking like stones dropped in deep water.
Tomorrow.
The Harvest.
Once, before the old war, the new year had meant celebration. Dancing in the square. Mulled rum shared between neighbors, the spices warm and sweet on your tongue. Warmth and joy and the promise that spring would come again, that the cycle would continue, that life would persist.
Now that same date haunted every human village like a specter with teeth.
At dawn, the royal guards would arrive. They’d open the black book in the village square, and order magic would do its work. Five names would appear on those pages, pulled forward by forces no one understood. Five villagers taken as thralls to serve the twin kings in their blood-soaked castle.
No one ever knew who would be chosen. The names simply appeared, as if fate itself were writing them. As if the universe had already decided who was worth keeping and who could be thrown away.
And with my luck—the luck that led me to bear traps and burned dinners and every small disaster life could offer—I already knew.
Tomorrow, when the guards opened that book, my name would be written there.
Evanna Dreamfyre. Called to serve. Called to die.
I just hoped the end would be quick.
By the time I reached Hollowspire’s outskirts, the village was already surrendering to the dark.
Doors slammed shut, the sound echoing down empty lanes like drumbeats marking retreat. Shutters clattered into place with desperate speed, wooden bars dropping into iron brackets with final, resolute thunks. One by one, the lanterns died, pinched out by nervous fingers, snuffed before their light could draw attention from the forest. From the things that noticed light. From the things that came when called.
The winding dirt paths emptied fast, lit now only by the thin, reluctant glow of hearth-fires seeping through gaps in walls. The few villagers still outside moved like rabbits who’d spotted a hawk: quick, hunched, shoulders tight with the instinct to be anywhere but here. No one lingered. No one looked up. No one met each other’s eyes, as if acknowledging another person might somehow make them both more visible to whatever cruel magic chose the names.
This was the village I knew. Afraid of its own shadows. Waiting to see which of us would be devoured next.
Head down, I walked faster, boots scuffing soft against packed earth. Avoiding eye contact—a habit so ingrained I barely noticed anymore. Sixteen years as the healer’s apprentice had made me invisible to most of Hollowspire. The girl who touched death and disease daily. The one who made people uncomfortable just by existing. I’d stopped trying to make friends years ago. The cold had deepened, seeping through my worn cloak, finding every thin spot in the fabric. My fingers ached with it. The tip of my nose had gone numb.
The Healing Center squatted where forest met civilization, a weathered cabin that had been listing slowly sideways for as long as I could remember, like decades of storms had shoved at it and almost, almost won. Moss crept across the sagging roof in thick green patches that probably did more to hold it together than the rotting shingles beneath. A single lantern hung from the porch beam, its flame guttering and weak, as if it resented being abandoned to the dark while everything else hid safe indoors.
The steps creaked under my weight, each board groaning like an old man complaining. The door’s hinges shrieked in protest when I pushed it open.
Silence met me. The wrong kind—not peaceful, but empty.
“Maevyn?”
My voice fell flat in the stillness, absorbed by the herbs and wood and thick silence. No answer. No shuffle of movement from the back room, no sharp reply telling me I was late or that I’d tracked mud inside again or that the frostmint was bruised because I’d been careless.
Nothing.
The hearth was dying, its embers sulking red and low, barely clinging to life. They cast strange shadows across the room, dancing and flickering, making the bundles of hanging herbs look like small bodies swaying from the rafters. Above the fire, mint and sage and yarrow and chamomile twisted slowly in the rising heat. Their mingled scents filled the space: medicinal, green, touched with smoke. Usually comforting. Tonight, cloying. Too thick.
Usually the cabin felt cramped, cluttered with patients and Maevyn’s bustling energy, her sharp voice directing me here and there, always three things happening at once.
Now it felt like standing in a held breath. Like the moment before something breaks.
Maybe she’d gone to tend to someone. Old Petyr with his rattling cough that got worse every night. Or the baker’s daughter with her persistent fever that no amount of willow bark could touch. Maybe she was out back, hurrying to gather supplies before true night fell and the forest became something else entirely.
She trusted me enough not to hover anymore. Most days, that felt like progress.
Most days.
I set my herb pouch on the worn wooden counter, the one she’d carved herself forty years ago, its surface stained with decades of plant juices and blood and medicines. My fingers left red smears on the wood. That would need cleaning. And my apron. And probably the entire front of my dress.
The blood had started to dry, turning from bright red to rust-brown, cracking when I moved, flaking off in small pieces that drifted to the floor like dark snow.
