Clare Fairford roamed the empty fields like a shadeborn made flesh.
The air was thick, heavy with the ghosts of things that had burned. Ash settled on his shoulders like a fine grey snow. The sky above, where dawn should have been, held a strange, bruised glow; the color of old legends whispered by the sod-cutters and wattle-men, the color they said the heavens turned when a wyvern breathed its last upon the clouds.
At first, that was what Clare had assumed. A chimera. A wyvern. Some beast of myth that had descended upon their quiet stead and unmade it with fire.
He remembered running back from the river, the world still ringing from the initial blast. He'd seen the blazing mound of timber and rubble that had been his home. He'd heard something that sounded like Hese screaming: a thin, sharp sound swallowed by the roar of the flames. He'd taken half a step forward, his mind screaming saveher, before a secondary blast had erupted from the ruin. A tremendous gust of wind and heat had thrown him backward into the smoldering lawn, and the world had gone dark.
When he opened his eyes next, the pile was a smoldering wound in the earth. The lattice of solid oak that had framed the cottage was now just charcoal, skeletal fingers clawing at the sky. The wattle-and-daub walls had crumbled back into the mud they were made from.
His eyes filled with tears, hot and stinging against the ash on his cheeks. He spent hours digging. He pulled at charred beams that crumbled in his small hands. He clawed at the collapsed earth, his fingers raw and blistered, his dirty blond hair singed at the tips. He kept digging, driven by a desperate, childish hope that he might find something—anything—that had survived.
He found nothing.
There was no point. It was too late. It had been too late the moment the sky had turned white.
He finally gave up and sat in the dirt before the ruin of his house. His small, quaint cottage. The place where his entire world had lived.
What had he ever asked for? He had had everything. The gruff, distant affection of his father, Erle. The deep, warm love of his mother, Wynd, who always smelled of the kitchen and the fields when she hugged him. His laughing siblings: Lorn, his older brother; Hese, his fierce little sister; and Corey, the baby, who had just learned to grasp his finger.
They were all gone.
And he was all alone.
The tears began to roll down then. They came first as a silent trickle, tracing clean paths through the soot on his face. Then, as the full weight of the silence pressed in on him, the trickle became a flood. He choked on a sob, his small body shaking with a grief too large for it to hold.
And as if the sky itself were mourning with him, it began to rain. A slow, cold drizzle of water and ash that turned the world to grey mud around the boy who had lost everything.
–––
Rain and ash fell in turns for three days.
Clare walked through it, a small shadow wrapped in his father's wool cloak. It had been the only thing he had managed to drag from the wreckage that did not crumble at his touch. He left the Fairford stead behind, left the orchards where bees once hummed, left the stone marker where the old road met the river ford. He did not choose a direction; his legs simply carried him east, the way the dawn should have risen but never did.
He passed other farmlets, each one a black scar. At one holding the stone bake-oven still stood, its arched mouth gaping like a toothless skull; at another a single paddock post smoldered, glowing at the heart like banked coals. Once he found a cow wandering in circles, hide singed, eyes white with pain. It lowed once and crumpled where it stood. Clare whispered an apology he did not understand and kept walking.
He slept where he fell: beneath a hedgerow the first night, curled among bracken the next. Hunger gnawed, but grief was the larger beast; it swallowed every simpler pain. On the morning of the fourth day, the ash-rain thinned and a weak, colourless sun struggled above the horizon.
By noon he glimpsed chimneys and slate roofs ahead; not a village, but a proper crossroads town. A timber gate straddled the rutted track. Two lanterns hung unlit and sooty from its lintel. Beyond, the road forked: north toward the Midlands heartland, south toward the depth of the land beyond the Midlands. Traders' wagons clustered inside the palisade in anxious knots. Soldiers in leather jacks kept loose order with spear butts.
Clare's knees trembled as he reached the gate. The world tilted and a low roar filled his ears. He managed two more steps, then the cloak and the ash-stained tunic pulled him forward and darkness swept up to catch him.
***
When vision returned, it was to the flicker of a hearth. He lay on a straw pallet in a low-beamed chamber that smelled of rosemary and boiled oats. A kindly, stout figure knelt beside him, wiping soot from his face with a damp cloth.
The man's hair was snow-white, cut short about the ears. A neatly trimmed beard of the same colour framed a deeply lined face. But his eyes were brown, steady, and warm. They held no judgment, only quiet concern.
"There we are, lad," the stranger murmured, voice rough like worn wool. "Easy breaths. You're safe in Waymeet Hollow."
Clare tried to rise. A gentle hand pressed him back.
"Rest first. There shall be talk after."
Footsteps and hushed voices drifted through the open door. Clare heard snippets: the boy from the ash-lands… lone survivor… Gates' farm burned as well… He shut his eyes, wishing he could shut out the world; the words buzzed like wasps.
Later—how long he did not know—the white-haired man set a wooden bowl by the pallet: thin porridge sweetened with honey. Clare's stomach cramped at the smell, but hunger won. He ate in shaking spoonfuls.
Only when the bowl was empty did the man speak his name.
"I am called Vizier Vygrl'd," he said. "Most folk shorten it to 'the Vizier,' though I've no court to serve these days. I keep a ledger for the trade guild and patch up travellers when I can."
Clare licked a trace of honey from his thumb. His voice came out as a whisper. "I am Clare Fairford. Of… of Fairford Stead. Or I was."
The Vizier's eyes softened. "I passed those fields two summers ago. Good barley land."
"It burned," Clare said, the two words carrying all the weight of the days behind him.
"I know." The Vizier folded his hands. "Caravans brought word. A white fire from the sky, they said, not wyvern flame, not mage-cast. A thing the oldest songs never named."
Clare's lip trembled. "I could not save them."
"No child could." The Vizier placed a steady hand on Clare's shoulder. "But you saved yourself, and that is a seed. Seeds grow, given time and care."
Clare blinked hard. "What will become of me?"
"That depends." The Vizier's gaze did not waver. "Waymeet Hollow feeds the road but cannot feed another orphan long. Yet caravan-masters always need quick hands. The Adventurer Register posts novice writs each quarter-moon. And…" A small smile. "There is the guild-scribe who could use an assistant with neat penmanship, should you have it."
"I can read," Clare offered. "My mother taught me letters of the Psalter."
"Reading is coin in a scribe hall," the Vizier said. "Eat, rest, and we shall see which path feels truest when your strength returns."
***
Word travelled faster than wagons. By dusk the story of the ash-child had spread from the gatehouse to the last ale-stall: a lone boy walking out of the white-burnt farms, falling at the Vizier's feet like a spirit of mourning itself. Some pitied him. Some whispered omens. A few spoke of dark portents: skyfires, rampaging chimeras, rumours of southern hinter things stirring.
In a corner loft above the guild office, Clare slept for the first time without dreams of fire. Outside, the crossroads lanterns guttered in a dry wind. Far beyond that wind, six strangers from a dead world trudged east across trackless plain, following an instinct older than maps. Dawn would come for none of them yet; but their roads were already bending toward the same dark horizon.