At first, I thought the screaming was part of the dream.
It reached me from very far away, thin and warped, as though it had to pass through water before it found me. A woman crying out. A child sobbing somewhere behind her. Men shouting over one another in voices too harsh and loud to belong to anything holy. Then the sound thinned, stretched, and vanished again into dark.
I did not open my eyes.
I could not.
My body felt impossibly heavy, pinned somewhere below me by the weight of sleep or blood or pain. Thought moved slowly. So slowly that it hardly deserved the name. I was aware only of fragments. Cold earth beneath my cheek. The smell of wet leaves. Something warm and sticky dried at my temple. A pulse of pain inside my skull that rose and fell like distant thunder.
Then the screams came again.
Not imagined this time.
Real.
Closer.
A man shouting.
Another voice cut off midway through a cry.
Crackling.
Fire.
Somewhere inside the blackness, something in me tried to rise toward it and failed.
I sank again.
The dark had no shape to it. No up or down. Only a thick, endless depth in which sounds drifted loose and broken. My mother's face was not there. Neither was the village. Neither was the forest. Only pain and dark and the faint sense that something terrible was happening very far away in a world I could no longer reach.
And then a voice spoke.
"Wake up."
It was quiet.
Not loud enough to split the dark. Not sharp enough to command. It entered gently, almost like breath at the back of my neck. But it did not belong to the dream, and it did not belong to me.
The darkness shifted.
"Wake up."
I tried to answer and found I had no mouth.
No body.
No air.
Only that voice, close enough now that it seemed to pass through me rather than around me. It was neither a man's voice nor a woman. Young nor old. Kind nor cruel. It was the sort of voice that made such distinctions feel smaller than they ought to have.
"Wake up, Haruto."
My name.
The moment it said my name, the dark trembled.
Something pale opened before me.
Not a door.
Not light exactly.
An image.
At first it was only color. Black and orange. Smoke. Fire climbing through the night in long, hungry tongues. A village lane. A roof collapsing inward in sparks. Then a figure moving through it.
White hair.
Shiro.
She was standing in the firelight with her face turned half away from me, one hand raised as if to shield herself from heat or smoke or something rushing toward her through the dark. Her mouth was open. Calling for someone.
Calling for me.
Terror hit me so hard it broke whatever held me under.
My eyes flew open.
I lurched upright with a sound that tore out of me raw and wrong. Pain exploded through the side of my head so violently that the world tilted at once. Trees swam in and out of focus. Branches overhead. Night between them. A shaft of moonless gray where the canopy had broken. For one awful second I did not know where I was.
Then the forest returned all at once.
The root.
The fall.
The blood.
The barbarians.
"Shiro—"
Her name came out cracked.
I shoved myself to my knees and nearly collapsed again. The ground rolled under me. My stomach twisted so hard I thought I might vomit. I planted one hand in the leaf-litter and breathed through my teeth until the worst of the spinning eased enough for me to move.
Move.
That was all that mattered.
I touched the side of my head and hissed. My fingers came away dark even in the thin light. Blood. Still wet in places. My temple throbbed with every heartbeat. The world blurred when I turned too fast.
None of that mattered.
They were going to attack at dusk.
No—
Panic clenched hard in my chest as I looked up through the trees.
It was night.
For half a second I could not think. The fact itself was too large to fit inside me. Night. Full night. I had lost hours. I had lain here while the sun went down and the world kept moving without me.
"No..."
The word fell uselessly into the dark.
I forced myself to stand.
My knees shook at once. My right leg almost buckled beneath me, and I had to catch myself against the trunk of a cedar slick with moss. Every part of my body felt wrong. Too slow. Too light. Too full of pain and not nearly enough strength. But somewhere beyond the trees I could already see it: a flickering orange stain against the night sky.
Fire.
Not lantern light.
Not hearth smoke.
Fire.
My heart slammed once, so hard it hurt.
"Hoshimine Village..."
I ran.
Or something close to running. At first it was little more than a stagger made desperate by terror. I crashed through brush I would have avoided on any other day. Branches whipped my face and shoulders. Roots rose like traps from the dark earth. Twice I stumbled and caught myself with my hands. The second time I nearly blacked out when pain tore through my skull bright as lightning.
But I kept moving.
The forest no longer felt gentle. No longer felt like refuge. It had become only distance between me and the village, and distance was suddenly unbearable.
Please.
I did not know who I was speaking to.
Not the Church's god. Not the One Above. Not any spirit of tree or river or old story. Maybe to the dark itself. Maybe to whatever had whispered me awake. Maybe to nothing.
Please let me not be too late.
My breath burned. Blood dried stiff along the side of my face. The orange glow ahead grew brighter between the trunks.
Then I heard it.
A scream.
Not one scream.
Many.
Women crying out.
Children shrieking.
Men shouting in pain, rage, terror. The clash of iron. The crack of wood breaking. A horse screaming as if its whole body had become one wound. Somewhere beneath all of it, low and terrible, came laughter.
I ran faster.
