Kaelen walked home through the gray twilight, and the world felt like it was ending.
Not dramatically—not with fire or screams or the ground shaking. Just... fading. The light bleeding out of the sky. The warmth bleeding out of the ash beneath his feet. The hope bleeding out of his chest, slow and steady, like smoke from a fire that had never really caught.
She didn't answer. She never answers.
He'd known, hadn't he? Deep down, in the place where children keep their ugliest truths, he'd known. Goddesses didn't listen to stutterers. They didn't listen to boys whose own fathers couldn't look at them. They listened to heroes. To warriors. To people who mattered.
I don't matter.
The thought sat in his stomach, heavy as stone.
He wiped his face with his sleeve—again—but the tears kept coming, silent and stupid, no matter how much he hated them. His nose ran. His throat ached. His chest hitched with sobs he couldn't quite swallow.
Why can't I stop? Why can't I be normal? Why can't I—
"Kael."
He flinched. Looked up.
Old woman Venn stood in the doorway of her hut, watching him with eyes that had seen sixty summers of Attending. She said nothing else—just his name, just that look—and Kaelen felt something shift in his chest.
She knows. She always knows.
He hurried past without speaking. What would he say anyway? What words could possibly explain the mess of him?
The path to his family's hut curved between low stone walls, past huts where families sat together around their evening fires. He could hear them through the leather flaps—laughter, conversation, the ordinary sounds of people who belonged to each other. People who didn't have to wonder if they were wanted.
His family's hut sat silent at the end of the path.
Kaelen stopped outside the entrance. Through the leather, he could see the dim glow of their fire pit. Hear the occasional clink of a pot being moved. Nothing else.
Just go in. Just walk in. They're your parents.
But his feet wouldn't move.
What if he looks at me again? What if she looks away again? What if I walk in there and nothing changes and I have to feel this forever?
He stood in the cold—the relative cold, the cold that came when the kiln's warmth didn't quite reach—and tried to remember a time when home had felt like safety.
He couldn't.
How can I be useful?
The question came from nowhere, or maybe from everywhere. How could he be useful to parents who saw him as shame? How could he be anything but a burden, a reminder of blood that had gone wrong?
If I could work. If I could hunt. If I could do something—anything—that mattered. But I can't even speak without—
His throat closed. His eyes burned.
I just want to play. I just want to run with the others and laugh and not think about any of this. I just want to be a child.
But children in Ash Valley didn't get to be children. Not really. Not with what was coming.
He didn't know what was coming. Nobody had told him.
That was about to change.
---
On the other side of the village, in a hollow between the sorting pits and the old storehouse, four children sat in a circle and tried to pretend they weren't afraid.
Ruk Naylor picked at a scab on his knee. Mina leaned against the storehouse wall, her braids coming loose. Dorn sat cross-legged, his missing tooth making him look younger than eleven. And Mira—the fourth, the quiet one, the girl who'd been harsh to Kaelen that morning—sat apart, her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes on nothing.
"They'll be here by the new moon," Dorn said. His voice was flat, the way adults used when they talked about death. "My father heard the scouts. Knights from the lowlands. A whole company."
Ruk stopped picking his scab. "How many?"
"Hundreds. Maybe more."
Mina's breath caught. "Hundreds? Our whole village doesn't have—"
"I know."
Silence settled over them like ash after an eruption. Each of them had heard the stories. Each of them knew what happened to villages that couldn't pay the tribute, couldn't fight the knights, couldn't do anything except burn.
"The elders are meeting tonight," Dorn continued. "They're going to decide who goes to the front lines."
"Who goes?" Mira's voice was sharp. "You mean who dies."
Nobody corrected her.
Ruk's jaw tightened. "My father says the front lines are a joke. A few dozen men with sharpened sticks against knights in full armor. We'll be dead in an hour."
"Then why fight?" Mina's voice cracked. "Why not just—I don't know—run?"
"Run where?" Dorn laughed, bitter and hollow. "The lowlands are where they're coming from. The mountains are impassable this time of year. We're in a bowl, Mina. A bowl full of ash, and they're about to pour water on us and watch us drown."
Mira spoke again, quieter now. "What about the children?"
Another silence.
Ruk broke it. "The elders won't send children to the front. That's not—they're not monsters."
"No." Dorn's voice was careful, measured. "But they'll send anyone who can hold a weapon. Anyone over twelve. Anyone who looks like they might be useful."
Ruk was twelve. Dorn was eleven, but tall for his age. Mina was nine, small, unnoticed—she might be safe. Mira was ten, the same as Kaelen, small-boned and quiet.
"Kaelen," Mira said suddenly.
The others looked at her.
"He's ten. He's—" She hesitated, searching for the right word. "He's not strong. He can't—they wouldn't take him, would they?"
Ruk's expression shifted. Something flickered behind his eyes—guilt, maybe, or the ghost of it.
"He's weak," Dorn said flatly. "Pathetic. They won't waste resources on someone who can't fight."
"Then he'll be safe?" Mina asked.
Dorn and Ruk exchanged a look. The look said things children shouldn't have to know.
"Safe," Ruk said slowly, "means staying in the village while the rest of us—" He stopped. Swallowed. "While the rest of us go to the front."
