Morning comes ordinary, which is somehow the cruelest part in hindsight.
Frost rims the window shutters. Aileen hums while she stirs the pot. Vereen laces his boots by the door, already dressed for a patrol he mentioned last night without any particular weight in his voice — just another rotation, just another day added to a season of them.
I don't know yet that I'll remember every detail of this morning for the rest of my life. I just know it feels the same as every other morning, which is exactly why I don't pay it the attention it deserves.
"Porridge or eggs," Aileen asks me, the way she does most mornings, already knowing the answer.
"Eggs."
"You always say eggs."
"They're better."
"That's not an argument, that's just repeating yourself with confidence." But she's smiling when she says it, cracking eggs into the pan, and Vereen chuckles from the doorway.
"Let the boy have opinions," he says. "Spirits know he'll need them."
He crosses the room, kisses the top of Aileen's head, then mine, and for a moment everything is so completely normal that the version of me who remembers dying once already almost lets his guard down completely.
Almost.
Aileen sets a plate in front of me, eggs a little too golden the way I like them, and settles into the chair across from me with her own smaller portion, mostly picked at rather than eaten. She's been doing that more, lately — feeding me first, herself second, always.
"You've got egg on your chin," she tells me, reaching over to wipe it away with her thumb before I can protest. "There. Presentable."
"I wasn't going anywhere fancy."
"You never know." Her eyes crinkle. "Could meet a princess. Best to be ready."
"I don't want to meet a princess."
"No?" She tilts her head, amused. "What do you want to meet, then?"
I consider this with more seriousness than a four-year-old probably should.
"Someone who needs help," I say, and I don't fully know where the answer comes from, only that it feels true the moment I say it.
Something shifts behind her eyes — pride, maybe, or something quieter and sadder that I don't have the years to recognize yet.
"That's a good thing to want," she says softly, and kisses my forehead, right where Vereen kissed it a moment before.
"Same as always," Aileen tells him, as he finishes at the door. "Home before dark."
"Home before dark," he agrees.
He taps the doorframe twice on his way out, the way he always does, and the door closes behind him, and the morning continues exactly the way ten thousand mornings before it have.
I don't know it's the last one.
The day moves the way most days do now — small, contained, ordinary.
Aileen takes me to the square in the late morning, trading herbs for thread, exchanging careful smiles with neighbors who've all gotten a little more careful themselves this past year. Lira finds us near the well, cloak damp from the morning frost, and the two women fall into the easy, low-voiced conversation of people who've long since run out of new things to worry about and are just repeating the old ones to feel less alone in them.
"Any word?" Aileen asks.
"Same as always. Guild says stay careful, patrols say stay careful, nobody says anything useful." Lira crouches down to my level anyway, mustering a real smile for me even with the tiredness in her eyes. "And how's my favorite miracle? Still terrorizing the other children?"
"They terrorize themselves," I say. "I just watch."
She laughs, and for a moment the weight in the square seems to lift, just slightly, just long enough to remember what ordinary used to feel like before this year wore it down.
The freckled girl finds me near the well shortly after, and declares, with great seriousness, that today's game involves pretending to be adventurers, which mostly means running in circles and shouting.
I run in circles. I shout. For an hour, I am simply four years old, and nothing else.
We're home before midday, and Aileen sets me up with the wooden blocks Vereen carved while she works through a stack of mending, humming that same wandering tune under her breath. Sunlight moves slow and gold across the floorboards.
A faint hum stirs.
Daily Quest Added: Build Something Reward: +1 Mind
I stack the blocks into something that might generously be called a tower. It falls over twice before I get the balance right.
Daily Quest Completed Mind +1 Reward: Minor Spatial Reasoning Increase
"Look at that," Aileen says, glancing over. "An architect now, are we?"
"It fell down first."
"Most good things do, before they stand."
I don't know yet how much weight that sentence is about to carry.
The first sound is small enough that I almost mistake it for thunder.
Aileen's head lifts. Her needle stills mid-stitch.
"That wasn't thunder," she murmurs, mostly to herself.
The second sound isn't small at all.
It rolls in from the direction of the forest — not a tremor this time, not the low, distant groan we've grown almost used to, but something sharper. Closer. A howl, and then another, layered over each other, wrong in a way that raises the hair on my arms even before I understand why.
Aileen is on her feet before I've fully processed the sound at all.
