If you asked anyone in Bramble Hollow who I was, they'd scratch their chin like they were digging through the pantry for a spice they used last winter.
"Ren?" they'd say. "Arkwell boy. Helps his father. Quiet. Decent with a hoe."
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Most days, I agreed.
"Ren! You're going to miss first light!" Sera's voice punched through my door before the sun did. She had a gift for being everywhere and loud about it.
"Two more minutes," I mumbled, face pressed into the thin pillow.
"Two turns into ten," she shot back, knuckles drumming the wood. "And then Dad says I'm lazy for letting you sleep."
That got me up. Father didn't shout, but disappointment from him felt worse. I sat, blinked the night out of my eyes, and counted three cobwebs in the ceiling corner that hadn't been there yesterday. I splashed my face with water cold enough to bite and wrestled my hair into something that could be called a shape. When I stepped outside, dawn had only just untied the sky.
Morning smelled like damp earth and chimney smoke. Chickens fussed at the corner of our yard, all offended clucks and busy feet. Down the lane, Old Man Garrel cursed at his mule in a way that was less argument and more ritual. The mule chewed and stared at nothing. Garrel lost every morning and still came back for more.
Mother had bread cooling on the sill, crusts cracked open to let out steam. "Eat," she said, sliding me a heel as I passed the doorway. "Before your body remembers it's tired."
She had flour on her cheek. I wiped it off with the back of my hand; she caught my wrist and smiled like I'd given her some great gift. "Go on," she said. "Your father's already started."
Father didn't talk much when he worked. He didn't need to. A nod toward the weed-choked furrows said more than a speech. The field was a worn patchwork of browns and golds, stitched together with stone borders that our grandfather had stacked. I took my hoe and joined him in the row.
"Don't fight the earth," he said after a while, as my blade caught on a root. "Coax it. Steady hands, steady mind." He said it the way he said it every year, like a prayer you only understood after your back started to ache.
We fell into the rhythm: lift, drive, drag, shake loose. The sun inched up and warmed the tops of our necks. A lark kept building a song and losing it. My palms complained first, then my shoulders, then my lower back. I kept my breaths slow, counting the rows in my head like steps on a long road: don't look up, don't look at how much is left; measure progress by foot and by furrow.
Sera bounced between us with a basket on her hip, collecting stones turned up by the hoe. "Treasure," she announced every time she found one that looked like anything other than a stone. "Dragon's tooth. Moon egg. Old king's coin." Each went into the same basket anyway.
"Bring the moon egg to Mother," Father said without looking up. "She'll make an omelet."
Sera stuck out her tongue and scampered off, braid swinging. I'd never tell her, but her running made the work feel lighter.
By midmorning, the village had fully woken. The blacksmith's hammer began its steady beat—clong, clong, clong—like a heartbeat for the hollow. Children shrieked and chased one another past the hedges. A cart rattled by with sacks of barley, the driver nodding at us as if we were part of the scenery.
Mira from the next farm leaned on the fence between our plots, straw hat tilted against the glare. "You going to the market playing tonight?" she called.
"If Garrel's mule doesn't eat the fiddle again," I said.
She laughed and tipped her hat to Father, who answered with a lift of his chin. Conversation done.
When the sun reached the place where hunger begins, Mother's call carried from the house, a bell without a bell. We took our bowls under the sycamore. Stew that was mostly broth with stubborn vegetables, bread that required teeth, and watered ale that made the edge of the day a little rounder. Sera tried to trade her carrots with me. I pretended not to notice and ate them all at once. She wrinkled her nose and stole the last crust from my bowl in revenge.
"What news?" Father asked no one in particular. In Bramble Hollow, "news" meant anything that hadn't happened here.
"Peddlers yesterday said the Roadward Watch put up a new post on the ridge," Mother answered, seating herself on the root beside us. "They've had trouble with bandits on the south road."
"Bandits don't come this far north," Garrel called as he led his mule past, as if he'd been invited to lunch. "Not worth the trouble. Not unless the tax men start digging in our pockets deeper." He tugged the mule's rope; the mule stayed where it was and blinked. Garrel sighed as if he'd been betrayed by love and friendship.
