The morning after the shadow came down on us should have smelled of bread and smoke and dung, the way all mornings do in the village. But it didn't. The air felt thin, like the world had been hollowed out while we slept. No smoke curled from Marik's chimney. No hens complained in their coops. The dogs that usually barked at dawn pressed their bellies flat to the ground and whined instead, ears pinned back as if listening to something under the earth.
I walked the lane slow, the sickle still at my hip because I hadn't been able to set it aside. My hands itched at the memory of feathers shearing away, of tar-blood hissing into the dirt. My palms were wrapped in fresh cloth Mother pressed on me, but I swore I could still feel the sting of rope burn underneath.
Widow Edda was already sweeping, though her broom was worn to nothing but sticks. Her eyes cut to the forest, then to me. She didn't speak. No one did, not at first. It was as though words might call the wings back again.
The only sound came from the well. Buckets banging, rope fraying against the wood. When I looked, I saw the men gathered—Father among them, his shoulders bowed but his stance set, jaw clenched as if he were holding his own bones in place.
Old Marik's stool sat where it had been crushed. Nobody had moved it. A crooked handful of splinters stuck out of the dirt like broken ribs. I found myself staring at it, waiting for Marik's cough to rattle the lane, waiting for him to raise his cup in that lazy salute. Nothing came.
"Ren," Father's voice carried. Not a command, not soft either. A thread pulled taut. I left the stool behind and went to him.
The men had spread their tools on the ground in a circle: hoes, rakes, sickles, even two hunting spears with heads blackened by old fire. None of it looked like enough. The black stain where the beast's blood had fallen was still smoking faintly, the dirt around it cracked as if scorched. Nobody stood too close.
"It bled," one of the men whispered, as if the word itself might break. "I saw it. The boy cut it."
All eyes shifted to me. Heat rose in my face though the air was cold. My throat tightened. I wanted to tell them I hadn't thought, that the sickle had swung itself, that I was no braver than any of them. But the way they looked at me, I knew the truth no words could unmake: I was part of it now. Marked, same as the ground where the tar had fallen.
"It'll come back," another said. His voice shook. "They always come back when you hurt them."
Father's gaze silenced him. My father's eyes weren't like the others. He'd faced storms that flattened our roofs, wolves that stole lambs, hunger that made a man want to bite his own hand. His stare was iron hammered flat: unbending, sharp. "Then we'll be ready," he said.
"Ready?" Widow Edda's broom snapped against the dirt. "With what? A few rusty blades and your stubborn back? This isn't a fox sniffing at the coop. This is something older than our soil. It doesn't come for chickens. It comes for names."
Her eyes flicked to me. I wanted to look away, but couldn't. My stomach knotted, tighter than rope pulled on a winch.
"We can leave," someone said from the edge of the circle. "Go east, beyond the ridge. Take the children, the animals, what we can carry—"
"And abandon the fields?" Father's voice was flat. "Abandon the graves of our own? The forest follows. You think it won't? You think we'll find some place where its shadow won't touch?"
The men muttered. Some nodded with him. Others shifted their feet, eyes darting to the treeline as if weighing the worth of soil against the worth of breath.
Mother arrived then, Sera at her hip, both of them pale but unshaken. She didn't speak to the men. She came straight to me, set her hands on my face, turned it left, then right. Searching. "No more foolish charges," she whispered, low enough that only I heard. "I've one son, and I'll not give him to a shadow."
"I couldn't just stand—"
Her palm pressed over my mouth, gentle but firm. "You could. You must, next time."
Sera tugged at my sleeve. Her voice trembled like the flame of the oil lamp on our table. "I saw it looking at you."
I swallowed hard. "I know."
Her grip tightened. "Don't go near it again, Ren. Promise me."
I opened my mouth. The promise stuck, heavy and impossible, in my chest.
The men argued on. Plans rose and fell like waves breaking against rock: fortify the houses, dig trenches, post watches at the edge of the fields. All the while, the forest sat beyond us, black and unmoving, its silence a dare none of us would take.
By noon, the arguments had worn thin. Nothing decided, nothing mended. Father gathered the tools back into his arms and said only, "We work the fields until the soil refuses us. No shadow feeds a man. The earth does." His voice had the finality of stone.
The men dispersed slowly, shoulders hunched, eyes cast anywhere but skyward.
Back at the house, Mother busied herself with stew though she'd barely any meat to spare. She stirred as if the motion alone could beat back fear. Father sat with the whetstone, the sickle laid across his knee, his strokes slow and even. The scrape of steel on stone filled the silence that no one dared to break.
I sat by the window, looking toward the forest. My palms throbbed under their bandages. My heart hadn't slowed since last night. Every time the wind shifted the branches, I thought I heard wings again.
That evening, when the lamps were lit and the shadows grew long in the corners of the room, Sera brought me the crust she'd hidden for me again. "In case you can't sleep," she said. Her smile was small, fragile as a cracked eggshell.
But when I laid on the straw, listening to the house breathe, I knew sleep wouldn't come. The image of those ember eyes lived behind my lids. The beat of its wings still pressed against my chest. And somewhere, far off in the forest, something answered a call I hadn't yet learned to hear.
I whispered Father's words to myself, steady and low, trying to bind them to bone:
"Steady hands. Steady mind. Even poor soil can yield fruit."
But the truth rooted itself deeper with every heartbeat:
The soil wasn't the only thing that had been marked last night.