Morning had already wiped away the smell of the celebration.
The first thing Poyraz noticed when he opened his eyes was the dense noise. Last night the village square had been overflowing with shouts, laughter, and footsteps; now the shrill sound of metal covered much of the village.
He looked out the window.
The sun was only just rising, the two pale stars hanging in the sky as always. But the ground was already full.
The people who had danced where they stood last night were now standing across from one another this morning, swinging their weapons. Some were shouting, some grunting, and as metal struck metal the field hummed like a smithy.
The noise hadn't died down. Only its kind had changed. The laughter of last night was gone, replaced by the shrill scream of iron.
'It changed overnight,' he thought to himself.
The celebration had cooled. What remained wasn't hope; it was calculation.
"With those I choose," the old man had said. Two words. And those two words had turned a village drunk on joy the night before into so many rivals in a single morning.
Poyraz got out of bed and pulled on his clothes. Hak's bed was empty, made. Tunay, as always, slept with his hair down over his face, at odds with the whole world.
He didn't wake him.
When he stepped outside, the morning chill struck his face. As he walked toward the square, his eyes wandered the surroundings out of habit.
Garrun's order—"never let your weapon out of reach"—had by now sunk into every corner of the village. The woman handing out food had a knife at her waist. An axe leaned beside the forge. Even the girl who'd played her instrument yesterday had set it aside in a corner and was wiping down the short sword in her hand with a rag.
The village had armed itself. But Poyraz knew this had as much to do with yesterday's announcement as with Yalaz's order.
Everyone was preparing for something.
When he reached the training ground, the first person he saw was Sevda.
Her orange hair plastered to her face with sweat, she was bringing her sword down on a wooden post. Not once, but over and over. Her strikes were powerful but erratic; she paid no mind to her fatigue, swinging as if she'd miss something the moment she stopped.
Poyraz watched her for a while. This wasn't the Sevda of last night. Last evening she'd been laughing in the inn, needling Tekin. Now she'd clenched her teeth, her eyes fixed on the post.
A little farther off was Yavuz.
He was training too, but it was a different kind of training. Not with fury like Sevda, but with patience. He repeated the same motion over and over, pausing in between, examining his own arm, then starting again. That old timidity in his eyes was gone now.
'They both want to be chosen,' Poyraz thought. 'But for different reasons.'
Poyraz drew back into the shade of a tree, leaned his back against it, and went on watching.
As time passed, others came to the field too. Hazar, with his spear. He no longer carried a sword; he held the spear like a limb of his own, finding the right angle before Garrun could correct him. Nothing remained of that scattered, hopeless boy of a week ago.
They were changing. All of them.
And Poyraz felt as if he'd been left outside that change.
The days flowed by, resembling one another.
Poyraz stopped counting them; here, time was nothing but a game of the sun and the countless moons anyway. But behaviors were changing, and he could read them.
Sedef and Esen now hardly ever left each other's side.
Esen's endless cheer was this time like a mask; she laughed, ran about, brought everyone things, but her eyes were constantly checking on Sedef, then on Yavuz.
After the grove, all three of them had changed. Sedef flinched at the slightest noise, her hand darting at once to the arm of whoever was beside her.
Tekin and Aylin had chosen a different path. The two of them kept learning the alphabet from Sevda, hunched over a table, wrestling with those meaningless shapes.
At first Poyraz took this for an escape—everyone was preparing for war while they buried themselves in storybooks. Then he understood that this too was a way of surviving. Everyone buried their fear somewhere different.
And then there was the weight of the village itself.
Miren was slowly fading; Selis's healing and Yalaz's potion had pulled her back from the brink of death, but the old woman still couldn't get up from her bed.
Garrun, meanwhile, had become something else entirely.
In training he was hard and calm as always. But once training ended, in moments he thought no one was watching, he would walk toward that little house at the edge of the village. His sister's house.
Poyraz once saw him standing in front of the door. He hadn't gone in. He'd just stood there, looking at the door. As if he didn't dare go inside.
Poyraz turned his head away then. Some things were better not seen.
That evening, after the inn had emptied, Poyraz withdrew to his room.
Tunay wasn't there; he studied magic with Togan in the mornings and joined the group sparring with the old man in the evenings, so he came back late now.
