I heard someone die today.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
Just… quietly.
A breath stopped. A heart didn't start again.
It was an old man who lived near the fields. I'd only seen him once or twice—grey hair, pale skin, face like wrinkled leather. He used to hum as he walked. That's all I remembered.
The village didn't cry for him.
They just buried him in the morning, without a name stone. I watched from a distance, crouched behind a crooked tree. The dirt was still soft when the gravediggers walked away.
Something settled in my chest after that.
A cold thing.
A silent thing.
"Why do people die?" I asked aloud later, sitting on the porch in the shade of the house. The heat of summer clung to my skin like a second layer of clothes.
Solara's voice came first, soft and heavy.
"Because time feeds on life."
Nyssara disagreed. "Because they stop fighting."
Aelira said nothing for a while.
Then finally: "Because even the strongest forget why they wanted to live."
I wasn't sure which was worse.
The world outside the house was growing louder.
Children ran through the mud streets screaming and laughing. Adults shouted about harvests and taxes. Sometimes, there was music at night. Sometimes, there were fights.
But I always felt like I was behind a pane of glass. Watching. Listening. Not quite… belonging.
Other kids looked at me oddly. Not cruelly—just like I was something strange. A story that hadn't been told to them yet.
"They know you're different," Aelira warned one day. "Even if they don't know why."
"They smell it," Nyssara added. "Power doesn't hide. It leaks."
"I'm not doing anything," I argued.
"Exactly," Solara said. "That's what makes them nervous."
I began to experiment again.
But this time, not just with energy.
I started asking questions.
Real ones.
To my parents, the village healer, the old man with no teeth who always sat by the well.
"What's beyond the forest?"
"Why do animals obey the hunters but not the priests?"
"What happens if a spirit eats another spirit?"
"What makes a person real?"
They gave me confused looks.
Sometimes fear.
Sometimes frustration.
Mostly dismissal.
So I asked my spirits instead.
"Spirits can consume each other," Nyssara admitted one evening. We were in my room. Candlelight flickered across the walls, casting warped shadows. She leaned back against nothing, her arms crossed like usual.
"But only when one forgets who they are," she added. "We call it devouring. Most don't survive it. The ones who do? They stop being 'spirits' and become something else entirely."
"What do they become?" I asked.
She just smiled.
"Wrong."
My control had improved.
Not just in summoning or aura, but in will.
By now, I could float small stones for minutes at a time.
I could light a candle in two heartbeats.
I could force my body to run even when my legs screamed to stop.
Father began training me more seriously—not because I asked, but because he saw something changing. He didn't say it, but I saw it in his eyes.
Fear.
Maybe awe.
He showed me how to fight with wooden blades. How to fall without snapping my neck. How to breathe before swinging and how to listen for footsteps in silence.
But he never asked about the spirits.
He didn't need to.
He knew.
One day, I followed a fox into the woods.
I don't know why.
It looked at me once—eyes glowing, red as coals—and darted between the trees. I chased it without thinking, my feet moving on instinct.
Aelira yelled at me to stop.
Solara begged me to wait.
Nyssara just watched.
But I didn't stop.
I had to see where it was going.
I ran until the world changed.
The trees were different here—older, twisted. The air smelled like iron and ash. The fox stopped near a pool of black water and turned.
It was no fox.
It was something else.
Eyes like a dozen mirrors. Fur like smoke. Its mouth opened and—
I blacked out.
When I woke, my skin was cold, and my chest burned like fire.
My spirits were around me, panicked.
Aelira's voice trembled as she wrapped light around my heart. Solara was whispering words I didn't understand. Nyssara stood guard, sword drawn, facing the empty woods.
"There are things in this world," she said grimly, "that even we don't understand."
"What was it?" I croaked.
"A warning," Solara said.
"A test," Aelira added.
"A door," Nyssara whispered.
That night, I dreamed of stars that bled. Of books written in bone. Of a throne with no king.
And in the dream, something spoke to me.
Not in words.
In meaning.
It asked me:
"Will you remember who you are when nothing else does?"
I didn't answer.
I just stared back.
And in the silence, I felt it smile.
When I woke, I felt something different.
A thread in my chest.
Tied to something far away.
Something waiting.
I didn't tell my spirits.
Not yet.