I should clean up. Should organize the herbs properly, the way Maevyn liked. Should stoke the fire before it died completely and left us in the cold and dark.
Should do a lot of things.
Instead, I stood there, staring at my blood-covered hands, and felt the weight of tomorrow settling over me like a burial shroud.
The Harvest.
In my mind, I could see it already, clear as prophecy, vivid as memory: The platform in the square. The guards in their gray armor. Captain Renier with his granite face and dead eyes. The black book on its pedestal. My name on those pages.
Evanna Dreamfyre.
Five names. Five people taken. Five families destroyed.
Tomorrow they would come for me.
Tomorrow I would be led out of Hollowspire like all the others before me. Into the darkness. Into nothing.
We never saw them again. Never heard what happened. Just... gone.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but my mind kept racing.
What did they do to us? To the harvested?
The stories whispered in the village came flooding back. Collars. Iron and magic, binding us as property. Blood-drinking in throne rooms lit by torchlight. Beautiful monsters with ancient eyes who fed on human terror as much as human blood.
But no one actually knew. That was the worst part. Not knowing.
Maybe it was quick. Maybe merciful.
Or maybe—
My breath hitched. Maybe they kept us alive. Kept us screaming. Kept us bleeding while those amethyst and golden eyes watched without mercy.
The Vampyre kings. Dawn and Dusk. Morning and night.
What would they do to a healer from a forgotten village? Would they even notice me before they—
“Stop it,” I whispered to the empty room. My voice cracked. “Just stop.”
But the imaginings wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Tomorrow was coming whether I wanted it or not.
I pressed my palms against my eyes hard enough to see stars. Took a shaking breath. Another. The way Maevyn had taught me years ago when the nightmares first started.
In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth.
Again.
Again.
Slowly, the panic receded. Not gone—never gone—but manageable. Pushed back down into the dark place where it lived, waiting.
I lowered my hands and looked around the familiar space. The shelves lined with bottles and jars. The worktable scarred with years of cutting and grinding. The cot in the corner where I’d learned to set bones and stitch wounds. The runes carved into the doorframe, blessings that were supposed to keep evil out but never seemed to work.
This place had been my sanctuary for sixteen years. The only home I’d known after my parents were taken. Maevyn had given me that: a place to belong, a purpose, a reason to keep breathing when all I wanted was to follow my parents into whatever darkness had claimed them.
And tomorrow, I’d lose it all.
Tomorrow, someone else would gather the herbs. Someone else would learn the runes. Someone else would help Maevyn set Old Petyr’s broken bones and ease the baker’s daughter’s fever.
Someone else would live the life I was supposed to have.
A sound from outside. Footsteps on gravel, quick and light.
The door swung open, bringing a gust of cold air and the scent of pine needles. Maevyn stood in the doorway, her weathered face drawn tight, her gray braid coming loose from its usual neat coil. She held a basket of wood for the fire, but stopped dead when she saw me.
Her eyes went to the blood on my apron. My hands. The red smears on the counter.
“Stars and shadow.” Her voice was sharp as a scalpel. “What happened?”
I opened my mouth to answer. To explain about the trap and the forest and the healing. To make light of it the way I always did, to laugh it off as just another disaster in a lifetime of disasters.
But what came out instead was:
“My name is going to be in the book tomorrow.”
The words hung in the air between us, heavy as stones.
Maevyn didn’t move. Didn’t soften with false comfort or harden with denial. She just stood there, looking at me with those gray eyes that had seen too much and knew too much and couldn’t lie worth a damn.
Then she set down the basket, stepped into the room, and closed the door behind her with quiet finality.
“Bear trap?” Her voice was steadier now. Professional. The voice she used when setting broken bones or stitching deep cuts. The voice that said we have work to do, so pull yourself together.
I nodded.
“Show me.”
“I healed it already—”
“Show me anyway.” She gestured to the stool by the worktable. “Sit.”
Moving numbly, I sat. She knelt before me, her joints creaking in protest, and pulled up the hem of my torn dress to examine my ankle. Her fingers were cold but gentle, probing the pink scar tissue, checking for signs of incomplete healing.
“Could’ve been worse,” she said after a moment. “Could’ve been your hands. Can’t heal without fingers.”
It was so perfectly, absurdly Maevyn—practical even in the face of disaster—that something in my chest cracked.
