Chapter 2 -The Hunt Begins
Rian's breath came in shallow, hot bursts. Around him, the forest seemed to press closer, branches hissing like teeth. The villagers stared from the tree line as if they had seen a ghost — or worse, an omen. Fear made their faces hard and small.
"Stay away from him!" cried old Mara, the baker's wife, her voice brittle with righteous panic. "He's touched by the star. Take him to the pyre!"
A child began to wail. Someone whispered a prayer in a language that had no mercy left in its syllables.
Rian pushed himself up. For a moment, he wanted to deny it all. Smile, speak normal, explain that he'd merely fallen into the clearing and fainted. But when he lifted his shirt, the sight of the pale sigil seared across his chest took his breath away.
The mark was thin and black as a scar, but it was alive — a pattern of interlocking runes that pulsed faintly with the same cadence as the star. He had not seen it before the dream-vision. He had not known he could have such a thing.
Mara's eyes widened, and she stepped forward as if to clutch him. "The Ashborne sigil," she hissed. "The nameless stain. Burn it!"
"Don't touch him!" someone shouted. A lantern bobbed at the edge of the trees. Its light revealed another figure: a man garbed in the brown-and-amber cloak of Dustford's militia. He was young, with a jaw too sharp for gentle things and a spear that looked as if it had tasted battle. Beside him appeared two more — one with a hunting knife, another with a crossbow.
"Back away," the militia captain ordered. He looked at Rian like a question with teeth. "Did you touch the star, boy?"
Rian remembered the voice — the Sovereign's final echo: Awaken, Rian Ashborne. The memory of being kneeling before an impossible throne still burned in him like coal under skin.
"I—" he tried to speak. A choked sound escaped.
"Bind him!" roared an angry voice from the crowd. Fear made even the meek cruel. A man stepped forward with ropes. The villagers closed in, their faces hard as stones, their eyes hungry for meaning. In Dustford, an explanation for misfortune was a comfort; if blame could be placed, the heart could sleep.
Rian didn't wait to be taken. He had no idea where the urge had come from—some animal memory, some ruinous instinct—but his legs moved. He pushed past Mara, outran the ropes, and plunged deeper into the forest.
Branches clawed his skin. Thorns ripped the hem of his shirt. He tasted copper on his tongue. Behind him, shouts rose, angry and frantic. Lanterns flared like tiny suns, bobbing after him through the trees.
He ran until the trees thinned and the ground sloped downhill. There, in a small ravine, the air changed. A damp, mossy smell rose to meet him. Rian slid down the bank and fell against a flat stone, chest heaving. He pressed his palms to his ribs where the sigil glowed beneath skin, and felt a hum under his fingers — neither good nor bad, simply ancient and dangerous.
Then he heard a sound that stopped his breath like a hand clamped to his mouth: the steady, deliberate footsteps of someone who owned the forest.
A figure emerged onto the ridge above him, silhouetted against the dim sky. Not one of the Dustford militia. Taller. Cloaked in leather and ash. A hood shadowed their face. A single, pale braid fell over their shoulder like a rope of moonlight.
"Stop," the figure said. The voice was calm, and it traveled to Rian like a rope thrown across a river.
Rian wanted to bolt. He wanted to flee further; the instinct to hide was louder than any rationale. But when he glanced up and saw the figure's hand — callused, steady, a band of silver caught at the wrist — something in him eased. The fear didn't go. But the panic thinned.
"You shouldn't have taken it," the figure said. Not accusing, more like a tired whisper of caution. "Not yet."
"How do you know?" Rian rasped. His voice sounded small in the ravine.
The figure's hood tilted slightly. Under it, a face that was not old but bore the kind of lines folded by life and decisions. Angular cheekbones. Eyes the color of river stone.
"You carry the Ashborn sigil," the figure said. "The Nameless Heir's mark. The star picks its vessels and not always by consent."
Rian's mind churned. He had never seen this person. Yet the way they spoke put memories at the edge of his tongue — memories from the dream-sky where the Sovereign's voice used names with soft authority.
"Who are you?" Rian asked.
"Name's Lyra," she replied. "Scout of the Grey Line."
He had heard of the Grey Line — a rumor whispered among children and drunk men in Dustford's tavern: watchers who kept the roads; secretive hunters of things that crawled out of the wild at night. People said Grey Liners were mercenaries, sometimes heroes. Sometimes monsters. The truth, as with most truths, was somewhere in the gray between rumor and legend.
"You come with them?" Rian asked, nodding toward the pursuing lights.
Lyra smirked, but it didn't reach her eyes. "They're local militia. Quick mind, slow steel. They'll chase for a bit, but they won't follow where the forest wages its own judgments. If they catch you, they'll burn the mark and think they fixed a problem. But ashes remember, boy. Ashes remember better than men."
Rian studied her. The forest at her back seemed to bow — leaves quivering like a salute. Lyra looked like someone who belonged to the wild and yet did not fear civilization's scorn.
"Why help me?" he murmured.
Lyra's expression changed in the space of a heartbeat, becoming softer but not kind. "Because I smelled the star before the village ever noticed. Because we Grey Liners have rules: never let the ignorant destroy a thing they don't understand. And because if the Ashborne sigil flares, the wrong kind of hunters will come. Ones that will take, not burn."
She moved closer. Rian could see a faint scar tracing from her temple to her jaw, like a lightning strike frozen under skin.
"How can I trust you?" he asked. Trust was a fragile coin.
"You shouldn't," she said simply. "You can start by keeping up." She extended a hand. "Come."
