Mira woke to the smell of oil and sea salt, the two scents braided together so tightly they felt like home. The bench beside her was a forest of tiny tools and spare gears; Old Mirek's clock dominated the space, its brass face catching slanting light like a patient eye. For a long, slow moment she lay there listening to its tick steady, indifferent while her head remembered only the last stretch of fever: a head full of dust, a mouth full of metallic tang, a dream of fur and iron teeth.
Lysa's small hand found her sleeve. "Mira?" Her voice was that mixture of relief and accusation younger sisters perfected. "You were out cold. Mirek almost called the healer."
"I'm fine." Mira forced the words because the alternative felt expensive, like debt she could not afford. She reached up and froze. The leather strap she used to protect her wrist from hot metal felt oddly warm beneath her fingers. When she peeled it back there was a narrow ridge of raised skin, a jagged line like a thorn pressed into flesh. It was darker than the rest of her skin, as if a shadow had been sewn into her.
She blinked at it, at the skin that did not belong to any burn or scrape she could remember earning. For one ridiculous second she tried to treat it like a stubborn stain something you would scrub and it would go away. The mark did not cooperate. The skin under her thumb pulsed, faint and insistent, as if something beneath had taken a breath.
"Does it hurt?" Lysa asked, quiet now.
"A little," Mira said. It was true enough. A wash of heat rolled from wrist to elbow; it felt less like pain and more like a message you received in the marrow. She tightened her fingers until knuckles whitened. Outside, a gull made its flat keening sound against the cliffs and something lower answered a long, resonant note that was not bird and not human.
Old Mirek drifted in wiping his hands on a rag. He was a man who measured time in gears and temper, whose face had been mapped by sun and smoke. He saw the mark and his expression closed, as if someone had snapped a lid on his mouth. For a craftsman who loved to name everything that moved, silence was an omen.
"Where did you touch anything with carving?" he asked, simple and direct.
"I didn't touch anything," Mira said. The lie felt small and clean tucked in her mouth, but in the same breath she pictured the market stall a trunk of carved things, glass eyes, a thing that had fit in her hand and thrummed like an insect when she'd brushed it. She'd reached to see. Only curiosity. Only that.
Mirek's fingers shook a little as he sat. "There are old things in the world," he said. "Things that remember bargains." He looked at her like someone who had once swallowed something too bitter to forgive. "Marks find the chosen in ways we do not understand. Sometimes gifts. Sometimes debts."
"Debts to who? A fox?" Mira scoffed, because scoffing was easier than listening to the scraping under her skin. Greyhaven traded in nets and salt and gossip, not prophecies. Mirek's words sat on the bench between them like a tool that did not belong in the shop.
"You're stubborn," Lysa said, half-teasing, half-fearful. "You always are."
Stubborn. It had been useful the way she could hold an awkward part for longer than someone else, the way her hands learned machinery when tongues could not explain it. She liked the practical tidy world of gears where every problem had a calibratable answer. This thorn of flesh was neither practical nor tidy.
Mirek reached as if to touch the mark and then stopped. His hands, which could coax a gear into smoother motion than a new tongue, hovered above her skin and retreated. The motion made something cold scrape along her spine.
"Let it be," he said at last. "The fever can make a woman see things. If the mark is anything, let it reveal itself in its own time." He folded his rag with unnecessary care. "And do not let anyone carve it or press at it. Old carvings are cleverer than they seem."
"Let it be until what?" Mira asked. The question tasted foolish. "Until it blooms?"
Mirek only shook his head. "Until it tells you what it wants. Or until someone else notices."
"Someone else," Lysa repeated. Her voice dropped; the word sat larger than either of them. "Like the magistrate?"
Mirek laughed without humor. "The magistrate notices coin and reputation. He does not notice things he cannot sell. Worry about your own strength first." He stood, the motion a dismissal that left a weight in the room.
She wrapped the scrap of leather back around the thorn, tying it with clumsy knots that somehow steadied her. The band felt absurd and useful both, like armor made of spare cloth. Outside the market had started, and the town woke with its familiar noises: calls for fish, the metallic ring of a hammer, a cart's creak measured against the tide. The sound gave her courage — the small predictable things of a town that hadn't noticed its old bargains for a long time.