Mina's face went pale. "You're going to volunteer?"
"If I don't, they'll conscript me anyway. At least this way—" He shrugged, the gesture too adult for his twelve-year-old shoulders. "At least this way my mother gets the death payment."
"Dying for coin," Mira murmured. "What a world."
Silence again. Longer this time.
Then Mira said, "Does he know?"
Nobody asked who.
"His parents haven't told him," Dorn said. "I heard my mother talking to his. They're protecting him. Keeping him innocent until—" He stopped.
"Until what?"
"Until they can't anymore."
Mina pulled her knees to her chest. "Maybe that's better. Maybe not knowing is kinder."
"Is it?" Mira's voice was sharp again. "Is it kinder to let him wake up one day and find the village burning around him with no idea why?"
Ruk looked at her. "What do you want us to do? Go knock on his door and say 'Hey Kaelen, sorry we've been bullying you, by the way we're all probably going to die in a few weeks, good luck'?"
"That's not—"
"That's exactly what you're suggesting."
Mira's jaw tightened. "I'm suggesting we treat him like a person. Like someone who deserves to know what's coming. Like—" She stopped, her voice breaking. "Like we haven't spent years making his life miserable for no reason."
Dorn shifted uncomfortably. "It wasn't for no reason."
"Then what was the reason? Because he stutters? Because he's weak? Because it made us feel bigger?"
Nobody answered.
Mira looked at each of them in turn. "We're selfish. All of us. We bully him because it's easier than admitting we're scared. We push him away because if he's close to us, we might have to care about what happens to him. And now—" She laughed, ugly and broken. "Now we're sitting here deciding whether to tell him he might die, like it's a choice we get to make."
Ruk's voice was quiet. "What do you want us to do?"
Mira was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "I don't know. But I know this—if we keep him in the dark, if we let him walk into whatever's coming without warning, we're not protecting him. We're protecting ourselves. From having to watch his face when he finds out."
Dorn opened his mouth to respond, but Mina cut him off.
"She's right." Her voice was small. "I've been horrible to him. We all have. And maybe—" She swallowed. "Maybe if we told him, if we were kind to him just once, it wouldn't fix anything. But it would be something."
Ruk stared at the ground. His hands had curled into fists without him noticing.
"He's desperate," he said finally. "You've seen him. He'd do anything to be accepted. If we go to him now, if we're suddenly nice to him after years of—" He gestured vaguely. "He'll do something stupid. Something to prove himself. And with what's coming—" He shook his head. "Better he stays home. Better he hates us. At least then he'll be alive."
Mira wanted to argue. He could see it in her eyes—the need to push back, to fight for something that felt right.
But she didn't.
Because she knew, in the deep place where children keep their ugliest truths, that Ruk was right.
Sometimes cruelty was kindness wearing a mask.
Sometimes the only way to save someone was to make them hate you.
---
Far from the children's hollow, at the edge of the village where the ash gave way to barren rock, an old man sat on a bed of stones and watched the darkness gather.
Elder Morvath had seen seventy-seven summers. He had buried two wives, three children, and more friends than he could count. He had watched the volcano smoke and simmer and occasionally rage, and he had never once doubted that the goddess was watching over them.
Tonight, for the first time, doubt crept into his chest like cold.
We can't win.
The thought was not new. He'd had it every night for a week, ever since the scouts returned with news of the knights. But tonight it sat heavier, pressed deeper, refused to be ignored.
We can't win. We can't run. We can't hide.
Three impossibilities. Three walls with no doors.
And yet—beneath the doubt, beneath the fear, beneath the weight of seventy-seven years of knowing how the world worked—something else flickered.
The goddess.
He looked toward the mountain. It rose against the darkening sky, its peak hidden in perpetual smoke, its slopes scarred with ancient flows. The fire that lived there had burned before his great-grandparents were born. It would burn after his great-grandchildren were ash.
She has never abandoned us. She will not abandon us now.
Was that faith? Or was it desperation wearing faith's clothes?
Morvath didn't know. He wasn't sure it mattered.
We will fight. We will endure. We will feed the kiln until our last breath. And if the goddess wills it—
He stopped.
A flicker.
At the mountain's peak, just for an instant, the smoke glowed orange. Brighter than usual. Hotter.
Then it was gone.
Morvath blinked. Stared. Waited.
Nothing.
Just the mountain being the mountain. Just fire doing what fire does.
But his heart beat faster, and his hands trembled slightly, and he couldn't quite convince himself that what he'd seen was ordinary.
He sat on his bed of stones, watching the darkness, waiting for a sign that might never come.
And behind him, in the village, four children rose from their hollow and walked toward homes that might soon be ash, carrying secrets they couldn't share and guilt they couldn't shed.
---
Kaelen finally pushed through the leather flap.
His parents sat by the fire, not speaking. His father's face was gray with exhaustion. His mother's hands moved mechanically, stirring broth that had long since cooled.
They looked up when he entered.
His father opened his mouth—to scold, to shame, to say something that would cut—but his mother's hand touched his arm, and he closed it again.
"Sit," Sella said quietly. "Eat."
Kaelen sat.
Nobody spoke.
And somewhere, twelve miles away, deep in the mountain's burning heart, something that might have been a goddess stirred in her sleep.
---