Lyra Moonwhisper stood at the tavern door, rain soaking her silver hair, plastering it to her head, running down her neck like cold fingers. She watched the stranger fall from his horse, watched him collapse in the mud, watched the life drain out of him like water from a broken vessel.
She saw the stranger.
She saw more.
To everyone else in Thornwick, to her foster mother Martha sweeping the tavern floor, to the villagers watching from their windows, he was just an injured mercenary, a pathetic figure collapsed in the mud, another victim of the darkness that had consumed so many. Just another dying man in a dying world.
But to Lyra's eyes, three shadows of death coiled around his body like black mist like snakes, foretelling three different deaths, three paths that fate could take him.
The first shadow was the wound infection. She could see it clearly—a black mist wrapping around his side, where the crossbow bolt had struck him. Within three days, without treatment, without magic, he would die of blood poisoning. His blood would turn black, his organs would fail, his heart would stop. The shadow had a timeline, a countdown that was already running.
The second shadow was the pursuers. Seven figures in white robes, their faces hidden behind silver masks, their holy light staffs glowing faintly in the rain. They were coming this way, following his trail, tracking him like hounds on the scent of his blood. They would find this place in two days. The shadow had a direction, a purpose, a determination that would not be stopped.
The third shadow... Lyra couldn't see it clearly. It was a deeper darkness, like something ancient was awakening, something that had slept for a long time and was now opening its eyes. It had no timeline, no countdown, because it wasn't death—it was transformation. Something in this stranger was changing, becoming something new, something that had never existed before.
"Lyra!" Her foster mother Martha's voice called from behind her, rough with worry and age. "Get inside, you'll catch your death! The rain's getting worse, and there's nothing you can do for that man. He's gone, and you can't save him."
"Mother, that man..." Lyra pointed to the stranger collapsed in the mud, her voice trembling with something she couldn't name, something that felt like destiny. "He needs help. I can see it—his death shadows, they're coiling around him like snakes. But there's something else too, something... bright. Something that's fighting back."
Martha sighed and walked out, her boots crunching on the muddy ground. She was a woman in her fifties, weathered by years and worry, her face a map of lines that told stories of hardship and loss. She looked at the stranger and shook her head, her eyes sad with the weight of too many deaths seen. "He's dying, child. We can't save him. The wound's cursed, I can see the blackness spreading from it. Even if we could get him inside, even if we had a healer, there's nothing that can stop that kind of poison. It's Church work, that wound. Holy water on the bolt, blessed to prevent healing, to make the death slow and painful."
"No," Lyra said, her voice unusually firm, unusually certain. "I can save him. I can feel it—there's power in him, something that's fighting the death shadows. Something that's stronger than the poison. If I can help it, if I can give it strength..."
She knelt in the mud, not caring that it soaked her skirts, not caring that the cold was seeping into her bones. She placed her hand on his wound, and silver runes began to glow on her wrist, faint light cutting through the rain like starlight through storm clouds. She could feel his life force draining away, like sand through an hourglass, each grain falling irreversible, each heartbeat weaker than the last.
But in that draining, in that fading, she felt something else.
Fire.
Deep in his blood, beneath the poison, beneath the death shadows, a slumbering fire burned. Ancient. Powerful. Dangerous. It was like nothing she had ever felt before, like nothing that should exist in a human body. It was dragon fire, she realized with a jolt of recognition. Dragon blood, the most forbidden of all magics, the most hunted of all powers. The Church burned dragon-blooded children at birth. The Kingdoms executed dragon-blooded adults on sight. And here, in the mud of Thornwick, lay a man with dragon fire burning in his veins.
"Bring him inside," Lyra looked up, purple eyes burning with strange light, with a power that was hers and yet not hers. "Now. Before the pursuers come. Before the death shadows win."
Martha looked at her foster daughter, really looked at her, and saw something she had never seen before. Lyra had always had the sight, had always seen death shadows, had always known when people were going to die. But she had never looked like this, never had this fire in her eyes, never had this determination that went beyond saving a life, that felt like saving the world.
"Help me get him inside," Martha said, her voice changing, becoming something harder, something that accepted what was coming. "Then we'll see what we can do."
Together, they lifted the dying stranger from the mud, carried him into the tavern, laid him on a bed in the back room where the herbs were kept, where the smell of dried sage and old wine filled the air. And as Lyra placed her hands on his wound, as silver light began to flow from her palms into his flesh, she felt the dragon fire respond, felt it reach for her, felt it recognize her.
And she knew, with a certainty that terrified her, that nothing would ever be the same again.