In the weeks after the attack, the city learned a new kind of silence.
It was not the peaceful quiet of early mornings or drifting snowfall. It was a stunned hush that followed catastrophe, when even the air seemed to move carefully. Streets that once hummed with easy chatter became corridors of murmured voices and shuttered windows.
The warped contractors had carved a wound through the heart of the district. Entire blocks bore the scars. Splintered doors. Cracked stone. Dark stains scrubbed obsessively from pavement but never fully erased from memory. People walked faster past those places, eyes fixed ahead.
The authorities responded with swift, visible force. Patrols doubled. Contractors in official colors moved through the streets with tense vigilance. Rumors spread faster than facts. Some said hundreds of lives had been taken by the warping. Others claimed it was only a few dozen.
The truth lay somewhere in between and changed depending on who told it.
Only a few of the warped were captured alive.
Those who survived were imprisoned under heavy guard, sealed away in facilities most citizens would never see. Their names circulated in whispers. Neighbors who had once shared meals and festivals were suddenly spoken of like distant storms. Families of the imprisoned lived under a quiet shadow, caught between relief and shame.
The rest were not so fortunate.
Memorials appeared across the city. Flowers gathered at corners. Candles flickered in windows at night. Grief became communal, a tide that rose and fell through many households.
No family escaped untouched. Even those who lost no one carried the fear of how close the violence had come.
In spite of it all, life resumed.
Because it always did.
Markets reopened. Children returned to school. Laughter cautiously threaded its way back into public squares. But beneath the surface, the city had changed. Trust frayed at the edges. Strangers studied one another a heartbeat longer. Every raised voice drew flinches. Every sudden noise sent pulses of unease through crowded rooms.
The attack became a marker in conversation.
Before the warping. After the warping.
The city rebuilt its walls and routines with determined hands. Yet in quiet moments, when dusk softened the streets and shadows lengthened, the memory of that night lingered like a bruise pressed gently but persistently.
It was into this altered city that the years carried Freya forward.
Grief did not leave.
It did not explode or fade or transform into something noble. It settled.
It settled into the walls of the house, into the rhythm of footsteps and the spaces between words. It became a second atmosphere Freya learned to breathe.
The first year passed in fragments.
Freya marked time by anniversaries she never spoke about. The first winter without her mother's voice drifting through the kitchen. The first spring where the rooftop felt too wide and empty. The first birthday where the extra plate stayed in the cupboard.
Her father aged in quiet ways. Fine lines carved themselves around his mouth. He worked longer hours, not out of ambition but avoidance. When he was home, he moved gentler, as if afraid of disturbing something fragile.
They loved each other fiercely. That much never changed. But their conversations grew careful. Each avoided the subject orbiting both their thoughts. Her mother's name became a sacred object neither knew how to hold without breaking.
Freya filled the silence with routine.
School. Homework. Sketching.
The nightmares came less often after the first few months, but they never vanished. They lingered like storms beyond the horizon. Some nights she slept deeply. Others she woke choking on phantom screams, charcoal pencils already in hand before she was fully conscious.
Her sketchbooks multiplied.
At first she drew to survive the nights. Later she drew to understand the days. Classrooms, stairwells, strangers on buses. She captured the city obsessively, as if afraid it might disappear if she did not pin it to paper.
Inky was always nearby.
It remained silent, an unmoving constant in a life that felt permanently tilted. Sometimes she caught Inky watching her with a weird ancient intensity. The sight stirred complicated emotions she pushed down and locked away.
She forgave her cat in the way children forgive things they cannot afford to hate.
But forgiveness did not erase the scar. It simply built a bridge over it.
By the time Freya turned ten, the city had mostly healed. Most shops had reopened. Laughter boomed louder the square. New children played where she once had.
She never joined them.
She still met her old friends, but something fundamental had shifted. They talked about games and rumors and small adventures. Freya listened, smiled when appropriate, and felt a quiet distance stretching between them.
They had moved on in the way most children do.
She still had not.
On the anniversary of her mother's death, Freya woke before dawn. The date pulsed in her mind like a second heartbeat. She dressed quietly and slipped from the house.
The cemetery greeted her with mist and pale light. She knelt before the grave, sketchbook in hand.
"I'm still drawing," she murmured. "You were right. It helps."
Her voice sounded older than she remembered.
She sketched the headstone carefully. Every curve of carved stone. Every shadow pooled at its base. When she finished, she rested her hand against the cool surface.
"I miss you," she whispered.
The words felt inadequate. They always did.
The years layered themselves gently after that.