Poyraz sat on the edge of his bed, opened his palm, and closed his eyes.
He searched for the Yelvi in his head. It was there—a feeble ember, on the verge of going out. He pushed it into his torso. The Yelvi resisted as always, leaving that familiar ache where it passed.
He began turning it through the shapes he'd memorized. Square. Triangle. Triangle. Circle…
After countless shapes, something snagged. The energy scattered, leaving only pain in his arms.
'Again.'
He tried once more. This time it broke at the next one. Again. This time somewhere else.
Whatever he'd accumulated through the day ran out in a few attempts. His palm was empty. Earth magic—in Togan's words, the simplest—still blew up in his hand.
The door opened. Hak came in.
"Again?" he said, closing the door behind him.
"Again." Poyraz lowered his hand. "Esen cast her first spell today. A clump of earth the size of a fist. She lifted it into the air and showed us all."
He tried to smile; it didn't quite work.
"I'm still blowing up at the last part."
Hak sat down on the bed across from him. He said nothing. But he didn't leave either.
That was the only thing Poyraz expected from him anyway.
For a while neither of them spoke. The cold light of the two stars seeped through the window.
"There's an expedition in a week," Poyraz said at last. "The old man said 'those I choose.'" He paused. "Do you think he'll choose me?"
Hak looked at him. "Do you want him to?"
The question caught Poyraz off guard.
He'd thought he knew the answer, but by the time it reached the tip of his tongue it had changed.
If he was chosen, there was the outside; the smell of corpses, the Hounds, that shadow… But alongside that, the chance to grow.
If he wasn't chosen, he'd stay in the village—relatively safer, familiar, and routine.
Neither possibility sat right with him.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "It's just… everyone's going somewhere. Sevda's getting stronger, Tunay carries two energies at once, you're playing with reveries. I'm still in the same place."
Far away, very far away, a shadow appeared on the empty plain among the mountains.
The emptiness in its leg hadn't closed. The five cracks in its armor still spewed thin black smoke. The sword in its hand was no longer rusty; it was a metal cloaked in darkness, thirsting.
The Shadow didn't stop.
Each of its steps was heavier than the last.
But it didn't stop.
Until a familiar altar appeared before it.
The Shadow slowed its steps. The smoke seeping from its armor began to lessen. It flung its black sword to the ground. As the sword returned to its rusty and feeble appearance, it took a few more steps toward the stone altar.
When it reached the altar, it touched its black hand to the symbols. Nothing happened, and it hadn't expected anything to.
It climbed onto the altar and kept walking toward the very center—the place where its blood-covered sword had once been driven in, even though that sword no longer existed.
When it reached the very center, it sat down and folded its legs.
A few minutes later, the glimmers coming from the holes in the Shadow's armor began to grow, lighting the merciless steppe.
As time passed the brightness increased, until it was as if a new star had appeared on the plain. The countless symbols on the altar joined the glow as well.
But after a while the brightness vanished as fast as it had appeared. The steppe darkened. The shadows regained their strength.
When the darkness returned, a star-shaped rock had appeared on the altar. A rock with writing on it.
To root out the demons,
rule over the stars.
After the rock appeared on the altar, the Shadow rose to its feet. The glow in its armor had vanished. The holes were still there, still spewing smoke. But they had shrunk and were about to close.
The Shadow turned its head once more to the west, toward the mountains of the Ruined Lands.
But this time it wasn't looking at caves, rocks, or trees.
It was looking at somewhere more alive, more full of life, and more full of sound.
In the deep silence of the night, Poyraz leaned his back against a tree in his usual way and watched the surroundings.
Sleep hadn't come. He too had gotten himself outside.
In these hectic days the village fell quieter at night than it ever had. He'd come to like it.
He focused on the sounds of the crickets, the rustling of the trees.
After sitting for a while, he began to get bored. He stood and started walking. It didn't take long before something stopped him.
He turned his head to the left.
From the mountains, from far, far beyond the mountains, a glow began to rise. As if the sun were coming up, but with a white light.
When the brightness dimmed and vanished a while later, he finally noticed Yalaz, sitting on one of the rooftops, watching that same glow.
Yalaz said nothing.
And Poyraz didn't ask.