The sun did not feel like a blessing. To me, it felt like an interrogation. It beat down on my neck, demanding to know why my skin stayed pale while the village girls tanned, and why the air around my fingers shimmered with a heat that didn't belong to the season.
Crackle.
I looked down. The dry grass beneath my bare feet was turning black. Not from fire—there was no flame—but from the sheer, suffocating intensity of whatever lived inside my marrow.
"Nytheris! Get back inside! Now!"
My mother's voice was a whip. I looked up to see Elara standing in the doorway of our leaning cottage. She looked exhausted. Her hair, once the color of wheat, was streaked with gray that had no business being there. That was my fault, too. Every time I "glitched," a new line appeared on her face.
Whoosh.
A sudden gust of wind caught the laundry she hung, but the wind was wrong. It smelled of ozone and expensive incense. My heart hammered against my ribs—thump-thump, thump-thump—a frantic rhythm that made the pebbles at my feet begin to vibrate.
"They're coming again, aren't they?" I whispered.
"Inside," she hissed, grabbing my arm. Her grip was tight, desperate. "The children are near the creek. If they see your eyes turning gold, Nytheris, I can't protect you. I can't tell them it's just the light anymore."
"I hate it," I snarled, the words tasting like copper. "I hate being his. I hate being yours. I just want to be nothing."
"Don't you dare say that," she whispered, her eyes filling with a terrifying mix of love and pity. "You are the bridge, my beautiful, broken girl."
Splash!
A chorus of laughter erupted from the nearby woods. I froze. I knew that laugh. It was Elias. He was twelve, two years older than me, and his voice was already beginning to drop into a steady, comforting resonance. Through the thicket, I saw them—a group of village boys splashing in the shallow water. Elias was at the center, lifting a smaller boy onto his shoulders. He looked so grounded. So real. He didn't have to worry about the grass dying where he stepped.
"Look at the freak's house!" one of the boys shouted, pointing toward us. "The air is shaking again! My dad says the devil lives in their well!"
"Shut up, Leo!" Elias shouted back, though he looked toward our cottage with a furrowed brow. "It's just the heat. Leave them alone."
My chest ached. A physical, localized pain that felt like a hot needle threading through my lungs. I wanted to run to him. I wanted to ask him how it felt to just be a boy.
BOOM.
The sky didn't crack; it shattered. There wasn't a cloud in sight, but a bolt of pure, white radiance struck the center of our garden, throwing me and my mother backward.
Riiing.
My ears erupted in a high-pitched whine. Dust filled my throat. I coughed, pushing myself up from the dirt, my vision swimming. In the center of the smoking crater stood a man who looked like he was made of polished marble and cruelty.
My father. Lord Aethelon.
He didn't look at my mother. He didn't look at the screaming children fleeing the creek in terror. He looked at me like I was a smudge on a fine painting.
"You are leaking again, little spark," he said. His voice wasn't loud, but it vibrated in my teeth. It was the sound of a mountain moving.
"Leave her alone," my mother screamed, throwing a shard of a broken ceramic pot at him. It didn't even reach his skin; it turned to fine white sand a foot away from his face. "You gave her to me! You swore she could stay!"
"I swore she could stay as long as she remained hidden," Aethelon said, stepping toward me. Each footfall sounded like a heavy drum—Thud. Thud. "But the veil is thinning. The villagers whisper. The other gods laugh behind my back about my... mistake in the mud."
"I'm not a mistake," I spat, standing up. My hands were shaking, and for the first time, I didn't try to stop the heat. I let it roar. "I'm a person. I'm her daughter."
Aethelon's eyes flared—a blinding, solar yellow. "You are a half-finished thought. A divine soul trapped in a rotting meat-suit. You think this life is yours? Look at them."
He gestured toward the woods. I saw Elias. He hadn't run as far as the others. He was crouched behind a tree, his face pale with a terror I had never seen before. He wasn't looking at the god. He was looking at me. Because my hair was floating in an invisible current, and my skin was beginning to glow with a terrifying, sickly light.
"Nytheris?" Elias whispered. The sound was tiny, but to my ears, it was a death knell.
"See?" Aethelon sneered. "To him, you are a monster. You will watch him grow old. You will watch him take a wife who breathes air, not fire. You will watch him die, and you will still be exactly this: a freak in a dungeon of your own making."
"Fuck you," I whispered.
My mother gasped. The God of Embers froze.
"What did you say, you little wretch?"
"I said fuck you," I screamed, and this time, the power didn't just leak. It exploded. A wave of concussive heat blasted outward, shattering the windows of our cottage and leveling the fence.
Crrr-ack!
The ancient oak tree near the creek split down the middle. My mother screamed as she was blown back into the house. I saw Elias fall, his hands covering his head as splinters of wood rained down on him.
For a second, I felt powerful. For a second, I felt like a god.
Then I saw the blood on Elias's forehead where a stone had grazed him. I saw the sheer horror in his eyes as he looked at me—not as a friend, but as a natural disaster.
"Nytheris, stop!" my mother wailed from the ruins of our porch.
I looked at my hands. They were wreathed in white-hot static. I looked at the boy I loved, and I realized my father was right. I wasn't part of his world. I was the thing that would eventually burn it down if I stayed.
Aethelon laughed, a cold, metallic sound. "There she is. There is the goddess. Come, Nytheris. Let the woman have her dirt. You belong in the heights, where your 'accidents' won't kill the cattle."
I looked back at Elias one last time. He was scrambling backward, stumbling, desperate to get away from the girl he used to share apples with. He didn't say goodbye. He just ran.
Drip. Drip.
Rain started to fall—but it wasn't water. It was gray soot, falling from a sky that had turned the color of a bruised lung.
"I'm not going to your palace," I said, my voice dead and hollow. I felt a coldness starting at my center, spreading outward, quenching the fire until I felt like a hollow shell. "I'm going somewhere where I don't have to see any of you."
I walked toward my mother, who was shaking, her eyes wide with a fear that hurt worse than my father's contempt. I didn't hug her. I couldn't. I was afraid I'd incinerate her.
"I'm sorry, Mama," I whispered.
I turned to my father, the golden man who had ruined my soul before I even knew I had one.
"Take me to the Citadel," I commanded. "But not to the halls. Not to the feasts."
Aethelon tilted his head, his golden brow arching. "And where exactly do you think you belong, little spark?"
I looked at the soot-covered ground, at the charred grass, and the distant, retreating figure of the only person who had ever made me feel human.
"The bottom," I said. "Put me in the dark."
As the world began to dissolve into a swirl of divine transport—vwoom—the last thing I heard was the sound of my mother's sobbing, and the last thing I felt was the crushing realization that Elias hadn't even looked back.