My mother was gone.
I rose too fast. My knees wavered, the mat sagging beneath me. The breath caught in my chest. Where could she have gone? Even in her condition, she had never risen before me. Her steps had slowed, her hands trembling even to carry water or mend a strap.
Some days I saw her press her palm against her chest, as though steadying a pain she would not speak of. As of late she had not even been able to get up from her bed mat. And now—gone.
I ducked into the clearing, scanning the wood. No trace of her. Cold air licked at my skin, sharp with the tang of melting frost.
The forest stretched like a sea of pillars, trunks silvered in morning light, breath of earth rising as mist. I listened for her humming—she always hummed the same low tune when gathering roots—but the clearing was silent, not even the caw of ravens.
I saw no tracks to follow. Nothing telling me where to go. The wind flew west. My mother wouldn't be strong enough to travel against it. I went west with the wind. The landscape flying into dunes of snow. Our home barely visible.
Only steps behind me, my own tracks devoured by the zephyr. Despair iced my veins. I couldn't leave her. But how to find her?
I steadied my breath. Eyes closed, I listened, hoping to hear the soft hum of my mothers voice or the tune of her harp she nearly always had by her side.
Nothing. Winds whipping. Cutting at my face.
Her scent struck me—no sweetness now, only the feces and urine that had stained her bed ridden clothes. I recoiled. I must be close. But the wind is at my back—had I already passed her?
I turned, still as I could be, nose in the air. Where was the smell coming from? I jumped through the dunes of snow. In the trees—a scrap of her cloth. But she could never climb so high.
The wind? But what tore her clothes off?
It howled, carrying the stench sharper now—copper and rot, heavy in my throat. I pressed forward through the drifts, each step sinking, dragging, as though the snow itself wanted to keep me from what lay ahead.
Then—silence. The trees closed around a hollow, their branches bending low as if in mourning. My breath caught. There, half-buried in the frost, lay my mother.
Her body was sprawled across the snow, limbs splayed as though thrown. Her face was pale, lips tinged blue, and blood patterned the white beneath her in black-red blossoms. I staggered toward her, knees buckling.
Scars raked her side—deep, tearing wounds, each mark the width of a claw. My stomach lurched. I knew them. The same creature that had stalked me after the coyote.
My eyes darted across the clearing. The prints were everywhere—huge, padded paws pressed deep, circling. Blood trailed in erratic lines. My heart thundered.
Not a beast. A man.
He stood a few paces from her, tall, his figure wrapped in furs I had never seen before, stitched with markings foreign to me. Teeth hung from his cloth. Upon his belt was fastened a helmet with the face of an owl, and as a warning to the animals near was a skull of a bear strapped to his shoulder. His hair was dark, long and unbound, and a knife in each hand, like fangs, dripped red at their tips. He breathed hard, chest heaving, eyes fixed on the treeline where the last traces of the beast's passage vanished into the mist.
I froze.
I had never seen another man before. But he was older and stronger than I.
Yet here he was, bloodied knives in hand, standing over the body of my mother.
The wind snapped between us. He turned, and his gaze found mine.
There was no smile, no word of comfort. Only eyes sharp as flint, heavy with something I could not name. I wanted to cut him down, to fall at his feet and beg for a way to bring her back. Instead I did nothing. The cold had devoured every thought. I was hollow, a husk. My eyes for a time could see no color.
My bow slipped in my grasp. Breath tore from my lungs.
I cried, my voice cracking the heavens with a primal roar.
I had not been able to protect her.
For a moment, I heard my mothers hushed wheezes. She still drew breath if only for a moment.
"My beloved…" she coughed, blood flowing from her mouth. "It lays beneath the hearth…your inheritance"
My arms tightened around her limp frame, but no warmth returned. The air stung my eyes and nose, a bitter haze of blood and snow. My mother—gone, truly gone. I wanted to sink into the frost beside her, let the wind bury us both.
But the man was still there.
