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Zodiac Chronicle, Libra's Balance

Vluzaa
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Chapter 1 - Don't say things you want the world to keep

The Copper Mare smelled like thyme, smoke, and a touch of wet dog—courtesy of Bram, who insisted on letting strays curl by the fire. They didn't chase him off anymore. Not after he'd built a second hearth for them in the tavern's back corner using nothing but spare bricks and stubborn optimism.

"You'll spoil them," Lanssa said, grinning as she set down a tray of meat pies. "Next they'll be asking for wine."

"They've got taste," Bram replied, lifting a mangy pup onto his lap. "Better company than half the people in this town."

Jessa cackled from behind the bar. "Says the boy who flirts with every passing merchant like they'll marry him for a smile."

"They could," Bram protested. "You don't know."

"Darion," Lanssa said, glancing at the corner table, "tell him no one's marrying a man who can't boil water."

Darion barely looked up from his whittling. "I'm just wondering what kind of dog would agree to officiate the wedding."

Laughter rippled through the room.

Mirell, perched on the edge of the bar with a mug nearly as tall as his pride, raised it in toast. "To us. And the only tavern in Ausdale where the mutts drink for free."

"To the Copper Mare!" Jessa shouted, slamming down a second mug beside Lanssa's elbow.

Lanssa felt it then—that quiet, golden thing. The kind that lives between heartbeats. It wasn't just joy. It was belonging. A thread woven through all of them: Bram with his ridiculous heart, Jessa with her sharp tongue and softer soul, Darion with his haunted silences, and Mirell—Gods, Mirell—who always played like every note might be the last before the world cracked.

This was her world. Her family. Not by blood, but by choice. By nights like this, and mornings spent scrubbing soot from stone and arguing over who stole the last eggs.

She reached for her cup and clinked it against theirs.

"May it always be like this," she whispered.

Darion glanced up. His eyes met hers across the flickering candlelight. "Don't say things you want the world to keep."

The words hung in the smoky air.

She didn't understand them—not then.

Later, the wind began to scream.

At first, it was small—a sigh through the shutter cracks, a pressure behind the ears that made the dogs whine.

Then came the silence.

So total, so immediate, it crushed the warmth from the room like a fist closing. Mirell's playing stuttered to a stop. The fire dimmed to embers. Even the dogs growled low in their throats and slunk beneath the tables, hackles raised.

"What the hell—?" Bram muttered, halfway rising from his chair.

Darion was already at the window, his whittling knife forgotten.

"Stars above," he whispered.

Lanssa moved beside him—and the breath died in her chest.

The sky wasn't just dark.

It was broken.

A jagged tear cleaved the heavens from horizon to horizon, swallowing starlight like a hungry mouth. Around its edges, the constellations twisted and warped, pulling inward like drowning men. Light flickered and failed across the wound like candle flames about to die.

Then the shriek came.

Not from the sky.

From the tavern door.

No warning. No creak of hinges.

Just destruction.

The door exploded inward, wood splintering like bone. Bram caught a shard in the shoulder and went down screaming. A thing flowed through the wreckage—all limbs and wrongness, blacker than the void between stars, claws trailing shadows that writhed like dying worms.

The dogs bolted for the cellar.

The creature lunged.

"GET BACK!" Darion roared, and in the same breath, Mirell launched himself forward, grabbing a poker from the dying hearth and swinging wide.

The iron passed through it like mist.

Jessa screamed—high and sharp and full of terror.

Lanssa grabbed a carving knife from the nearest table. Her hands shook so badly she nearly dropped it. Bram was crawling toward her, blood pooling beneath him on the worn floorboards. She dropped to help him—

But the creature moved like liquid shadow. Like nightmare given form.

It was on Mirell before he could swing again.

One blow.

A wet snap.

Mirell crumpled like a broken doll, his neck bent at an impossible angle.

"NO!" Lanssa's voice cracked raw. She hurled the knife—it spun wide, clattering uselessly against the wall.

Jessa grabbed a chair and brought it down across the creature's back. Wood shattered. The thing turned with fluid grace and drove its claws through her chest in one brutal thrust.

Lanssa ran to her friend.

Too late.

Always too late.

Jessa coughed blood, her eyes wide with fading terror. "I'm sorry," she whispered, voice barely a breath.

And died.

Lanssa's scream tore from her throat like something living.

Darion's hand seized her arm, iron-strong. "Now! GO!"

"I won't leave them—"

"GO!"

He shoved her toward the cellar stairs as the creature turned its attention to them, shadows writhing around it like smoke.

As she stumbled down into darkness, the last thing she saw was Darion charging the beast with Mirell's poker raised high—no hope in his stance, only fury and love and the desperate need to buy her seconds.

The scream that followed wasn't human.

And it wasn't the creature's.

She didn't see him die.

She only heard it—the wet sound of claws finding flesh, the crash of his body hitting stone.

She ran.

Down into the dark. Into the cold. The cellar was a maze of wine casks and grain sacks, nowhere to hide, nowhere to breathe. Her hands shook. Her knees buckled. Blood—Bram's blood, Jessa's blood—slicked her palms.

