CLEA HAD TRAINED all her life for death. Through all the cuts and bruises, she’d been told time and time again how glorious it was to die for the cause of humanity.

There was no glory here, only a haunting sense of futility.

The monster was toying with her.

Scorched trees split the night sky like a canopy of shattered glass. Views of the forest repeated themselves in dark, endless loops. There was no sense of time, only the repetitive pounding of her leather boots through the snow. 

The air stung, every breath yanked away as quickly as she gulped it down. Suffocating. She couldn’t outrun the intrusive thought that she hadn't chosen this life.

A frozen branch snapped like a bone under her foot and she stumbled.

Blood dotted the snow, jostled loose from the claw marks carved down her right arm. She pivoted in a moonlit clearing, her fear painting the disfigured trees with illusive shapes and faces.

Silence asserted itself with a sense of impending danger.

In the woods, hunting was a game that every beast played. They were loyal servants of the moon, gloating in full audience tonight. Stars glittered in masse behind it, as numerous as the lives lost under its light.

Clea whirled around to find the reaping shade crouched at the tree line nearby. Smoldering black smoke veiled it in darkness, but glowing red eyes betrayed it. Void of pupils, they settled on her like hot coals.

It crawled on all fours, joints cracking as the bones rolled and rotated under pallid skin. Dipping and lunging, it grabbed at her with arms like mangled tree branches.

Clea clamped onto its throat as its nails gored her shoulders. The two of them crashed into the snow and rolled, the beast’s teeth snapping at her face.

She channeled a surge of hot energy through her palms as she tumbled on top of it, shouting through the pain as the reaping shade exploded into ash with a blast of light.

Her ghostly breaths dissipated into the cold night air, and she choked on the residual smoke that cloaked the reaper’s body. With every exhalation, she felt like a bit of her soul left her. The world shifted as she hoisted herself up. Blessings could only be cast from one’s own life force, and Clea was too weak to channel another.

Now only darkness remained, illuminated by an audience of pupilless eyes.

There was no glory in dying this way, eaten in the snow without any last rites.

Veilin were praised as heroes because of the energy in their blood. Light was meant to be shared, blood meant to be spilled, and yet here she was, wanting to live more than she’d wanted anything else. Blood painted hot lines from her wounded shoulders down the cold skin of her back. Her right arm was dark and slippery, trailing drops like dark oil in the snow. 

A reaping shade slid through the shadows to her left, and she noticed a faint glimmer of light whispering through the trees behind it. A campfire. Life.

Clea broke into a sprint after it. The forest grabbed at her, a root snaring her foot, a branch blocking one path and then another. She battled forward, the last of the branches snapping against her arms as she rolled and crumpled at the foot of the fire.

The clearing was empty.

Clea’s mind spun with vertigo, circling unconsciousness until she couldn’t resist it any longer.

* * *

Ryson watched the girl from his perch as the reaping shade skulked toward her from the cover of the woods. One of his booted legs hung from the branch, his other knee folded into his arm.

This is why we shouldn’t light fires, a dark voice chided in his head. We could have had a perfectly quiet night, but you always like to have your little fires. 

Ryson resisted the urge to argue back.

The reaper hissed possessively, lashing out at the deserted clearing and the competition that hid beyond. A proud grin stretched its face into two rows of jagged black teeth, glimmering with drool.

Ryson wasn’t eager to watch a reaper feast. They were sloppy and brutish, eager to fill the silence of the forest with the haphazard jig of snapping bones and ripping flesh. They rarely killed their prey first, so there was also quite a lot of screaming. It was noise with no melody, first sharp and then guttural, panicked and then dazed. Reaping shades simply played the human instrument all wrong.

The shade’s spidery fingers rested on the girl’s ankle, and Ryson slipped from the tree and plunged a dagger through its back. The reaper spun, flinging a rain of black blood across the snow.

Its eyes accused him as it clasped the dagger and staggered away.

Ryson stepped into the moonlight, closing the space between them as he watched the reaper wither. He spun another dagger in his left hand impatiently, wondering if he should have chopped off its head instead. He hated when they died slowly. They had a reputation for being rather dramatic.