"Lucifer. Come here. Now."
I go to her without question. Something in her voice leaves no room for anything else.
Outside, distantly, someone starts shouting. Then more than one someone. Then a bell — the kind that only rings for one reason in a village this size, and it isn't a good one.
Aileen crosses to the window, and I watch her face change in real time, watch the careful, practiced calm she's worn all year crack straight down the middle.
"That's not supposed to—" she starts, and doesn't finish.
Through the gap in the shutters, I see them.
Direwolves. More than I can count at a glance, pouring out from the treeline at the village's edge like the forest itself has finally exhaled. Bigger than any wolf has a right to be, moving with a coordination that looks less like animal instinct and more like something is driving them.
"Mama—"
"I know." Her voice shakes, just once, and then steadies through sheer will. "I know, sweetheart. Stay behind me."
She grabs the bag by the door — the one she's kept packed all winter, the one I never understood the weight of until this exact moment — and pulls me against her side.
The bell keeps ringing. The shouting gets louder, closer, mixed now with sounds I don't have names for and don't want to.
Through the window, I catch fragments — a market stall overturned, a man dragging his elderly mother toward the chapel's stone walls, a woman screaming a name that isn't mine but sounds enough like it that my chest seizes anyway. The whole village has become motion and noise, and none of it is organized, none of it is safe, all of it is just people trying to survive the next thirty seconds without any promise of the thirty after that.
"We need to get to the shelter cellar," Aileen says, mostly to herself, already moving toward the door. "Vereen said if anything ever— stay close, Lucifer. Stay so close."
I stay close.
We make it three steps outside before the world goes wrong all at once.
The heat of her hand around mine. The cold air biting at my face. The smell of smoke already threading through the frost, from somewhere I can't see and don't want to.
I don't remember every piece of what happens next in order. I've tried, since, more times than I can count, and it never comes back whole — just fragments, sharp-edged and out of sequence, the way trauma likes to keep itself.
I remember the street full of people running the wrong directions, colliding, scattering. A cart overturned, wheels still spinning uselessly in the air. Someone's abandoned basket of eggs, cracked and steaming faintly in the cold.
I remember Aileen's hand locked around mine so tight it hurt, and being grateful for the hurt, because it meant she hadn't let go.
I remember a shape, gray and massive and wrong, cutting between us and the cellar door before we ever reach it. Yellow eyes that don't look at me the way an animal's should — too focused, too patient, like something behind them is choosing its target rather than simply hunting.
I remember Aileen shoving me — hard, sudden, using every bit of strength in her small frame — back toward the house, back toward anywhere that isn't directly in front of that shape's teeth.
"Run," she says. Just that. One word, with everything she has behind it.
I don't run. Some old, foolish, four-year-old part of me tries to grab for her hand again instead, and that half-second of hesitation is the only thing I actually remember with any clarity at all — her face, turning back toward me, golden eyes wide, already knowing what's about to happen and choosing, without a single second of doubt, exactly where she needs to be standing when it does.
Between me and the wolf.
I don't see the rest. I don't think my mind lets me. There's a sound I will spend the rest of my life trying not to remember, and then there are hands — someone else's, a neighbor, hauling me backward, away, into a doorway, into darkness, into safety I don't want and can't refuse.
I scream her name. I don't remember doing it. I'm told, later, that I didn't stop for a long time.
I don't know how long passes before Vereen finds me.
Hours, maybe. The fighting has moved on by then, or been beaten back, or simply run its course the way these things eventually do. I'm still in the neighbor's doorway, wrapped in someone's spare cloak, when he comes around the corner at a dead run, already shouting my name before he can possibly see me.
He finds me. He drops to his knees in the mud in front of me, hands shaking as they move over me, checking for wounds I don't have.
"Lucifer. Lucifer, look at me, are you—"
I look at him. I don't have to say anything. Something in my face tells him everything he's afraid to ask.
"Where's your mother." His voice is very calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that's really just terror wearing a mask it hasn't finished putting on yet. "Lucifer. Where is she."
I don't have words. I don't think I have words for a long time after this. I just look toward the square, toward the place none of the neighbors will look at directly, and I watch him understand.
I watch a man who has already lost so much learn, in the space of one held breath, that he's just lost the one thing he built everything else around protecting.