Then came the footsteps. Soft. Wrong. Clicking on stone in a rhythm that belonged to nothing that had ever drawn breath under sun or stars.

She pressed her back against the cellar wall. Closed her eyes. Raised a broken bottle like it might matter, like it could do anything against the thing that had torn through her family like parchment.

If this was the end—

No.

She would not go quietly into whatever darkness waited.

She braced her feet against the cold stone. Found her voice in the ruins of her throat.

"Come on then!" she shouted into the black. "Take me if you can!"

And something did answer.

But not what she expected.

Light exploded through the cellar—not warm like hearthfire, but searing cold like winter starlight. The shadow-beast shrieked, a sound like breaking glass and dying worlds. She opened her eyes to see it caught in a cage of gleaming runes, writhing and hissing as the pale fire burned its essence.

Behind the creature stood a man.

Or what looked like a man.

He wore robes of bone-white cloth that seemed to drink the light around them, their hems embroidered with symbols that hurt to look at directly. His hood was thrown back, revealing a face carved from marble and shadow—beautiful in the way winter storms were beautiful. Terrible and remote. His eyes held the pale fire of distant stars, and his presence felt ancient as stone, deep as forgotten prayers.

He spoke no words. Simply raised one hand.

The runic cage collapsed inward like a fist, threads of light slicing through the creature's form. It shrieked once more—a sound of pure anguish—then dissolved into nothing.

Silence crashed back like a tide.

Lanssa couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Could only stare at this stranger who had stepped from legend into her ruined world.

He turned to her, and those star-pale eyes found hers.

"You live," he said. His voice was deep as winter rivers, distant as mountain peaks.

She stared back, words failing her. "Who—what was that thing?"

"Not of this realm." He stepped closer, moving with liquid grace. "Are you hurt?"

Her mind finally caught up to her body. The pain, the loss, the terrible weight of what had happened crashed down like a falling mountain.

"Darion—Jessa—Mirell—Bram—they're—" Her voice broke. "They're all—"

"I know," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."

Two simple words.

They shattered what remained of her composure.

She fell to her knees on the blood-slicked stone, her body shaking with sobs that felt like they might tear her apart. She didn't weep—couldn't weep. The grief was too vast, too raw. It lived in her chest like a wound that would never heal.

He didn't try to comfort her. Didn't offer empty platitudes or meaningless touches.

He simply waited.

When she found her voice again, it came out hoarse and broken. "Why? Why did it come here?"

A pause. Brief, but weighted with something that might have been regret.

"For you."

They left Ausdale before dawn touched the eastern hills.

The stranger—Ausgelich, he named himself when she finally asked—led her away from the smoking ruins of The Copper Mare without speaking of what lay behind them. She followed because there was nothing else. Her friends were ash and memory. Her home was gone. And something vital inside her had cracked so cleanly she felt she might crumble if she stopped moving.

They walked forest paths and forgotten hunting trails, Lanssa numb to everything but the rhythm of her own footfalls. He moved like shadow made flesh, silent even on frost-brittle leaves. The first words she spoke came without her looking at him.

"You said it came for me."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Another pause, longer this time.

"The answer is not simple."

"That's a pretty way of saying you're lying."

He didn't flinch at the accusation. "I am protecting you."

"From the truth?"

"From what the truth would make of you."

She stopped walking.

So did he.

Dawn light filtered through the canopy above them, touching the edge of his hood with pale gold. He kept his face turned away.

"You don't get to make that choice for me," she said.

"Would you rather be dead?"

"I'd rather know why they died."

He turned then, and she saw something in those distant eyes—not quite pain, but its shadow. The weariness of someone who had carried impossible burdens across impossible years.

"There are forces in this world that would see you dead before you understand what you are," he said carefully. "Ancient powers that fear what you might become."

She stared at him. "What I might become? I'm nobody. I serve drinks and clean tables."

"You are far more than that." His voice was quiet, almost gentle. "And that is precisely why you're in danger."

"What kind of danger?"

He looked away again, something in his shoulders bending inward as if the weight of truth itself was crushing him.

"You were never meant to see this world," he said. "Not this one. Not yet. But the moment that creature kills your friends, the moment your friends' blood was spilled in your name—everything changed."

"My friends died because of me?" The words came out strangled.

"Yes."

She wanted to hit him. To scream. To claw at his too-calm face until she drew blood. Instead, she whispered, "Then don't let it be for nothing."

Something shifted behind his expression. Recognition, perhaps. Or something deeper.

"Then walk," he said. "And I will tell you what I can. As much as I dare."

"And the rest?"

He turned away, beginning to move again down the shadowed path.

"The rest is a road you will walk whether you choose it or not."

They kept walking as the sun climbed higher, painting the world in shades of gold and green that seemed impossibly bright after the darkness of the night before.

Above them, unseen by mortal eyes, the stars wheeled in their courses.

The wound in the sky had closed.

But the scar remained, invisible against the blue, a reminder that some boundaries, once broken, could never be fully healed.

And in places far from Ausdale, in chambers of shadow and halls of cold light, other eyes had taken notice.

Ancient things stirred.

Whispers began.

Because fate was moving at last, after centuries of slumber.

And its name was Lanssa.