The reaper cut the air with a shriek, convulsing as the blood touched by the weapon boiled and sizzled away. Its bony appendages reached toward Ryson as the skin slipped off its fingers, and its eyes dissolved into ashes.

“Curses!” it spat in forest speech. Reapers weren’t known for their expansive vocabulary, even in their native Kaletik tongue.

Ryson’s eyes wandered past the reaper to its prey. He wondered what she was doing so far out in the wilderness. Plenty of people tried to travel between the three human cities and failed, but failure had been so frequent in the last several years that he assumed people had stopped traveling at all.

“Curses! You are cursed,” the reaper hissed.

Ryson rolled his eyes.

“Those eyes!” it howled before launching off on a string of poorly crafted insults.

He stopped spinning his dagger, turning on his heels and sweeping the reaper up by the empty eye sockets of its skull.

Silver eyes were a brand that carried many messages. Made brilliant by the contrast of the night and Ryson’s dark complexion, he knew his eyes in many ways defined him. There was a sting in that reminder tonight. The moon was full, and he was aware in its fullness of how he could no longer hear its call.

Ryson bared his fangs in a grimace and severed the reaper’s spine with one quick slash. The skull slipped from his hand as the reaper’s bones dissolved.

Ryson glared at the ash pile, angry that he’d let the beast’s words rile him. Was this what he’d stooped to? Rebuking reaping shades who seldom made it past three-word sentences?

Indulging his own petty whims, he ground his boot into the ashes as he approached the girl. He stood over her, his thumb sliding back and forth over the blade of his dagger. Cast in cursed silver, they were more than weapons or relics. Over the last few months, they’d become soothsayers in his restless hands. Death was taking its sweet time in claiming him, and the world now felt like a drab prison cell. He hoped to find some measure of relief from the puzzle fate had brought him.

Her height and frame suggested an upbringing of nutrition and privilege, but she seemed far from that now. A routine of physical effort lined her limbs with traces of muscle, but her body had been robbed of the softness and color of health. Her clothes clung loosely to what remained of her.

She had the well-kept hair of class. Despite lying in frazzled disarray, it had once been trimmed and braided. She was wearing plain travel clothes that covered almost every inch of her. They were beige and bland but thick and evenly stitched all the way up to her chin.

He mulled over the possibilities, not too quick to investigate further and ruin the pleasure of guessing. His eyes swept from her feet to her head as he circled her figure with wide, patient steps. Her skin was sickly, but still tanned and freckled from sun exposure. The closest city was Virday, and higher-class citizens there avoided the sun, exposure so often associated with labor and poverty. Though she had to be a resident of Virday, Ryson was confident she hadn’t grown up in its culture.

Her entire body extended out toward the flames in a poised, reaching frame. Her bloodied hand was a red candle that begged to be ignited. It was longing personified, and he paused, noticing how the firelight danced over her in warm colors, fighting back the cool, silver rays of the moon. They were the lights of life and death, capturing the balance in which her body now lingered.

He was drawn in by the image. Something deep and long silent stirred inside him at its symbolism. The clothes hid her like a blanket, but he could imagine the firelight spilling across her shoulders, dripping down her breasts and over her ribs. He could imagine the moonlight cresting over the curve of her back, and in the stillness she’d glow like a sculpture.

He’d forgotten most things, but looking at her, he remembered that everything was perfect in its most natural form, that everything was eternal in complete stillness, and that above all things, he’d once been an artist. He’d been an artist of a brutal persuasion, but an artist nonetheless.

He knelt and used the tip of his weapon to move the long strands of caramel-colored hair that covered her face. Her youth was obvious, but sun and exhaustion aged her into maturity. Though her body had been worked by the elements and physical strain, there was gentleness in her face, the curve of her nose, and soft openness of her lips. Her blond brows framed eyes he imagined had seen as much sun as the rest of her, perhaps retaining a version of its light.

He tried to remember what truly living eyes looked like, and guessed for his own amusement that hers were brown. Common in every city, he imagined hers would be uncommon in their vibrancy. They were brown, but not the burdened, dull brown of an encumbered existence. They’d tell the same story her body told, eyes with the unspoken potential of churned earth. Dark, slumbering, lush, so recently and violently sifted that it better exposed the rich potential of life beneath.