After we ate, Father let the stew sit heavy in our bellies for ten more breaths, then set his bowl aside and stood. Work didn't wait because we were comfortable. We returned to the rows. Somewhere behind us, Mother's voice rose as she scolded the hens like small, unruly children. Sera tried to imitate the quarrel through the window, cluck for cluck, and lost her balance laughing.
Afternoon brought heat and the slow hour where time moves thick as molasses. The earth we turned grew damp and sweet-smelling beneath its dry crust. My palms began to blister in two familiar places; I shifted my grip and let the old calluses remember their duty. Father and I traded rows now and then without comment. When my hoe caught again, he stepped in, pried out the root with a practiced twist, and handed it back. The world's simplest lesson: learn by watching, then by doing, then by getting it wrong and doing again.
Toward the far edge of the field, the land tipped down toward the river. Dragonflies hovered like living needles over the reeds. In the deepest part of afternoon, when the light went flat and the insects grew bold, I volunteered to fetch water just to stand in the shade and pretend it was for work. Sera insisted on coming.
"We need three pails," she said, as if we'd been ordered by the queen.
"We need one pail and two hands that don't spill," I corrected.
On the path, a grass snake uncoiled across our boots. Sera jumped back, then forward, then crouched to admire it. "If you don't bother it, it won't bother you," I said, though my skin prickled anyway. She stuck her finger out as if to shake its hand. The snake slid off into the grasses, insulted.
At the river bend, the water ran clear over stones the color of old coins. Sera balanced on a boulder and pretended to command a fleet. I knelt at the bank and filled the first pail, letting the cold seep through my sleeves into my bones. The relief made me shudder. For a minute I just watched the surface wrinkle around my hands and thought about nothing.
"Ren," Sera said, suddenly softer. "Do you ever think about leaving? Not forever. Just… seeing what's past the ridge?"
"Sometimes," I said before I could stop myself. "Then I think about Dad, and the rows that won't hoe themselves."
She made a face that said I'd answered like a grown-up. "You could take me with you," she said. "I'm small, but I'm loud. Very useful."
"That's exactly what bandits look for in a traveling party," I said, and she laughed, the sound bouncing off the stones.
We carried the water back in three trips because Sera insisted on doing it "properly," which meant slow and proud and only a little spilled. By the time we returned to the field, the light had slipped from white to gold. The breeze off the river combed the wheat in slow waves. We worked the last row, side by side with Father, the way I imagined we would every year until his back couldn't bend and mine would have to bend for both of us.
Evening softened the village. Smoke thinned into delicate lines. The smith's hammer fell silent. Mother set out supper—thick slices of bread, onions fried to sweetness, a rabbit stew that had managed to catch a rabbit. We ate at the board Father had sanded smooth, where you could still see the whorls of the wood if the light hit right. Sera kicked my shin under the table twice, once by accident and once for sport. Mother pretended not to see and hid a smile in her cup.
After we'd cleaned, neighbors drifted through the lane and gathered at the green like they always did on fair nights. Garrel brought his fiddle to avenge himself on the mule. The Baker twins attempted a handstand contest and collapsed in a tangle. Someone passed around a jar of apple spirits that made everyone generous and then honest and then sleepy. I sat on the fence and watched it all, that slow, worn tapestry of people who know one another too well to be surprised.
When the sky finally let go of the day and admitted it was night, Sera tugged at my sleeve. "Come on," she said. "The Maiden's Crown will be clear tonight."
We climbed the low hill beyond the mill, the one with the scratchy grass that never quite decided whether to be soft. The stars were already pricking through velvet. Sera flopped onto her back and spread her arms wide as if she could catch them.
"There," she said, pointing. "The Hunter. See? Belt, shoulder, shoulder, knee. And there's the River. That crooked line, like when you spill water on a table and it runs where it wants."
"I see dots," I said.
"You see dots because you don't squint right." She angled my chin with bossy fingers. "There."