I lifted my head, vision blurring, and found him watching me. His knives dripped into the snow, steaming red. His breath misted in clouds, slow and steady, as if he had known this death before and carried its weight without breaking.
"You!" The words tore from my throat, ragged. "Was this your doing?"
His eyes narrowed. He said nothing. Only shifted his stance, blades lowered but not sheathed, gaze flicking to the treeline where the paw prints vanished.
I followed his glance. The wind carried a sound then—low, guttural, like stone grinding on stone. The trees shuddered as though a great body moved among them.
The beast was still out there.
Fear and fury battled in me. I reached for my bow, hands shaking. The string cut against my fingers, useless, fragile compared to the knives in his hands. Still, I would not put it down.
The man stepped closer. My heart lurched. He crouched by my mother, not touching her, but bowing his head as though in respect. Then, in a voice low and rough as gravel, he spoke words I had never heard before—alien, guttural syllables that might have been a prayer.
When he rose again, his gaze found mine once more. This time his lips parted, just enough for one word.
"Run."
I could not leave this man without knowing what had happened to my mother.
The forest rumbled with a low growl.
The beast emerged low from the mist of melting snow, shoulders rolling as though sculpted from sinew and frostbitten stone. Its jaws gaped wide, ropes of saliva freezing mid-air before shattering against the ground.
Hunger burned in its pale eyes, not the blind hunger of a starving thing, but something keener—intent sharpened like a fang—fixed not on my mother now, but on the man who barred its path.
It lunged.
The stranger moved like no hunter I had ever seen. No stumble, no wasted step. His body curved aside from the beast's fury, letting it carve a trench in the snow where he had stood. In the same breath his blades sang out, meeting hide and muscle.
The impact was thunder. Steel bit deep into the shoulder. Blood erupted, hot and black against the white drifts, spraying across my vision in steaming arcs. The leopard's cry ripped through the forest, a raw bellow that seemed to tear the marrow from the trees. It thrashed, raking claws through bark and air. One strike grazed the man's cloak, shredding fabric into strips slick with blood not his own.
Again the blades struck. A second gush painted the snow. The beast snapped its jaws, breaking bone from its own mouth as it fought against the edge. Snow churned red beneath them, thick with steaming clots. Each breath of the animal came ragged, wet, bubbling through the puncture in its ribs.
Then, at last, silence.
The leopard sagged to the ground, its body twitching as nerves died. Its flank rose and fell in shallow, useless heaves, each one weaker than the last. The stranger knelt. He pressed a hand to its shuddering chest, and for a moment he bowed his head, as though mourning what he had slaughtered.
He whipped the blood off of one of his blades and sheathed it. Then his other knife slid low, parting the beast's belly.
The stink came first—hot iron, blood, and the rank of an opened gut. Steam coiled upward as he pulled the flesh apart, his hands moving through innards to free what was hidden inside. Intestines slopped against the snow, pink and glistening, twitching faintly as though still alive. From that mess he drew forth a small bundle slick with afterbirth—a cub, pale as winter itself, its body matted in the red baptism of his mothers death, and clinging fluids.
For a heartbeat it lay still in his hands, a drowned thing wrenched from the pit of death. Then its chest convulsed, ribs fluttering, and it screamed—thin, high, piercing. The sound cut through me.
The stranger lifted it toward me, his fingers dripping with gore. His voice was rough as wind tearing through dead pines.
"Death makes way for new life. Take it, boy. You are its kin."
"What shall you call it?"
"Solas, for we are both alone in the world."
My hands shook as I reached for it, blood soaking into my palms, hot and wet. Its warmth bled into me, searing. My arms tightened around it instinctively, as though I cradled both corpse and salvation.
At last the words forced themselves out, rasping and broken.
"Who are you?"
The man's eyes stood cold and black on his blood stained face.
"I am Rennan, servant of the old faith," he exhaled. "Who are you?"
I swallowed. "I…I'm Sekan. What do you seek here? I didn't know there were others here."