She’d bitten her lower lip. It gleamed with a wounded redness against the snow. Red wings blossomed from the claw marks on her shoulders.

A victim of the forest’s depravity, she was beautiful where she lay, picturesque in ways humans could not understand. They never saw the artistry in their suffering, not in the same way that the forest and its beasts did. Few, if any, suffered well, and this woman had been transformed by her struggle into something remarkable.

His bandaged hand reached for her chin and tilted her head toward him. The movement exposed a patch of glowing skin rubbed clean by the snow. He shot up at the realization of what she was.

“Veilin.” He snorted in disgust as he backed away from her. Every prior notion of her shattered into a wall of disdain. He retrieved his weapon from the reaper’s remains and returned both daggers to their rightful places. No wonder the reaper had been so furious at Ryson’s interruption. He should have let it kill her.

Kill her instead. A voice within him spoke as he watched the girl. He blinked and a perfect image of himself appeared crouched over her. It watched him with black irises that absorbed all light. Veilin are the enemy. Do it.

Ryson’s hand reached for the heavy scythe strapped to his back. He hesitated as he gripped the handle. Glowing eyes materialized in the darkness around him, more reapers and other beasts anticipating his decision, no doubt. Little was more aromatic to forest beasts than Veilin blood; Ryson only now realized how poor his sense of smell had gotten. No doubt the girl’s struggle had filled the forest with the scent, and it had drawn monsters in from all directions. He had a thirsty audience, compelling him to do what his dark replica demanded.

Kill her. The world will be better off without another lightwalking charlatan, the replica chided, a messenger in times of doubt, always tilting the scales in darkness’s favor.

Ryson gripped his weapon but was filled with a pervasive tiredness, as if the very thought of drawing it drained his enthusiasm. It felt heavy on his back. He found himself more disappointed by her Veilin blood than anything else. His hand slipped loosely from the hilt and dropped by his side. What reason was there to kill her, really?

What are you doing? the figure hissed.

“She’ll die anyway.”

He turned to leave, but from this angle, the girl’s extended wrist caught his attention. Beneath the ashes and mud was a black tattoo of a crown and a familiar crest of a lion, swan and shield.

Ryson stilled, unsure if the image was real or if he was simply haunted by it.  

Kill her. The figure whispered now from beside him. It awakened a bloodthirsty ache in his bones, compelling him toward her.

The reapers’ wide eyes blinked as they drifted closer to the clearing.

They wanted the girl just as he did. He pitied the wretches.

She bears the Lodain family crest. Killing her would be perfect poetry. The figure sauntered behind his back and stopped at his other side. In contrast, the dying reaper’s words still burned in his mind.

A royal, delivered to him on a full moon, sprawled out in the snow. A Veilin. In previous versions of his life, this would have been a stroke of exceptional luck, but not any longer.

“What an exhausting night,” he whispered as he rubbed his face.

He’d forgotten how much commotion life caused simply by being alive, and tomorrow he’d have to cross the gates of a human city. He already missed the forest’s silence. 

Peering through a bandaged hand, he looked back down at the girl.

She was already so close to death. Likely wrought with anxiety and fear long before tonight’s hunt. Maybe she would be happy to die. He’d long outgrown the notion that life was innately some kind of gift. Maybe by leaving her, he’d be doing her a favor.

On the other hand, taking her would hardly be a risk. The faded luminance of her skin was a clear indication that the energy in her blood was nearly gone. Even if she woke up, she’d be too weak to sense what he was. Not that it mattered. His own kind wouldn’t even recognize him now. He was basically a human too.

One of the reapers inched into the light of the campfire, a slender hand extended toward the girl.

All Ryson needed was to go to Virday and find that wretched beast Alina. He had enough trouble simply anticipating Alina’s reaction after he’d disappeared for so many years. This girl was an added inconvenience, wasn’t she?

Ryson released a heavy sigh, and the reaper startled at the sound. He ran a hand through his hair as the beast clamored into the forest, stumbling over itself in fright. The dark replica of himself vanished as he settled firmly upon a decision.

“Cursed fate,” he muttered before returning to treat the girl’s wounds.

He’d take her back to Virday and then be done with her for good.

Alina might be more inclined to let him past her threshold if he brought her something anyway.