“I stepped right on it.” The words tumbled out. “Wasn’t even paying attention. I was thinking about tomorrow and—and I just stepped on it like the fool I am. Like someone who deserves to be chosen. Like—”
“Stop.” Her voice cut through my spiral. “Stop that right now, girl. You hear me?”
She looked up, and there was something fierce in her eyes. Something that looked almost like anger, but burned hotter.
“You think the Harvest chooses people who deserve it?” Her laugh was bitter. “You think it cares about good or bad, smart or foolish? It’s magic, Evanna. Order magic. It doesn’t care about anything except what the kings want, and what they want is blood and obedience and five more bodies to throw into their cursed castle.”
She stood, her knees popping, and crossed to the counter where I’d left the herbs. Started sorting them with practiced efficiency, her movements sharp and precise.
“If your name is chosen,” she said without looking at me, “you’ll survive. You hear me? You’ll use that stubborn will of yours and that healing gift and you’ll survive for as long as you can. You’ll stay yourself—stay you—no matter what they do.”
Her hands paused over the valerian. “No matter what they take.”
The words hung between us, heavy with all the things we both knew.
That thralls didn’t come back. That survival in the Kingdom of Dusk and Dawn meant becoming something else, something less than human. That “staying yourself” was a pretty lie to make us both feel better.
But I clung to it anyway.
“Maevyn.” My voice came out small. “I’m scared.”
She turned then, and the expression on her face was complicated. Sad and fierce and determined all at once.
“Good,” she said. “Fear keeps you alive.” She crossed back to me, pulled me up from the stool, and wrapped me in an embrace that smelled like smoke and herbs and home. Real home. The kind you build rather than the kind you’re born into.
“Get some rest,” she said softly into my hair. “You’ll need your strength tomorrow. No matter what happens.”
I nodded against her shoulder, not trusting my voice.
She pulled back, holding me at arm’s length, studying my face with that healer’s intensity. Then she kissed my forehead—quick, fierce—and turned away before I could see her face crumble.
I climbed the stairs slowly, each step groaning its familiar complaint. My room waited at the end of the narrow hallway, just before Maevyn’s door, just after the storage closet that smelled perpetually of dried lavender and mouse droppings.
The door stuck, as it always did. Warped wood swollen with damp. I nudged it open with my hip and squeezed inside.
My room.
Small, like me. The cramped space suited my short, curvy frame in a way the rest of the world never had. I’d always been too soft where other girls were lean, too shy where they were bold. Here, at least, the walls didn’t judge.
Calling it that felt generous. Barely large enough to turn around in, more closet than chamber. The ceiling sloped down on one side where the roof sagged. A crooked window let in threads of moonlight and winter drafts in equal measure. The walls were bare except for water stains and a single nail where I’d hung my spare apron.
My bed crouched in the corner: a flattened mattress stuffed with straw that had gone musty years ago, covered in a patchwork of furs. Small. Lumpy. Drafty.
But mine.
I sat heavily on the edge, the frame creaking in protest. My stomach growled, a hollow, insistent ache that I’d been ignoring for hours. But there wasn’t anything to eat. Not tonight. Most families were rationing, hoarding what little they had in case tomorrow brought disaster. In case the Harvest took their provider, their mother, their eldest son.
In case it took them.
I lay back and dragged the furs up to my chin, breathing in their familiar smell of animal and wood-smoke and old sweat. The mattress barely gave beneath my weight. My freshly healed ankle throbbed with phantom pain, muscle memory of agony that wasn’t quite real anymore.
Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the loose window in its frame. The cold seeped through gaps in the walls, turning my breath to fog.
Sleep came fast—too fast, like falling into dark water.
Like being pulled under.
I didn’t want the dream.
But it came anyway.
It always did.
Darkness pressed against me with physical weight, thick and suffocating, clinging to my skin like oil. The air tasted of metal and meat: blood so fresh it still steamed, so thick I could feel it coating the back of my throat. Of iron and salt and the particular wrongness of life being spilled where it shouldn’t be.
Ahead, two shapes emerged from the black.
Familiar. Wrong. Impossible.
My parents.
They stood with their backs to me, close enough to touch but impossibly distant. My mother’s honey-colored hair caught light that didn’t exist, gleaming like the last rays of a dying sun. My father’s broad shoulders formed a wall between me and whatever waited beyond.
“Mother?” My voice came out small. Childlike. Afraid.
Seven years old again, calling for the woman who’d held me when nightmares came. Who’d sung away the dark. Who’d promised nothing bad would happen as long as she was there.