He doesn't scream. He doesn't fall apart, not in front of me, not yet. Something in him goes very, very still instead — a stillness I recognize, distantly, as the same stillness that comes right before a person breaks completely and simply hasn't found the moment to do it yet.
He pulls me into his chest so hard it hurts, one hand cradling the back of my head like he's afraid I might disappear too if he doesn't hold on tightly enough. I feel him shaking. I don't know if I'm holding him or he's holding me, and it doesn't matter, because either way, neither of us lets go for a long, long time.
Around us, the village keeps making the sounds a village makes after something like this — someone calling a name that gets no answer, someone else weeping openly in the street, the low, grim murmur of people counting who's still standing and who isn't. I hear it all from very far away, like it's happening to someone else, in some other Blumund, in some other life.
Lira finds us not long after, and whatever she sees in our faces stops her mid-stride, hand flying to her mouth.
"No," she says. Just that. "No, no, not her, not—"
She doesn't finish either. She just crosses the distance and wraps both of us in her arms, cloak and all, and for a while the three of us simply exist there in the mud and the cold, none of us saying anything useful, because there isn't anything useful left to say.
The elder comes later still, leaning on his cane, older in that single walk across the square than I've ever seen him look before. He doesn't offer platitudes. He just rests a hand briefly on Vereen's shoulder, and on mine, and says nothing at all, which somehow feels like the only honest thing anyone could have said.
By nightfall, the village knows the full count. Six lost, across every household combined. Aileen's name sits among them now, spoken in the same careful, grieving tone as the others — a name I will hear repeated by neighbors for weeks afterward, always gently, always like they're afraid saying it too loudly might make it more true than it already is.
It cannot get more true than it already is.
Later — I don't know how much later — I sit alone by a fire someone else has built, in a house that still smells like her.
Vereen sits across the room, not moving, staring at nothing. Lira has gone to fetch what needs fetching — water, food, the small mechanical tasks of grief that keep hands busy while the rest of a person catches up to what's happened. Nobody has said anything about tomorrow yet. I don't think anybody can, not yet.
A faint hum stirs at the edge of my mind, gentle in a way that feels almost obscene given everything else.
A gift from the Universe. Dominion +1%
I stare at the words until they blur.
I don't understand, not really, not yet, what it means that the universe chose this moment to give me something. I don't have room to be angry about it, or grateful, or anything at all except hollow. Some distant, calculating part of me — the part that used to negotiate contracts in a life that feels impossibly far away now — notices the timing anyway, files it away without knowing why, the way I've filed away every strange thing the System has ever shown me.
I whisper the old command anyway, out of habit more than curiosity.
Status.
———————————— STATUS ———————————— Name: Lucifer Energy: 10 — Measures vitality and stamina Strength: 10 — Measures physical power Speed: 10 — Measures movement and reaction speed Will: 6 — Measures determination and mental fortitude Mind: 10 — Measures cognition, perception, and magical capacity Dominion: 1% — Permanently increases all stats by this number as a percent Resonance: 0% — Description Blocked [Blank Cards: 2] Skills: None Locked Skill: ????? ————————————
Will, up by one. I don't need the System to tell me where that came from.
I close the screen. I don't want to look at numbers. I want my mother's hands in my hair and her voice humming that same wandering tune, low and constant, the way it's been since the night I was born.
I want to hear her say eggs, again, of course one more time, like it's the most predictable, most precious thing in the world.
I will never hear it again.
Across the room, Vereen finally moves — just enough to look at me, just enough for me to see the exact moment his careful stillness threatens to give out completely. He doesn't say anything. He just crosses the room and sits beside me, and pulls me against his side, and we stay like that until the fire burns down to embers and neither of us has the strength left to feed it again.
I'm four years old, and I already understand — with a clarity no child should have to earn twice in two lifetimes — that some losses don't come with warning, and some mornings that feel completely ordinary are the last ones you'll ever get.
I think of everything I didn't say this morning. I think of how someone who needs help was the last real thing I told her I wanted to become, and how she looked at me like it already meant something, like she already knew, somehow, that it would end up mattering more than either of us understood at the time.
I promise her, silently, in a house gone quiet in all the wrong ways, that it will.
Outside, for the first time in longer than I can remember, the forest is silent.
It doesn't feel like peace.
It just feels like something that's already taken what it came for, and has no reason left to hurry.