The trees thinned.
The first field came into view in broken strips between branches and brush, silver-black under the night sky except where the fire painted it in harsh, living orange. I stumbled down the slope toward the outer path, boots slipping in the loose dirt, shoulder slamming against a fence post hard enough to send another burst of white across my vision.
I barely felt it.
Then I reached the edge of Hoshimine Village and stopped.
For one second only.
Because my body, stupid and human, could not quite accept what my eyes were seeing.
The village was burning.
Not in one place. In many. Fire climbed over roofs and ran along dry beams in brilliant, vicious lines. One house near the lower lane had already collapsed inward, sending sparks spinning high into the dark like a swarm of dying stars. Another burned with the doors thrown open, the inside lit up bright enough for me to see shadows moving through it—too many shadows, some struggling, some dragging others behind them.
The square was chaos.
Villagers ran in every direction, but there was no direction left to run to. Men from the village—farmers, mill hands, stable boys, old hunters dragging rusted blades and tools that had never been meant for war—were trying to hold the center lane. Trying, and failing.
The barbarians were everywhere.
There were more of them than I had seen in the forest. Or maybe terror had simply made them multiply. Layered hides. Fur mantles dark with soot and grime. Iron helms taken from better men. Axes, spears, hooked blades, nicked swords that flashed orange in the firelight. They moved through Hoshimine Village like wolves loosed into a pen.
I saw Old Genji go down first.
Not because he was nearest. Because I knew him. Even in firelight and confusion I knew the shape of his shoulders, the thick gray beard, the way he swung a wood axe in both hands with more courage than skill. He buried it once in a raider's collarbone, and for one impossible second I thought he might actually hold. Then another barbarian came in from the side and drove a spear through him hard enough to lift him half off his feet.
Genji's mouth opened.
No sound reached me over the rest.
He fell and did not rise again.
Something inside me went cold.
A woman ran across the lane clutching a little boy to her chest. I did not know her name. I knew only that I had seen her once hanging laundry near the mill. A barbarian caught her by the back of the dress and yanked her so hard the child slipped from her arms and hit the ground screaming. She turned at once, clawing for him. Another man seized her by the hair.
I looked away too late.
Not because what followed was hidden.
Because it wasn't.
I saw women dragged into the mud by their wrists and hair while they kicked and screamed and begged. I saw rough hands tearing at cloth, pinning limbs, forcing bodies down while firelight flickered over faces twisted with panic and pain. I saw one young mother crawl toward her daughter before a boot slammed between her shoulders and drove her flat into the dirt.
The sound that came out of her did not sound human anymore.
My stomach lurched.
Children were being taken too.
Not all of them.
Some were simply in the way.
I saw a boy no older than ten run from the side lane with soot streaked across his face and one shoe missing. He made it three steps before a barbarian backhanded him so hard he spun and hit the ground. Another man grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up as if he weighed nothing. Near the square a group of raiders had already bound three children together with rope around their wrists. One little girl was crying so hard she could barely breathe. Another was silent with the kind of terror that had gone too far to make sound.
The church bell was ringing.
No one was ringing it.
It swung crooked in its frame as heat and impact shook the chapel tower, tolling out in wild, uneven strokes over slaughter and smoke. The sound was almost worse than the screaming. It made the whole nightmare feel sanctified.
A man from the village fell to his knees near the well with both hands clamped over his stomach. Blood poured through his fingers. He looked up once—not at the barbarians, not at the flames, but at the chapel, as if even now some part of him expected an answer to come from there.
Nothing came.
Only fire.
Only steel.
Only the coarse roar of men who had found a place weaker than themselves.
My chest felt too tight to breathe.
No.
No no no.
This could not be Hoshimine Village.
It was. Of course it was.
The lower lane. The prayer post. The well. Old Genji's shed, half alight. The chief's field beyond the square. The narrow path where children ran in summer. The same village that had hated me since birth had become unrecognizable in a single night, stripped down to smoke and screams and the truth of what walls it did not have.
And somewhere inside it—
Shiro.
The thought hit harder than the sight of the flames.
I searched at once.
Wildly. Pointlessly.
Every white flash became her hair. Every cry in a woman's voice became hers until it wasn't. Every figure running through the smoke made my heart seize before the fire shifted and showed me someone else.
"Shiro!"
I shouted her name into the chaos.
No one heard me.
Or if they did, it did not matter.
Another house gave way with a roar, showering sparks over the lane. A horse broke loose from somewhere near the barns and bolted through the square wild-eyed, blood down one flank, reins trailing fire. Two barbarians laughed as it nearly trampled a fallen villager.
I took one step forward.
Then another.
My legs were shaking so badly I could feel it in my teeth. Blood was still dripping warm at the edge of my jaw. My head pounded. My hands were empty.
And I was late.
The truth of that was a blade sliding between the ribs. Late to warn them. Late to save them. Late to stop any of this.
Then something moved near the center. A flicker of white through flame and bodies and dark.
My heart stopped.
"Shiro—"