'Hallowbrook sat where the road turned to ruts and the map stopped caring.'
No banners flew here. No gilded guards paced the lanes. It was a thin smear of huts and tilled earth, a place the capital tolerated because it produced grain and labor, nothing more.
To the men in the keep, Hallowbrook was a husk of utility: fields to take from, mouths whose work could be replaced. If the place burned, they would note the loss in an office ledger and roll their shoulders. Nothing more.
The villagers' lives were worth no more than ants in their eyes—replaceable, expendable, insignificant.
Arion Veilborne had been born into that neglect. From afar he looked like any other thin child of the outer settlements—too pale, too small-boned, with too little sun in his skin. Yet there was something about him the villagers could not accept.
His hair was black, threaded with faint silver strands that flashed only under moonlight. His eyes were pale, gray-white, and clouded. People called him blind and spat when he passed.
Those who looked too closely said the pupils were not empty at all. When he fixed his gaze on something, the slits in his irises fractured like frozen glass, and a faint ember-blue ran along the cracks.
It was a thing that made children stare. It made old women cross themselves.
No one had seen it first in one terrible revelation. Malrik and Liora—his father and mother—noticed it in small things that piled up.
When he was four he screamed at empty corners of the cottage as if something peered from them. At five he would not walk beneath the great oak near the well because "the wind crawls there." At seven he clung to Liora's skirts at funerals, trembling, crying about faces drifting above the pyre that no one else could see.
By eight, whispers hardened into a taunt: blind, cursed, touched by death. Years had only sharpened the villagers' mistrust.
Arion's frame stretched tall and wiry; his face kept a gauntness beyond his years. People said he was hollowed from within, as if something lived inside him and ate.
Still, Malrik and Liora sheltered him. They had the rough love of the poor—hands raw from work, voices low with fatigue—but they were fierce in defense.
When neighbors glowered and muttered about sending him away, they would stand in the lane and say nothing, and when the talk grew loud they would shove Arion back into the house and shut the door.
At night, when the cottage was quiet, Liora would press her forehead to his and whisper that he must never tell, never point, never make a spectacle.
Her eyes betrayed the truth she seldom admitted: she thought there was a depth in his gaze beyond sight, that he peered where mortals should not.
That night began like any other. Rain from a passing cloud had left the lanes slick and the air heavy. The last lamps guttered into the dark and shutters thudded closed as folk did their best to sleep through tomorrow's chores.
In their cottage, the hearth fire was low; Malrik's steady snoring filled one airless corner. Liora sorted cloth at the bench. Arion lay on his pallet, eyes tracing the beams above, mind restless.
Sleep never came easily to him. Even when the house was still and the hearth burned low, faint silhouettes lingered at the edges of his sight. They whispered fragments of words no one else could hear. He had long since grown used to lying awake, staring at the beams until exhaustion finally dragged him under.
And then the world made a different kind of sound—first tiny, then impossible—a slow thud, like a great heart beating somewhere beyond the hills.
It was not thunder. It was not the wind. It pressed down through wood and bone and reached into Arion like a probing finger.
He started up. The ember-blue in his eyes flared as though answering the call.
He felt it before he understood: a pressure and a wrongness, a cold that traveled through dirt into marrow. The fissures were opening.
He wrenched the door and ran out, bare feet sinking into the mud. The lane smelled of wet straw and hearth oil, but beneath it something acrid crawled—like copper, like rot.
He pounded on shutters and slammed the signal drum at the well, voice raw.
"Wake! Wake! The sky—" he cried. "They're coming! Get up, for God's sake, get up!"
A man peeled himself from a doorway and spat into the mud.
"It's the child," he muttered. "Arion's at it again. Go home, you fool."
The tone was not cruel; it was the tone of someone bone-sick with the habit of small cruelties.
Rennek, the butcher's son—a broad-shouldered lad with a grin too practiced—stepped out and shoved Arion so hard he went flat in the mud.
"Blind rat," Rennek sneered. "Scatter before the moon plucks your cloudy eyes out."
Where that shove landed, mud and cold oozed. Arion's blue cracks pulsed. Years of being dismissed hung on his breath like a weight.
