The silence that crashed down upon Oakhaven's festival square was a physical weight, pressing the breath from lungs, heavy with the unspoken terror that had bloomed in the wake of impossible light. Lucian lowered his hand, the one that still hummed with a phantom energy, his own breathing shallow and ragged. Around him, the cheerful, bobbing lanterns, moments before symbols of communal joy, now seemed to cast accusatory, flickering shadows on the faces of his friends and neighbours. Their festive colours looked garish and mocking against the backdrop of stark, collective shock.
Mary, was the first to break the spell, her voice a trembling whisper that barely carried in the sudden stillness. "Lucian…? Gods, Lucian… what…?" Her eyes, usually sparkling with good-natured humour, were wide and dark, fixed not on the empty space where the shadowy Dread Hound had vanished, but on him. On his hand, still held slightly aloft as if he himself couldn't quite believe what it had done.
He tried to summon a reassuring smile, the kind that usually crinkled the corners of his eyes, the one that could coax a laugh from the sternest villager or charm an extra honeycake from Old Man Hemlock. The expression felt like a painful grimace, a rictus of normalcy stretched too thin over a chasm of bewilderment. "Just a… a bit of a scare, everyone," he managed, his voice sounding hoarse and unfamiliar to his own ears. "Everyone alright? Timmy? Are you hurt?"
Young Timmy, who had been the focus of the Dread Hound's terrifying advance, was now being clutched tightly by his mother, Martha. She stared at Lucian, not with the relief he might have expected, but with an expression of raw, undiluted horror that twisted her usually kind features. "Stay away from him, Timmy," she breathed, her voice tight with fear as she physically pulled her son further behind her, as if Lucian himself were the monster.
The quiet words, sharper than any shout, struck Lucian like a physical blow. He opened his mouth, a denial, an explanation, anything, forming on his tongue, then closed it again. What could he possibly say? That he had no more understanding of how or why than they did? That the power that had saved Timmy now felt like a terrifying, alien presence coiled within him?
The village elders, their faces grim, were already pushing through the stunned, slowly retreating crowd. Elder Maeve, her weathered face a roadmap of Oakhaven's joys and sorrows, her silver hair pulled back in a tight bun, led the way. Beside her, Goodman Thistle, the portly, usually jovial head of the village council, looked uncharacteristically pale, his customary booming voice reduced to a strained rasp.
"Lucian," Goodman Thistle began, his gaze flicking from Lucian to the scorched patch of cobblestones where the Dread Hound had briefly stood, then back to the boy, his eyes filled with a fearful confusion. "What in the Weave's name… what was that display?"
"I… I don't know, Goodman Thistle," Lucian confessed, the admission feeling desperately inadequate, hollow even to his own ears. He gestured vaguely with his still-tingling hand. "The creature… it lunged. I just… reacted." He looked down at his hands, half-expecting them to glow again, to betray him further. They looked perfectly ordinary, smudged with the remnants of honeycake, yet they felt like foreign objects, capable of unleashing chaos.
Elder Maeve's gaze, ancient and sharp as a hawk's, was unsettling. It seemed to pierce right through his carefully constructed composure. "That was no ordinary reaction, boy," she stated, her voice low but carrying a chilling certainty. "That was… something else. Something not of this village." Her eyes, too, flicked to the faint, lingering scent of ozone that still pricked the air, a ghostly reminder of the unnatural energy that had been unleashed.
The festival was undeniably over. The fiddler had long since packed away his instrument, his merry tunes replaced by the uneasy murmur of hushed, urgent voices. People were already retreating, lanterns swaying forgotten in their haste, their warm glow unable to dispel the sudden, icy fear that had gripped Oakhaven. They weren't just scared of the memory of the Dread Hound anymore. They were scared of Lucian.
The days that followed were the longest, most isolating of Lucian's young life. Oakhaven, his home, the place where he knew every crooked stone in the pathways, every creak of the old mill wheel, every smiling face, transformed before his eyes into a landscape of averted gazes and sudden, pointed silences. His easy charm, the quick wit and infectious laughter that had always drawn people to him, now seemed to act as a repellent, creating a wider, more awkward gulf between him and those he had grown up alongside.