I squinted dutifully. The dots became lines because she said they did. I'd never admit it, but I liked the way her voice tied the sky into stories that belonged to us.
She leaned her head on my shoulder. "Do you think the old stories are true?" she asked after a while. "Heroes and dragons and bargains? Or did people just make them up to make the dark feel smaller?"
"I think people make stories out of what they want and what they're afraid of," I said, surprising myself. "Maybe that's the same thing."
"That's a very Ren answer," she said, which was a compliment and an insult. "Mother says the world is larger than our courage. Father says courage is a pair of good hands and a day's work."
"Both of them are right," I said.
We fell quiet. The crickets tuned their fiddles. Somewhere across the hollow, a dog barked twice and then remembered it didn't care. The air had that particular coolness that tells you tomorrow will be hot. Sera's breathing evened out. I thought about the ridge and the road and the places I'd never see, and then I let it go, the way you let a fish slip back into the stream because you don't have a net.
And then the sky changed.
It began as a pinprick too bright to be a star. I noticed it because it refused to sit still. It grew while I watched, very slightly at first, then enough that my eyes watered. The usual murmurs from the green fell off, as if a hand had brushed silence over the village. Even Garrel's bow stilled on the strings.
"Ren?" Sera whispered, fingers digging into my sleeve. "Ren, what is that?"
I didn't answer. The bright point dragged a tail across the darkness, a wound leaking fire. It came on with a certainty that made my stomach turn. The birds in the hedges burst out all at once and tore across the fields like a dark river. The mule brayed, a sound I'd never heard it make. Somewhere, glass broke.
The light didn't fall so much as it chose a direction and committed to it. It crossed the sky in a breath and a lifetime. For a moment—one sharp, impossible heartbeat—the world turned the color of a furnace. Shadows sharpened under our chins. The wheat flashed gold-white, every blade stamped by a second sun. Heat licked my face, quick and dry, as if I'd leaned too close to the oven when Mother opened it.
And then it went—past the ridge, beyond the far forest, disappearing the way a thrown stone disappears into deep water. No crash reached us, no roar. Only a pressure in the air, as if the sky had inhaled and forgotten how to exhale.
I realized I'd been holding Sera's hand hard enough to hurt. I loosened my grip. She didn't pull away.
All at once, the night rushed back in: crickets, a baby crying somewhere down the lane, the confused bark of the same dog as before. Voices rose—questions thrown at the dark, answers nobody had. Father's boots pounded up the hill. Mother's lantern swung, light spilling over us like a spill of warm milk.
"You two, home," Father said, voice steady in the way that told me his heart wasn't. He looked at the horizon where the light had vanished and then at us, measuring what could be done and what couldn't. "Now."
We went. On the lane, neighbors spoke in low bursts—"saw it, I swear," "never seen," "no sound at all, how—" The jar of apple spirits sat forgotten on the grass. Garrel cradled his fiddle like something that could explain the world if he tuned it long enough.
Inside, Mother set the lantern on the table and put a hand on each of our heads like she could count us by touch. Sera opened her mouth to ask a hundred questions. Mother shook her head once. Not now. Father barred the door, not because a bar would stop whatever fell out of the sky, but because bars are what you put between your family and the unknown when the unknown knocks.
We lay on our pallets with our boots still on. Through the wall, I heard Father and Mother talking in the low, flat tones people use to keep fear from waking the children. I stared at the ceiling until it wasn't a ceiling anymore, just a dark space that refused to explain itself. When I shut my eyes, the afterimage of the light hovered, a red smear that pulsed with my heartbeat.
Bramble Hollow slept badly. When I drifted off, it was to a dream of furrows that ran up into the sky and stars that sprouted like seeds.
If you asked anyone the next day, they'd say nothing changed. Goats still needed tethering. Bread still rose. The ditch by the mill still clogged and had to be cleared with a stick and cursing. But something had tilted. You don't see it at first. You feel it, like an itch under a bandage.
I didn't know it then—how could I?—but that was the last day anyone would point at me and say "nothing special" without being wrong.
It was just another ordinary day. The last one.