Chapter 1 – Ash and Silence
The world had gone quiet.
Not the quiet of peace — but the hollow, suffocating stillness that comes after the last scream dies.
Nara stood at the ridge overlooking what had once been her village. She had been running for what felt like hours, but her lungs forgot the ache the moment she saw the smoke. It billowed in thick black pillars, swallowing the stars and blotting out the moon.
Her legs carried her down the slope without her telling them to move. The grass was still wet with morning dew, but the air was heavy with heat. The closer she came, the more the details emerged through the haze — charred rooftops that still spat embers into the air, walls collapsing inward with sharp groans, the skeletal remains of homes that had once hummed with life.
She crossed the village boundary stone and stepped into a world she no longer recognized.
The smell hit her first. Burnt wood. Scorched flesh. Blood — thick and metallic, clinging to the back of her throat until she gagged. She forced herself forward. Her eyes darted from one ruin to another, searching, desperate.
Her father's house — or what remained of it — still stood in outline, though the roof had caved in. She stepped over broken beams, her bare feet sinking into ash. The hearth room was no longer warm; it was just a blackened pit, dust drifting in lazy spirals where the fire had once crackled.
That was where she found them.
The twins lay side by side, her brother's arm around his sister as though he had tried to shield her from the flames. Their faces were peaceful, as if they had simply fallen asleep, but the soot on their skin told another story.
Nara's knees buckled. She crawled to them, her hands trembling, afraid to touch and even more afraid not to. When her fingers finally rested on their foreheads, the skin was still faintly warm — just enough to break her.
A sound tore from her chest. It was not a scream, nor a sob, but something far more primal — a raw, wounded howl that scraped her throat. It echoed off the empty walls and rose into the smoke, as though the mountains themselves might hear.
She stayed like that for hours — or maybe minutes, she couldn't tell. Her tears dried, leaving her face tight and raw. And somewhere beneath the crushing weight of grief, something else began to take root.
It was small at first. Just a heat, deep in her chest.
By the time she left the house, it had already begun to sharpen into something dangerous.
She didn't have a name for it yet.
But one day, she would.