The statues were already crumbling when I was born.
By then, no one remembered the day the sky split open or the sound the Dark One made when he died. They remembered the story, of course—everyone remembered the story—but stories harden with age. The sharp edges wear down. The terror dulls. Victory becomes neat.
The Hero stood in every square, carved from stone hauled down from the mountains. Sword raised. Cloak forever frozen in wind that no longer blew. Children climbed those statues. Lovers kissed in their shadows. Merchants leaned carts against their bases and complained about chipped marble.
The prophecy had been fulfilled three generations ago. Evil was defeated. The world was saved.
And yet, every year, the winters grew longer.
I was born in the last house on the eastern road, where the city thinned into fields and the fields into nothing. My mother used to say that meant I arrived late to everything. Late to the war. Late to the glory. Late to meaning.
"You missed the age of miracles," she told me once, braiding my hair by the hearth. "Be grateful. Miracles always leave scars."
She died the next winter, when the river froze solid and stayed that way through spring.
The priests said it was an illness. The healers said it was the cold. No one said what we all thought: that the world was sick, and no one knew how to cure it anymore.
I was seventeen when the bells rang again.
They had not rung for prophecy in a lifetime.
At first, I thought it was a funeral. Bells rang often enough for that—too often. But funerals rang slow and low, with long pauses that let grief breathe between notes.
These bells were fast. Urgent. Afraid.
I was working the southern wall, patching cracks with mortar that refused to set properly in the cold. The stone felt wrong under my hands. It always had. As if the city itself no longer trusted what it was built on.
When the bells started, everyone froze.
Tools slipped from numb fingers. A bird burst from the parapet and vanished into the gray sky. Somewhere far below, a child began to cry, and no one shushed them.
The bell tower door flew open, and Old Marrec stumbled out, face white beneath his beard.
"It's the flame," he shouted. "The Everflame's gone out."
No one spoke.
The Everflame did not go out. That was the point of it.
Lit by the Hero himself on the night the prophecy ended, it burned in the central cathedral without fuel, smoke, or flicker. A symbol, the priests said. Proof, the kings claimed. An anchor, the scholars whispered, when they thought no one important was listening.
The world stood because the flame burned.
I dropped my trowel.
Someone laughed—a short, sharp sound that broke too quickly to be joy. "That's not possible," a mason said. "It's never gone out."
Old Marrec swallowed. "It has now."
The city moved as one after that, pulled inward toward the cathedral. I was carried with them, boots slipping on frost-slick stone, breath burning in my chest. The streets narrowed as we approached the inner ring, buildings leaning closer together as if to listen.
The statue of the Hero dominated the square before the cathedral. Someone had tied fresh ribbons around its wrist, red and gold, fraying in the wind. The sword tip pointed directly at the great doors.
Those doors stood open.
Darkness spilled out.
Inside, the cathedral was cold in a way that had nothing to do with winter. The Everflame's basin sat empty at the altar's heart. No ember. No glow. Just blackened stone and a faint smell like extinguished candles.
The High Priest knelt before it, hands shaking, lips moving in prayer that no longer had a listener.
"It will relight," someone said behind me. "It always does."
But no one stepped forward to try.
The silence stretched, thin and tight as wire.
Then the first crack sounded.
It came from above, from the great stained-glass dome that depicted the prophecy's final moment—the Hero striking down the Dark One, light bursting outward to cleanse the land.
A hairline fracture split the glass from edge to center.
Another followed.
Someone screamed as the dome shattered, shards raining down like frozen color. We scattered, slipping and colliding, as pieces struck stone and flesh alike. I felt a sharp pain along my forearm and barely noticed.
When the echoes faded, the cathedral lay in ruin.
The Everflame did not return.
They sealed the cathedral by nightfall. By morning, the city gates were shut. By the third day, the king's messengers arrived, cloaks heavy with frost and fear.
They brought proclamations. Reassurances. Lies.
"The flame is being tended," the notices read. "A temporary disturbance. The prophecy stands fulfilled."
But the crops failed that season anyway.
Not all at once. That would have been merciful.
First, the barley refused to sprout. Then the wheat grew thin and pale, stalks bending beneath heads that never filled. The orchards bloomed early and froze. The river broke its banks and then vanished beneath ice thick enough to bear wagons.
Beyond the walls, villages went silent.
The roads filled with people carrying everything they owned, which was never much. They spoke of shadows moving where they should not. Of wolves that did not flee fire. Of ruins older than memory waking and remembering their purpose.
The priests prayed harder.
The scholars argued louder.
The king sent soldiers.
None of it helped.
I left the city when my ration card ran out.
There was no ceremony to it. No final look back. I wrapped my mother's scarf tighter around my neck and joined the eastbound line at dawn, when the guards were too tired to ask questions they did not want answered.
The world beyond the walls felt thinner, stretched. Sounds carried too far. The wind seemed to hesitate before touching anything, as if unsure it still belonged.
On the third night, I dreamed of the Hero.
He stood at the edge of a battlefield I did not recognize, armor cracked, eyes hollow. The sword lay broken at his feet.
"You're too late," he said, not accusing, just tired.
"I wasn't born yet," I replied, and woke with frost on my lashes.
I reached the old watchtower at the borderlands a week later.
It should have been abandoned. Everyone knew that. The border wars ended with the prophecy, and the towers were left to rot, their purpose fulfilled along with everything else.
Smoke rose from its chimney.
I approached carefully, hand on the small knife at my belt, heart thudding. The door opened before I could knock.
A woman stood there, tall and wrapped in a cloak patched more times than I could count. Her hair was iron-gray, her eyes sharp as cut stone.
"You're late," she said.
"I didn't know I was expected," I replied.
She studied my face for a long moment, then stepped aside. "No one ever does."
Inside, the tower was warmer than it had any right to be. A fire crackled, real and ordinary. Maps covered the walls, layered over older maps, some so worn they were little more than ghostly outlines.
"You felt it, didn't you?" the woman asked, pouring water into a kettle. "When the flame went out."
"Yes," I said, though I did not know how she could tell.
She nodded. "Good. That means you're not deaf to the world yet."
"I'm not special," I said quickly. "I missed the prophecy. I missed everything."
A corner of her mouth twitched. "So did the rest of us. That's the problem."
She gestured to a map pinned with black markers. "The Hero died doing what the prophecy demanded. He ended the Dark One. He broke the cycle."
My stomach tightened. "Isn't that what everyone wanted?"
"Yes," she said. "And now the world doesn't know how to continue."
She met my gaze fully then, and for the first time I saw the exhaustion beneath her sharpness. The weight of years spent watching cracks spread through something everyone else insisted was whole.
"Prophecies don't just predict," she continued. "They bind. They hold things in place. When this one ended, it took more with it than anyone understood."
I thought of the Everflame's empty basin. Of the shattered dome. Of winters that refused to leave.
"What do you want from me?" I asked.
She smiled, and there was no comfort in it.
"Nothing," she said. "At least, not yet. But the world is coming apart, and it's looking for something to blame."
She handed me a piece of old parchment. It was blank, save for a single line written in a hand so faded it might vanish if I blinked.
When the story ends too soon, the ending begins to rot.
"You were born after the ending," she said softly. "That makes you dangerous."
Outside, the wind shifted, carrying a sound I had never heard before—like stone grinding against itself, deep beneath the earth.
The woman went to the window, hand tightening on the frame.
"It's started," she murmured.
I did not ask what it was.
Somehow, I already knew.