He had screamed before over shadows and been ignored. He knew what they would do: laugh, call for ropes, speak of seers or devils, go back to bed.
Still, he screamed louder.
"They're here! Can't you smell it? The air—it tears—"
His words broke off as the drumbeat came again, louder, closer.
There is a cruelty in habit: those who have seen a thing so often come to believe it was never true.
The villagers had grown used to Arion's fits. When the fissures split the sky, they saw only a change in the weather; they did not yet see the things that poured through.
The first soul that emerged was not a memory or a whisper of the dead. It was hunger made shape.
It slithered like a column of black smoke, then rippled until a grotesque thing crouched on its haunches where the lane met the well.
To Arion it had eyes like coals, a maw without sane edges, limbs stitched from shadow and tendon.
To the farmer who came to fetch water, nothing was there—only an inexplicable chill. He frowned, rubbed his hands together, and called to his wife.
The wraith struck before anyone could understand.
The farmer's chest collapsed inward, ribs fanning against the dark. He fell, his boots filling with the wet, coppery taste of life.
His wife screamed and clutched at him; her skin peeled from her forearms, sliding away like wax in a lamp.
Children screamed. Dogs bayed and were torn like burlap. Rennek's laugh snapped into a high, thin shriek as his belly ruptured, spilling intestine into the mud.
Bodies slammed into walls as the chaos spread. A man, hurled by an unseen force, struck a lantern post. The iron lamp toppled, spilling burning oil across the muddy street. Flames licked the timber, racing hungrily from house to house, until the village itself was set ablaze.
Arion moved through the chaos like a man guided by a map written in blood. He saw them: the way the wraiths slid between people so easily, the smell-reach of their mouths. He screamed for people to leave, to run for the hollow trails beyond the hedgerow. Some turned and fled; most were seized too quickly.
Old women who had prayed each morning and evening were snatched from their thresholds and flung against walls; the smoke of their burning huts smoked their charred bones into the air.
Arion knew how to run. From the time he could walk, he had darted through hedgerows and slipped between barns, fleeing phantoms only he could see. Every shadow had been a teacher. Every night of terror had been practice. Now, when true horrors came, his body already knew the paths of survival.
At a low rise outside the village, figures stood in a shallow copse and watched with no urgency in their hands.
They had not come to save anyone. Days before, they had slid like thieves into Hallowbrook with a device—an ugly contraption of bone and iron, teeth and wire bound around a small stone carved with runes.
They planted it beneath the well, where the earth was thin and the veil between the worlds already frayed. When the device pulsed, its markings tugged the other side open wider.
The cloaked men had smiled at the first flaring—that was why they did not flinch now as screams rose. They had planned on feeding the newly freed to their benefit.
For the outlaws who used evil souls, there were rules that only they acknowledged: a soul, once loosed, was a diluted thing in this world. It needed fuel—warm, beating life—to swell into power.
Sacrifices were not sacrilege but investment. Hallowbrook sat within reach and without defense. It was a perfect, unprotected farm of offerings.
Within an hour a messenger on a tired horse crossed the rough ground to the nearest garrison and panted out his news.
He expected bells and clanging armor, perhaps a detachment sent to put out flames and drag survivors out from under burning beams.
He found a captain at a long table, a man with a scar down his cheek and clean hands.
"A village lost, ser," the rider said with the dull hope of men who believe in their cause. "Hallowbrook—burned, souls-wrought—"
"A village?" the captain repeated, voice flat as stone. He barely looked up. "Send the ledger. Who paid their tithes this quarter?"
The captain rolled the report between two fingers. "Unfortunate, but insignificant. There are fifty more like that out there. We are not meant to be shepherds of every stray yard in the countryside. Their lives… these villagers—they are little more than ants. Filthy, replaceable, expendable. Send word to rebuild. Replace the men. Send out another cart of seed if necessary. That will be cheaper than riding forth."
Another knight muttered, "Another disaster from the outskirts." Their voices carried no urgency, only detachment. To them, these outlying calamities were little more than routine—a tally of losses no more pressing than storms or floods. They had heard of such soul leaks, yes, but only in passing. None truly understood what stirred, and fear kept their curiosity silent.
