The dawn that followed her dream was no ordinary dawn.
It bled across the sky in bruised shades of violet and ash, as though the heavens themselves mourned some secret truth. The village roofs glittered with frost, but beneath that fragile shimmer lay a silence too heavy for morning. Even the sparrows, who always claimed the eaves with their bickering songs, were mute.
Elira walked the cobbled path with her cloak pulled close, trying to convince herself that the world was as it had been the day before. Yet beneath her skin the runes still flickered faintly, alive with a warmth that was not of fire but of memory, as though the universe itself had branded her.
At the marketplace, she found the people gathered in a shivering circle around the fountain. Their faces—lined with suspicion, fear, and a hunger for safety—turned toward her with the same unspoken thought: Something unnatural has come.
She followed their eyes to the fountain.
There, snarled in the wrought iron, was a shadow that did not belong to the morning. It writhed like smoke caught in a storm, its edges unraveling and knitting again, a creature sculpted from absence. Within its formless body, two points of scarlet burned like coals buried deep in night.
The villagers recoiled, murmuring charms, clutching talismans. A child began to cry, only to be hushed swiftly by a mother who dared not break the fragile hush.
"Elira," came the elder's voice, carved of age and oak. He leaned on his staff, his eyes twin lanterns of solemn knowing. "It has begun."
The words struck her like a bell. It has begun. They echoed the dream, the voice of thunder from the cliff of obsidian.
Her breath quickened. She wanted to vanish into the crowd, to run home and press her face into the dust of her imagined bookshop, to deny this path entirely. But the air around her thickened—an unseen tide rising to claim her.
The shadow lunged. It did not move like a beast, but like hunger itself, flaring outward in tendrils of writhing dark. The crowd scattered with cries of terror.
Elira's hands lifted of their own accord.
The runes blazed awake, gold and white, curling like living constellations across her skin. A deep, resonant hum poured into the air, the kind that did not touch ears but bones, vibrating through every soul in the square.
The shadow hesitated. It feared.
Something broke free in Elira then—a reservoir she had always dammed with fear and denial. The light exploded from her palms, not as fire nor as lightning, but as pure brilliance: a shard of dawn hurled into the heart of the dark.
The creature shrieked—a sound that was not sound but the tearing of silence. Its form writhed, unraveled, and at last scattered into nothing, dissolving into the thin gray air.
The marketplace stood stunned, as though the world itself held its breath. The cobblestones glowed faintly where the light had struck, and the villagers' eyes turned not to the vanished monster but to Elira.
Her hands still shimmered like embers fading into ash. She trembled, yet a current of something vast—something terrifying—ran through her veins.
The elder stepped forward, lowering himself to one knee, his staff pressed against the ground in reverence. His words rang through the silence:
"You are not the child who dreamed of ordinary days. You are the flame the darkness dreads. The world has woken, and it has called your name."
Elira's heart ached, for she saw her bookshop vanish like smoke in her mind's eye. The ordinary life she had cherished had burned away with the creature. What remained was something far greater, far heavier.
And though fear still bound her ribs, a spark—small but fierce—lit within her. Perhaps destiny was not a thief, but a sculptor, carving her into something she had yet to understand.