Rian took it.
They moved in silence until the lanterns were distant sparks and the forest opened into a narrow road that led away from Dustford. Lyra didn't talk of the Sovereign or the star. Instead she asked simple things — his name, his age, which band of the village he belonged to. Rian said little, mostly shook his head. He had no answers he trusted.
"Why me?" he asked at last. "If the Sovereign said I… was an heir… why was I born a boy in Dustford?"
Lyra looked at the sky; the crimson star was a dull smear of sorrow above the horizon.
"Sometimes the cosmos forgets pieces of itself," she said. "Sometimes power is scattered like seeds in the wind. Sometimes, a seed grows where it shouldn't. The Nameless Star was a kind of empire once — not of people, but of rules. Its heirs were meant to hold pieces of a will so strong it remade worlds. The Sovereign was not a single man. It was a design. The Falling left fragments. You are one."
Rian's palms tightened. "It said I ruled... beside it."
She snorted softly. "Words like that can be as much temptation as truth. There are those who hear the echo of grandeur and become tyrants overnight. There are those who hear and become priests of oblivion. Both are dangerous. What matters is what you choose with it."
They traveled until the road forked and the trees thinned. There, half-hidden in a copse of blackthorn, stood a small building that looked older than Dustford and lonelier than the moon. A sign hung crooked above the door: a lantern over a crossed spear. A Grey Line outpost.
Lyra eased the door open and ushered Rian inside. The room smelled of oil and old fire. Shelves lined with maps, jars of herbs, and a dull array of weapons greeted them. A woman sat at a table with a stack of papers, her hair braided tight, her hands stained with ink. She looked up as they entered, eyes assessing, then softened.
"Lyra," she said. "You brought him."
Lyra bowed her head slightly. "Found him fleeing Dustford. Ashborne sigil. Burn mark too fresh to have been forged."
The woman's face folded into a smile that did not reach her eyes. "Bring him here. Seal the door."
Rian felt a shiver. The room grew quieter, as if every object was listening. The woman came closer. Her fingers were quick as water, and when she touched Rian's chest where the sigil still pulsed faintly, he flinched.
"You feel it?" she asked.
He nodded. The hum under his skin was now like a second heartbeat.
"All right," she said. "We'll do what we can. But be warned: once a mark flares, it draws things. Not merely militia, but the Wards. And worse—Collectors. The Great Houses will sniff a lost heir from half the continent. You might have eaten bread at Dustford's table, boy, but soon you will dine with men who set nations on fire."
Rian wanted to be frightened. Part of him was. But the Sovereign's voice had changed something inside his chest; an ember lodged beneath skin that refused to be smothered by fear. It felt like possibility—narrow, dangerous, and shining.
"Do you remember anything?" the woman asked.
Rian thought of the throne of starlight. The Sovereign kneeling before him. The runes sinking into his chest. The vision had been a storm — fleeting images and strong sensations without easy meaning.
"I saw… pieces," he said. "A throne. Orders. A crown. It felt like power and like loneliness."
The woman—who introduced herself as Kest, Keeper of the Outpost—folded her hands. "Many foundlings will have tales like that. Some are lies, some are dreams, many are truths twisted by the mind. But the mark is real, and the star's pulse is real. For now, you will rest. You will learn. And then you will decide."
Lyra perched on a stool, chin in hand. "There's one other thing," she said. She hesitated, then reached into the pouch at her belt and pulled out a scrap of metal no longer than her thumb. It was a sliver of darkened iron etched with a sigil similar to the one on Rian's chest.
"This was found near the crater five nights ago," Kest said. "It came from the same meteor. The Grey Line keeps such things for study—if not for reverence. We think pieces of the Nameless Star litter the land. Pieces carry memory. They wake things."
Rian stared at the sliver. In its dark curve he saw, for the barest second, a flash of the Sovereign's crown and then his own face reflected in it, older and lined with both command and regret.
He swallowed.
"What do you want from me?" he asked, not for the first time.
Kest looked at him as if weighing something heavy. "To survive," she said. "To learn. To keep the mark from destroying you and everything you love. And, if you can, to find out why the Nameless Star fell. If we do not learn, the world will pay the cost."
Outside, the faint sound of the militia's shouts had dwindled to murmur and then to nothing at all. The night settled like dust. Rian sat in the dim light of the outpost, hands folded, the sigil glowing beneath his skin like a sleeping thing that had been woken too early.
He thought of the Sovereign's voice—gentle, vast, insistent—and the memory of kneeling before a throne made of stars. He thought of Dustford's faces, of fire-light and accusation, of the kitchen where his mother had coughed and of a father who had vanished into the northern wastes.
He looked up at Lyra and Kest.
"We begin in the morning," Kest said. "At dawn, you will learn what the Grey Line calls the Ashen Path. You will be taught to read the sigil, to feel the pulse, and to hold it. Then the decision will come: will you run and hide, or will you walk and learn what it is that chose you?"
Rian's chest tightened in a way that was almost like hope. He closed his eyes, and the Sovereign's final whisper threaded through his thoughts once more, faint as smoke and twice as stubborn.
"Awaken, Rian Ashborne. Awaken, the Lost Heir."
He did not know whether that awakening meant power or ruin. But for the first time in his life, something inside him answered back.
"Awake," he whispered, to himself and to the star and to the ruins of a throne he had never had the chance to climb. "I will learn."
Outside, the Nameless Star pulsed once, slow and patient, as if approving the beginning of a dangerous bargain.
And far away, beyond the reach of the outpost's crooked walls, something listened
To be continued