At eleven, Freya learned how to smile without feeling guilty. The first time she laughed freely with friends, the sound startled her. It felt like betrayal. She went to the cemetery that evening and confessed the moment in a rush, half expecting reprimand from the silent stone.
None ever came.
At twelve, she realized her memories of her mother were beginning to blur at the edges. Panic gripped her chest. She spent weeks drawing from memory. Her mother's hands. The curve of her smile. The way she leaned over the kitchen table.
Each sketch was an act of defiance against forgetting.
Her father watched these rituals with quiet understanding. He never tried to stop her visits to the cemetery. Sometimes he joined her, standing a respectful distance away. They shared grief the way they shared space. Close enough to feel the warmth, careful not to intrude.
The family grew around the absence instead of filling it.
By thirteen, Freya had changed in ways strangers would not notice but those who remembered her childhood felt immediately.
The reckless energy that once propelled her across canals had condensed into something sharper. She still climbed rooftops, still sought high places and open air. But she measured distances more carefully. She thought before she leapt.
Her teachers described her as focused. Observant. Mature for her age.
They did not see the nights she spent staring at the ceiling, tracing old fears with steady breaths. They did not see the way crowded rooms tightened her chest or how sudden loud noises snapped her back into that frozen instant years ago.
She learned to hide those reactions. To fold them inward and continue moving.
Strength, she decided, was not the absence of fear. It was motion in spite of it.
Inky never aged, or at least there weren't any visible signs.
It remained the same small black shape that had followed her since childhood. Other contracts she saw in passing had evolved, grew more expressive, more intertwined with their humans. Her cat remained distant, a silent witness to her transformation.
Sometimes she spoke to Inky in the privacy of her room.
Not accusations. Not anymore. Just observations. Fragments of her day. It never responded. Yet the act of speaking eased a pressure she could not name.
On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, Freya returned from the cemetery later than usual. The sky burned orange at the horizon. She found her father waiting at the kitchen table, hands folded around a mug gone cold.
Something in his posture stilled her.
"Sit," he said gently.
She obeyed, setting her sketchbook down. The air between them hummed with unspoken weight.
"You're almost fifteen," he began. "I've been thinking about what comes next for you. About the future."
Freya's pulse quickened. The word future felt enormous.
"I made some inquiries," he continued. "About opportunities in the capital. About Solace academy."
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Freya stared at him. For a moment she was eight again, standing on a rooftop with charcoal stained fingers and impossible dreams. The memory overlapped with the present, dizzying.
"You… arranged something?" she asked softly.
"I started the process," he said. "Nothing is final. It would be your choice. But I believe you deserve a chance to become more than this city can offer. More than grief has allowed you to be."
His voice trembled on the last words.
Freya looked down at her hands. They were steady. That surprised her. Inside, emotions collided. Fear. Excitement. Guilt. Hope.
The academy had always existed in the distance. A star she glanced at but never truly expected to reach. Now it stood close enough to touch.
"I don't want to leave you," she said.
A shadow crossed his face. Then he smiled, fragile but sincere.
"You wouldn't be leaving me," he replied. "You'd be carrying us forward. Your mother would have wanted that."
Her throat tightened.
The cat watched from the doorway, eyes reflecting the dim light. Freya met its gaze for a fleeting second. Something unreadable flickered there.
She turned back to her father.
"I'm scared," she admitted.
"I know," he said. "So am I."
They sat in shared silence, the weight of the decision settling around them. Outside, the city murmured with ordinary life. Inside, the future unfolded quietly.
Freya reached for her sketchbook and opened it to a blank page. Her hand hovered, then began to move. She sketched the kitchen table. Her father's hands wrapped around the cup. The space between them filled with possibility.
When she finished, she looked up.
"I want to try," she said.
The words felt like a step taken at the edge of something vast.
Her father's shoulders sagged with relief and pride. He reached across the table and squeezed her hand.
"Then we'll make it happen," he said.
That night, Freya lay awake not from nightmares but anticipation. The grief was still there, a familiar weight in her chest. It did not vanish in the face of new dreams.
It simply made room.
She turned on her side and looked at the cat. It stared back, silent as ever.
"We're going to the capital," she whispered.
It blinked slowly.
Freya closed her eyes. For the first time in years, the darkness behind her eyelids did not immediately fill with blood and screams. Instead she saw a skyline she had never drawn. Towers rising into unknown light.
Her mother's voice echoed faintly in her memory.
You can keep moments like this. Even when they pass.
Freya breathed in, steady and deliberate.
The future waited. And this time, she would run toward it.