Mira walked because she always walked when her thoughts were too loud. The quay was a broken braid of rope and posted signs, salt caked where rain had met wind. Dogs paused at her approach and sniffed the air with a seriousness she had never seen in them. One mongrel's hackle rose and it dropped its tail between its legs as if a polite animal had learned fear in five heartbeats. A fishmonger dropped a crate of mackerel when his dog began to snarl at nothing. Superstitions moved like a current beneath the market noise, and people looked at Mira with the same tilt reserved for news they'd rather not hear.
By noon the pull in her wrist had a direction. It was nothing you could measure on a map, more a tug at the edges of her sense as if someone had taken a string tied to her sternum and eased it north. She found herself at the cliff, because when you live in a coastal town you get used to going to edges to think. The Thornwild lay beyond the ragged stone — old trees knuckled together like a closed fist. The air over the cliff tasted of iron and rain-slick moss. Somewhere beneath the hush of gulls and surf something moved, vast and deliberate.
At first she thought it was wind, then shadow. It resolved into a shape on the ridgeline — a silhouette bigger than any animal she had seen, and where eyes should be there were two coins of gold catching light. For a breath she thought it impossible; the mind does that when the world provides a thing it has no room for in memory.
Her skin tightened. The mark flared hot as a bell; she clenched her jaw and felt, absurdly, that the thing on the ridge had noticed the flare. The call that rolled down to her was not a sound of voice but a pressure in her skull, a thought like a gloved hand. A name slipped into her chest like an arrow: Kael. With it came a picture — a crown that was fur and fang, a history that smelled of iron and sacrifice. It was not her memory. It was something older and worn and ready.
Mira wanted to run. She wanted to sprint the rough path and dive into the market where noise and commerce would drown out omen and insect. Instead she stood hands deep in the pockets of her work apron, wind combing her hair into ropes. The thing on the ridge dropped like a shadow and then — impossibly — became motion: a monstrous fall against stone, then landing below with the sound of weather. It moved on two legs, then slowed, then straightened into a man carved of muscle and animal.
He stepped from cliff into path like a storm folding into speech. When he spoke his voice came as a rasp that scattered grains of stone. "You bear the thorn," the man said. His eyes were not human gold so much as metal hammered bright. "You wound that wakes the old laws."
Her first response was stubbornness — the same quick grit that had fixed more than one broken gear. "I'm not some prophecy," she said, and the words came out brave enough that the gulls might have believed it.
His mouth twitched. "No one asks to be the answer." He studied her as if weighing a coin. Up close the man Kael was terrible and beautiful. There was a worn kingliness to him, something that had been shaped by long winters and hard bargains. He smelled of fur and smoke and a small, terrible sweetness like blood and honey.
"Why me?" Her voice was small. It mattered less than the question itself. The strip of skin with the thorn hummed beneath his regard.
"Because you are marked," he said simply. "Because the thorn chooses and the old debt remembers its name. Step away from the town, girl of gears. The bargain claws the unready."
Below, Greyhaven argued with its ordinary day. Above, the world recognized an old hunger. Between the two Mira felt her life tilt in a way that was neither before nor after but the fine seam between: whether she would be the one who stitched old laws closed or the one who cut them open.
She did not know, yet, which was the better role.
She took one small step back instinct, fear, maybe defiance and that was when it happened.
The mark beneath her leather band burned.
Not warm, not pulsing burned, a searing white-hot line that forced a gasp from her throat. She clutched her wrist, stumbling.
Kael's head snapped up.
His pupils narrowed to slits.
"Mira," he growled, voice suddenly feral. "Don't move."
Before she could ask why, the wind changed direction.
The gulls scattered into the sky all at once.
The cliff shadows twisted, thickening—almost alive.
And then something crawled out of the Thornwild behind her.
A low, guttural snarl vibrated through the stone beneath her feet, followed by the scrape of claws on rock.
Mira froze.
Kael didn't.
In a single breath, the Beast King surged forward, his human form tearing at its edges as golden light erupted in his eyes.
"MOVE!" he roared
But the creature was already leaping