His gaze turned outward, past me, toward the horizon where the mountains crouched like old broken backs.
"My business is my own." He said with a heavy laden voice. "I seek for those who have corrupted my half brother…and cast me out of my own lands."
"You may share my fire for what you have done, if you can but help me lay my mother to rest."
We carried her back in silence. The snow hissed beneath our steps, swallowing each footfall as though Vearda itself wished not to disturb her rest. My arms ached with her weight, still weak with famine, but I would not let her fall. Not once.
At the clearing, I set her down beside the hearth she had tended all my life. The fire pit was cold, stones blackened from the last embers she had kindled. My hands trembled as I gathered what I could—fallen branches, old bark, roots she once pulled with her own fingers. Rennan stayed in our home, starting a new flame within the hearth. He was solemn, saying nothing.
I dug with my bare hands, soil stiff with frost, breaking my nails until blood welled. Still I carved into the earth. Vearda gave way slowly, reluctant to take her. At last I laid her in the shallow grave, wrapping her in the last scraps of cloth we had, though no cloth could cover the wounds she bore.
My mother had told me before: When someone you love passes, you must bury them so that when the new kingdom comes they will be given new life.
Kneeling, I pressed my forehead to hers. Her skin was stone-cold, her hair stiff with ice. My chest broke open with sound, low and aching. I began to sing out of instinct.
It was the song she had always sung for me when storms rattled the roof or when fever burned me as a child. A lullaby carried on a fragile thread, halting through my sobs:
Though the fire has gone.
Though the dawn will not come.
The earth will bear you,
Beyond the reach of the sun.
My voice cracked, but I forced it onward, each word stitching the silence with grief. For a moment, I thought I heard her hum with me again, faint as the wind, before it slipped away. It was haunting but gave me comfort.
When the last note faded, peace settled over me—not whole, not full, but enough to let the air move in my lungs again. I covered her slowly, hands shaking, each mound of earth rising until no pale skin remained. Only a small cairn of stones marked her resting place.
I sat there long after, my fingers raw and bleeding, until the frost stung them numb. Rennan stepped forward at last. He knelt and laid one hand upon the stones, bowing his head in silent respect.
"She is not gone from you," he said, his voice like gravel in the wind. "The dead root themselves in us. They grow again through our blood."
I pressed my palm against the cairn. "Then let her root deep."
When the silence grew heavy again, I turned to Rennan. His knives still glistened faintly, though the snow had washed most of the blood away. The cub whimpered in my arms, pressing its small head to my chest, alive because death had taken her.
I swallowed. "You said you were cast out. That you seek those who hide. Who are they—the ones of the Second Sun?"
His eyes sharpened, black as obsidian. He drew a long breath, as if the words themselves carried a weight that might crush the both of us.
"They are not beasts, nor men, but something born of both," he said slowly. "The occult of the Second Sun burn their mark into flesh, binding themselves to fire that should never have risen. They are the reason the flood consumed the old world. And now they spread again, in shadow."
A chill deeper than frost crept down my spine. "And you—what drives you against them?"
Rennan's jaw tightened. His gaze did not waver, though his voice dropped low, a growl beneath the words.
"They took my father. Twisted him until I could no longer know his face. He is theirs now, and has done something so heinous I cannot forgive it. And until I put his body in the ground, I cannot rest."
The cub whimpered again, as though it felt the iron in his vow.
I held it tighter, the blood of my mother still on my hands. Rennan's eyes found mine—no longer a stranger's eyes, but something else, harder, binding.
"Sekan," he said, my name strange in his mouth. "Your loss may be yours alone—join my quest and you will see a life better than this. Remain, and death will find you as it has your mother. I will stay until dawn, then I leave, with or without you."
The wind snapped through the clearing, carrying his words into the dark trees.
And for the first time, I felt the pull of a path that stretched far beyond the hearth, far beyond my mother's grave—into fire, blood, and the shadow of the Second Sun.
I wanted neither to leave nor stay yet I must choose.