The crows always cawed louder in the mornings.
That's what Nyra believed, anyway. She said it like it was law. "They argue about who gets the best worms," she explained once, standing barefoot in the ash-dusted dirt of her family's field, watching them circle the sky like jagged, black stars. "That's why they're so loud."
She was ten years old, full of strange ideas. Her family didn't mind. In a place like Netheros, being strange meant you hadn't broken yet.
"Nyra! Bread's going hard!"
Her mother's voice drifted from their hut, scorched at the edges by woodsmoke and exhaustion. Nyra blinked up at the clouds, always a sickly red in Netheros and ran back toward the house with arms out like wings, flapping, flapping, flapping.
Inside, the hut was warm in a cramped, smoky kind of way. Two windows. One stove. Three cots. A table made of mismatched wood planks, and a curtain that separated her parents' bed from the rest of the room. Her baby brother, Enric, babbled in the corner while chewing on a wooden spoon.
"There's no bread left," Nyra announced proudly. "I threw it to the crows. They voted, and I picked the winner."
Her mother blinked slowly. "You threw it to...?"
"... They were arguing."
A pause. Then a tired sigh, and the faintest smile tugged at the corners of her mother's mouth. "We'll eat early stew, then."
Nyra grinned. "Victory!"
Later that morning, she helped her father in the garden behind the house, a crooked plot of hardened dirt, half-infested with bonegrass and crawling bloodthistles. They grew pulsepods and root turnips. Enough to live. Never enough to trade.
"Don't touch that one," her father warned, grabbing her wrist before her fingers brushed the red-veined leaves of a demon's tongue plant. "Spits acid when it flowers."
"I wasn't going to touch it," Nyra lied.
Her father gave her a look. He was a tall, gaunt man with broken horns and inked shoulders. Most peasants in Netheros had scars. His told stories Nyra wasn't old enough to hear yet.
"Weren't you supposed to be in class today?" he asked.
"Master Varell said I talked too much."
"Did you?"
"I told him crows have secret names and one of them is pretending to be a god."
Her father snorted. "You talk like your aunt."
Nyra's grin grew. She liked her aunt, Aunt Kessa, with the long ash-hair and missing ear who snuck her candied rotfruit and whispered, "Don't let anyone burn the strange out of you."
The village of Korr-Vira was old and small, pressed into the craggy edge of the wastelands just outside the capital walls. It wasn't on any maps. Most travelers passed it without notice, and that was how the villagers liked it.
They were poor. But not starving. They shared what they had, food, stories, firewood, bruises. Nyra knew everyone's names. She could tell which house was which by the shape of their smoke trails, and which kid was coming just by the sound of footsteps on dirt.
That afternoon, she met her best friend Tyren near the dried-out well behind the blacksmith's hut. He was skinny and fast, with a missing front tooth and a mean throwing arm.
"I found a skull," he announced.
Nyra gasped. "Is it haunted?"
"Obviously."
They named it Lord Bonesworth the Third and gave it a crown made of thornweed. They spent an hour giving it orders, like "Command the winds!" and "Tell us the secrets of the capital!" Then they played war with rocks until Tyren threw one too hard and split his knuckle open.
"I win," Nyra said, dragging him toward Aunt Kessa's house.
He glared at her. "You always win."
"I know," she chirped.
That night, after dinner, her father took out his flute. It was chipped and ugly, carved from bone and wrapped with wire, but it sang like something holy. He only played it when Enric fell asleep and only when the wind wasn't howling too loud.
Nyra curled up on the floor, watching the glow of the hearth paint flickers across the wooden walls. Her mother was sewing. Her father played. Enric snored like a dying bird. Outside, the wind carried dust and whispers and the sound of crows.
She felt warm. Safe. Whole.
"Tell me a story," she whispered, eyes half-shut.
Her mother looked up. "Which one?"
"The one where the stars were seeds."
Her mother smiled. "That's an old one."
"Then it's true," Nyra said, and her mother laughed.
In Korr-Vira, they didn't have much but they had rhythm. Mornings in the fields. Afternoons at the well. Evenings around fire and story. They told legends like lullabies and patched clothes with quiet hums. The air always smelled like smoke, but not the bad kind.
People said that the closer you lived to the capital, Drokh-Tur, the Throne of Red Stone, the more cursed you were. But Nyra didn't believe that. Sure, the royal guards sometimes came and took things without asking. And sometimes strangers passed through on horses with faces hidden behind masks of silver. But they never stayed long.
Korr-Vira was small. Forgotten.
And forgotten was safe.
Until the day the sky cracked.
That morning.
Nyra woke to screams.
Not the normal kind. Not the baby-cried, dog-bit, someone-slipped kind.
These were deep. Wet. The kind that made the air taste like iron.
She blinked the sleep from her eyes and sat up. The hut was shaking. Enric was wailing. Her mother was already by the door with a knife in one hand and a cloth in the other.
"Nyra," she said, not a shout, but a command. "Get under the cot. Stay quiet."
Nyra obeyed.
The door burst open. Her father stumbled in, blood down his chest. Not his.
"Guards," he rasped. "Not tax. Not inspection. Purge."
The word meant nothing to Nyra. It would later.
Outside, fire bloomed.
The hut shook again as hoofbeats thundered past. Screams. Blades. Shouting in royal dialect. Someone begging. Something burning.
She could hear Tyren yelling, not in fear, but in fury. Then a wet sound. Then nothing.
The cot above her shifted. Enric's cries stopped.
Nyra stopped breathing.
The door slammed open again, and a new voice, not her father's, barked something harsh and cruel in a tongue she didn't understand.
The sound of metal against flesh.
Her mother screamed.
Then silence.
Nyra didn't move for hours.
She didn't cry. Not until the fire started eating the house.
And even then, she was quiet about it.
She crawled through ash and bone and splinters. Out the back. Over the wall. Through the thornfields.
She walked until her legs gave out.
Then crawled.
Then walked again.
Eyes hollow. Mouth dry. Blood dried to her skin.
She didn't know how far the mortal realm was. She didn't even know if it was real. It was just a story, a shape on a map that no one in her village had ever seen.
But she walked anyway.
Because there was nothing left behind her but smoke and silence.
And the sound of crows.