She’d lied.
They didn’t turn. Didn’t acknowledge me. Didn’t move. Just stood there, frozen in that terrible moment before everything ended.
Something moved in the shadows behind them.
Fast. Fluid. Wrong in ways my mind refused to process. A shape that was human-shaped but fundamentally other.
A pale hand emerged from the darkness. Fingers too long, joints bending at angles that shouldn’t work. The skin was marble-white, flawless, beautiful in the way that poisonous things often are.
The hand pressed against my mother’s throat.
Gentle. Almost tender. A lover’s touch.
Then the world became violence.
Blood sprayed in a wide arc, bright impossible red, painting the dark in shades of crimson. So much blood. More than should fit inside a human body, fountaining out like a river released from a dam.
My mother’s scream tore through the air, high and desperate, but cut short too soon. Ended abruptly in a wet, gurgling sound that was somehow worse than the scream.
Her body jerked. Convulsed.
My father turned. His face twisted in recognition and rage and terror. He lunged toward her—
The creature moved faster.
His chest opened like rotten fruit. Not sliced. Opened. Ribs spreading wide with sounds like breaking branches, revealing the red horror inside.
He reached for her—for me—
His hand was still reaching when he fell.
Empty. Trembling. Landing in the spreading pool that was already cooling, already darkening.
The Vampyre lifted its head.
Blood dripped from its chin, painted its teeth. Each drop caught light like rubies, like garnets, like liquid fire falling.
Its eyes glowed. Not metaphorically. Actually glowed. Burning from within like coals in a dying fire, casting that horrible red light across features too perfect to be human.
Beautiful. Terrible. Ancient.
It looked at me.
Directly at me.
And it smiled.
Wide. Delighted. Pleased beyond measure.
As if my terror fed it as surely as my parents’ blood.
I tried to run. My feet wouldn’t move. Rooted to the spot, sinking into the shadows pooling around my knees.
Tried to scream. My throat sealed shut. Air trapped in my lungs, burning.
The Vampyre stepped forward.
One step. Two.
Moving through the carnage without displacing a single drop of blood, walking on air, on nothing.
It reached for me with that same pale hand.
And I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything except watch it come closer—
Closer—
Closer—
I woke choking on a scream that died in my throat.
My heart slammed against my ribs, too fast, too hard. Sweat soaked through my thin nightgown, cold against my skin. The furs were tangled around my legs like they’d tried to hold me down.
For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was. The room felt alien. Wrong. The shadows in the corners still moved like living things.
Then reality filtered back in pieces.
The crooked window. The slanted ceiling. The familiar creaking of the Healing Center settling in the night wind.
My room. My bed.
Safe.
I pressed a shaking hand over my mouth, forcing my breathing to slow. My hazel eyes caught the moonlight from the window, too wide, too afraid. I looked away from my own reflection in the dark glass. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
It wasn’t real.
The words felt hollow, but I repeated them anyway. A mantra. A lifeline.
It wasn’t real. It never was.
The truth was simpler. Colder. More merciful and more cruel all at once.
My parents had been conscripted to the war, dragged from our home when I was seven years old. They’d marched away with the others, wearing makeshift armor and carrying weapons they barely knew how to hold. Going to fight monsters they had no chance of defeating.
And they’d never come back.
No bodies returned for burial. No letters. No final words or tokens or proof they’d ever reached the battlefield at all.
Just nothing. The silence where they used to be.
The dream was just my mind trying to fill that void, painting in the missing pieces with the worst images it could conjure. My imagination making their deaths real because the not-knowing was somehow worse.
Except—
Except it didn’t feel like imagination.
Felt like a memory. Like something I’d witnessed even though I’d been hundreds of miles away. Like my mind knew, somehow, exactly how they’d died.
Like the truth had carved itself into my dreams and wouldn’t let go.
I curled onto my side, pulling the furs close despite their clammy dampness, and stared at the sliver of moonlight cutting across my floor.
Tomorrow was the Harvest.
Tomorrow, five names would appear in the black book.
And the nightmare—blood and screaming and those glowing eyes—felt far too close.
Like a prophecy.
Like a promise.
Like a warning I should have heeded but never could.
Outside, full darkness settled over Hollowspire like a shroud. The wind picked up, rattling the shutters. In the distance, so faint I might have imagined it, came the sound of wings.
Large wings.
Leathery wings.
Tomorrow, the black book would open.
And my name would be written there, in letters that couldn’t be erased.