He'd try a friendly greeting in the square, and conversations would halt abruptly, faces becoming carefully blank, eyes sliding away to fix on some distant, uninteresting point. Children who once clamoured for his boisterous games and fantastical stories now peeked from behind their mothers' skirts, their eyes wide with a fearful curiosity that stung more than outright hostility. His comfortable life had unravelled, leaving him adrift in a sea of unspoken suspicion.
He spent countless hours in the small, familiar room he shared with his younger siblings above their parents' bustling bakery, the comforting aroma of yeast and warm bread now failing to soothe the knot of anxiety in his stomach. He'd lie on his narrow cot, tracing the familiar patterns of knots and whorls in the wooden ceiling, his mind replaying that explosive, terrifying moment in the square a thousand times. The colours – the fierce ruby, the blinding topaz, the fleeting sparks of emerald and azure. The feeling – that overwhelming, uncontrollable surge of emotion, a terrifying tempest of fear and courage and a desperate, primal need to protect, that had preceded the impossible light.
Once, staring in frustration at the flickering flame of a tallow candle in the deepening twilight, he'd felt a similar, though much fainter, build-up of pressure inside him, a strange resonance humming beneath his skin. His fingertips had prickled with an almost painful intensity, and for a terrifying, heart-stopping second, he thought the candle flame had flared with an unnatural, vibrant blue before he'd managed to clamp down hard on the feeling, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He didn't dare try to replicate it again. The memory of the villagers' horrified faces was too fresh, too raw. He was afraid of what else might erupt from him, unbidden and uncontrolled.
His parents, bless them, did their best. His mother, her face etched with a worry that aged her overnight, would offer him strained, watery smiles and plates of his favourite pastries, her touch gentle but hesitant. His father, a man of few words but deep affections, would gruffly defend him against the worst of the village gossip that inevitably reached their ears, his voice louder and more belligerent than usual. But even their steadfast reassurance was tinged with an unspoken anxiety, a fearful uncertainty that Lucian saw reflected in their eyes whenever they looked at him for too long. He was their son, yes, but he was also… something else. Something they didn't understand.
The village council had met, of course, in a hushed, emergency session in the small, stuffy room above the cooperage. Lucian wasn't privy to their discussions, but the solemn, troubled looks he received from Goodman Thistle and the other elders whenever he chanced upon them told him enough. He was a problem, an unknown, dangerous quantity in their orderly, predictable world. A disruption to the quiet rhythms of Oakhaven life.
On the third day after the disastrous festival, as a grey, melancholic afternoon bled into another uneasy Veilfall, Lucian found himself sitting on the old, weathered stone bench at the edge of the village, overlooking the now-abandoned festival square. The skeletal wooden frames of the lantern stands stood stark and forlorn against the bruised twilight sky, like the bones of some great, forgotten beast. The air was still and heavy, the usual cheerful sounds of Oakhaven replaced by a subdued, watchful quiet that frayed his nerves. He felt a profound, aching loneliness, a deep yearning for the simple, uncomplicated belonging he had always taken for granted, a belonging that now felt irrevocably lost.
A flicker of movement at the very edge of his vision, where the Aethelgard road began its winding ascent into the low hills, caught his eye. Figures on horseback. Not local traders, he knew their ambling gaits and mismatched ponies. These riders were different. Their silhouettes were too sharp, too uniform against the fading light. Four of them, moving with a disciplined precision that was utterly foreign to the easy-going pace of Oakhaven. They wore dark, functional cloaks that billowed slightly in the evening breeze, and even from this distance, Lucian could sense an air of quiet, unyielding purpose about them that sent a shiver of unease down his spine.
They rode at a steady, unhurried pace, not like travellers weary from a long and arduous journey, but like people arriving at a known, predetermined destination. As they drew closer, the last vestiges of the dying sunlight glinted off something metallic at their belts – buckles, or perhaps the hilts of weapons.
A cold knot tightened in Lucian's stomach, a premonition as sharp and chilling as the memory of the Dread Hound's snarl. These weren't merchants. These weren't wandering entertainers or pilgrims passing through. These were strangers of a different, more formidable sort altogether, and he had a sudden, chilling certainty that their arrival had everything, absolutely everything, to do with the impossible, terrifying light that had exploded from his hand three nights ago. The fearful whispers of Oakhaven, it seemed, had carried far beyond the sheltered confines of the valley, out into a wider, more complicated world he was only just beginning to realise existed.