Back in the street, Arion did not know their words. He only knew the dark forms everywhere and the way his father had appeared in the doorway like a man possessed.
"Stay here!" Malrik bellowed when he saw Arion, as if they could set a boundary the world would not cross. He grabbed a length of old iron and swung into the air.
To the villagers, Malrik's blade cut nothing but night. They watched him like someone bitten by madness—thrashing at a phantom.
Arion saw that his father's swings passed through shadows without effect. The wraiths slid between strikes like smoke, untouched and uncaring. Malrik's face twisted between courage and dawning terror. He thought he was keeping his family safe, but each blow proved nothing could stop the creatures. To the villagers, he looked like a madman, slashing at air, and that alone made the crowd shiver with fear.
Liora dropped to her knees in the doorway and clutched Arion to her. Her voice was low, a thread.
"We hid it too long—" she breathed, fingers pressed to his cheek like a blessing and a warning. "You must listen to nothing but yourself. Keep your sight, child. Do not beg for pity."
Arion could have told her that he would run, that his feet would take him to the hedgerows, that his eyes would find the gaps.
Instead, he backed away, mouth dry. The world narrowed to the smell of iron and the screaming.
Before he could move, something slammed into Liora. From Arion's vantage, a wraith—slim and fast—dove into her chest.
Liora's hands clawed at nothing for a single stunned heartbeat. Then her torso exploded outward with a wet force that splattered him in a curtain of gore.
The sound of it filled his head: a wet crack, the shudder of lungs collapsing, the ragged tearing of muscle. Blood spattered his face—hot, metallic—coating his lips and stinging his eyes.
He staggered back, tasting copper and the cold of terror.
"Run—!" Liora's voice tore through him, ragged, fragmented, yet commanding.
The command struck sharper than grief or shock. The blood on his face smeared, his hands trembling. His mother's eyes, wide and empty, forced him to snap out of the haze.
He ran.
His long legs tangled in roots. He vaulted a hedge, fell hard into a gutter, and kept going. Every muscle burned, his thin frame barely carrying him over mud and brush. His calves screamed. Branches scraped his face. Roots tripped him. He ran.
The last thing he saw of Hallowbrook was a house with its roof caved and a child's wood horse smoldering amid the smoke.
Malrik's mouth hung open as though still trying to shout. Liora's hair fanned on the mud like spilled sunlight, her hand reaching for him though nothing could block the wraiths now.
By dawn, the sounds stilled. The fires shrank to smoking embers. Crows had already begun to wheel and pick. Hallowbrook was a graveyard of smolders and bones; blackened bodies lay in loops of cloth, some hands still clutching tools as if they had been surprised mid-work. The hedgerows smelled of singed hair and cooked bone.
The wraiths did not hunger for flesh. Their feast was crueler. When his mother fell, it was not her body they tore into but the light within her. Arion watched as her soul unraveled into shreds, pale ribbons devoured strand by strand, until nothing remained but an empty husk in the dirt.
Arion stumbled into the forest with his mother's blood crusted on his face and the taste of help gone sour in his mouth. He collapsed beneath an old oak whose roots gnarled like knotted wood, tears and soot and blood streaking into the soil.
Branches clawed at his arms as he fled, breath ragged. His feet carried him down a narrow trail—one he alone would have known. He had stumbled upon it years ago while chasing phantoms in the forest. The trees shielded him from the open road as he ran, offering cover from any watchers. The path led to a cleft in the rocks, half-hidden by moss and shadow. A cave. His only refuge.
For hours he lay half-conscious, feverish with shock, the ember-blue in his eyes dimming as he tried not to remember the sound of bone breaking and his father's last half-formed words.
The forest around him was not safe; every rustle suggested a watcher. He drifted in and out of sleep, remembering in fragments: Liora's small hands, Malrik's shout, Rennek's muffled shriek.
When he opened his eyes, the sun was low and the world felt older.
Inside the cave, water dripped from stone, hollow sounds echoed, and the smell of smoke lingered. He breathed shallow, ears full of far-off screams, feeling utterly alone.
He had nothing now but the sight that cursed him and a hunger that was not only for food.
He had not decided anything yet. He only wanted to live.