The night was a physical weight, pressing in on the charcoal burner's hut, seeping through the cracks in the walls with a cold that gnawed at the bones. The silence after the hoofbeats faded was more unnerving than the pursuit itself. It was a listening silence, a waiting one.
Driven by a need for light as much as warmth, I broke the last dry plank from the broken bench and, after some effort with my flint and steel, coaxed a small, defiant fire to life in the hearth. The flames threw our long, distorted shadows against the walls, making them dance like hanged men on a gibbet.
Rhen sat across from me, his cloak pulled tight around his shoulders. Even in the flickering light, I could see the fresh crimson blooming through the makeshift bandage at his throat. The sight was a cold knot in my own. We were bound, this stranger and I, by a fate I was only beginning to comprehend.
Driven by a sudden, reckless impulse, I reached for the leather cord I'd worn around my neck since I was a child. It felt as much a part of me as the scar on my chest. Tied to it was a small, oiled leather pouch. I worked the drawstring open and pulled out the scrap of vellum inside. The prophecy, copied in the strange, unfading ink only the high priests could procure. The words that had dictated the course of my entire life.
I didn't look at it. I simply leaned forward and tossed it into the heart of the fire.
Rhen watched, his expression unreadable, as the edges of the vellum blackened, curled, and were consumed by the hungry flames.
"I'd memorized it anyway," I said, my voice rough.
He gave a slow, understanding nod. "Me too."
The silence returned, thicker now, broken only by the snap and crackle of the fire. Then, moving stiffly, Rhen began to unbuckle his worn leather cuirass. The straps gave way with soft clicks. He let the armor fall to the dirt floor with a dull thud. Beneath it, his simple linen shirt was dark with sweat and clung to his torso. It was stuck to the scar, the fabric fused to the weeping edges of the wound by dried blood. He peeled it away with a sharp, pained grimace.
There it was, exposed in the firelight. The jagged, forked mark that was the mirror of my own. And as I watched, it began to glow with a faint, internal, silver-white light, the same way mine did in moments of high emotion—fury, or fear.
A compulsion seized me. I stood, my muscles protesting, and crossed the small, cramped space between us. I knelt before him, the packed earth cold and hard beneath my knees. He went perfectly still, a wild creature unsure of flight or fight.
Slowly, hesitantly, I raised my hand. With two fingers, I traced the length of his scar. His skin was fever-hot under my touch. And as I made contact, the invisible thread that hummed between us suddenly sang, a single, high, clear note that resonated in the very core of my being. It was beautiful and terrifying, a siren's call that promised both connection and annihilation.
His own hand rose, hovering in the air between us, his fingers trembling slightly. He stopped just short of touching me. His eyes, dark and intense, met mine.
"May I?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
I didn't speak. I simply pulled the collar of my own tunic aside, exposing the pale, luminous scar on my chest.
His fingertips settled upon it.
The moment his skin met mine, the world tilted off its axis.
It was not a memory. It was a deluge. Images, sounds, sensations slammed through the barrier of my own mind, violent and unbidden.
A cradle of dark, polished wood, split down the middle by a crack of blinding, silent lightning.
Two infants, screaming not with the simple distress of newborns, but with a soul-deep, shared agony, as hooded figures in priestly robes tore them from each other's side.
A woman's voice, soft yet filled with an ancient, terrible sorrow, whispering words that seared themselves into my consciousness: "The halves must never join. One must kill the other, or the rift opens forever, and all is lost."
I jerked away as if burned, scrambling backward on my hands and heels, gasping for air that felt too thin. The hut swam back into focus. Rhen was staring at his own hand, his face a mask of stunned horror, as if the fingers that had touched me were no longer his own.
"Gods," he whispered, the word choked. "It's worse than I thought. So much worse."
"What did you see?" I demanded, my voice shaking.
"The same as you," he said, his gaze finally lifting to meet mine. There was a devastating clarity in his eyes now. "We were never enemies, Wren. We were insurance."
I pushed myself to my feet, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "Explain. Now."
He rose more slowly, swaying slightly from blood loss and the psychic shock. "The priests… the Eternal Circle. They need a sacrifice with a complete, whole soul to seal the rift they say threatens the world. But a whole soul cannot be sacrificed; it must be fractured. So they find one, they split it at birth, and they raise the halves on opposite sides of a manufactured conflict. They set us on a path, waiting for us to find each other, to fight, and for one of us to finish the job, absorbing the other's half in the moment of death."
My stomach turned to ice. The war between the Crown and the Freeholds, the conflict that had defined my life, given me purpose—it was a lie. A farmer fattening two lambs for a ritual slaughter.
"And every generation," he continued, his voice flat and drained, "they do it. And every generation, for reasons the records don't show, it fails. The chosen ones die without completing the ritual, or they refuse. And the rift, whatever it truly is, grows wider anyway."
Outside, the wind picked up, driving snow against the shutters with a sound like scattering gravel.
I found my voice, thin and reedy. "How many? How many before us?"
"Seven pairs that we know of," Rhen said. He reached out and touched the cold stone of the hut wall. A intricate, lace-like pattern of frost bloomed instantly under his palm, a tiny, contained winter. "Their names are all carved into a hidden chamber beneath the capital's main temple. I found it last year, searching for answers. I thought I was the only one looking."
A laugh, short, ugly, and utterly without humor, escaped me. "I found it two weeks ago, during the solstice inspections. I thought the same."
We stared at each other across the dying fire, two hunters who had both been stalking the same terrible truth, unaware that we were the final pieces in the game.
From the forest outside, too close for comfort, came the long, mournful howl of a wolf. It was answered by another, and then another, until the night was filled with their chorus.
Rhen bent and picked up his broken sword, the blade ending in a jagged tear a hand's breadth from the hilt. He tested the remaining edge with his thumb. "They'll send the Inquisitors next. The real ones. Not your squad of soldiers."
I retrieved my own dagger from where it had fallen. The familiar weight of the hilt was a small comfort. "Then we run. At first light."
"Run where?" he asked, the question hanging in the frigid air.
"Anywhere the priests aren't."
A tired, grim grin touched his lips. It was the first genuine expression I'd seen from him. "Simple plan. I like it."
I stood and kicked a heap of snow from the doorway over the fire's last coals. A violent hiss, a plume of steam, and then we were plunged into an absolute, suffocating darkness.
In the profound black, his voice drifted over to me, quiet but clear. "Wren."
"What?"
"If we find a way out of this… if it truly comes down to it, and only one of us can walk away…"
"Don't," I cut him off, the word sharp. I didn't want to hear it. I couldn't.
"I need to say it," he insisted. There was a long pause, filled only by the sound of our breathing. "I won't fight you for it. If it comes to that."
I swallowed hard, the lump in my throat making it difficult. The thread between us hummed with the weight of his promise. "We're not there yet."
The words had barely left my lips when a new sound froze the blood in my veins. Not the padding of wolves, but the deliberate, crunching cadence of bootsteps on frozen snow. Slow. Purposeful. Just outside.
Rhen's silhouette tensed beside me in the darkness.
A single, gloved fist pounded against the rotten wood of the door, once. The sound was like a judge's gavel.
A voice, calm, cultured, and devoid of all warmth, spoke from the other side. "Open in the name of the Eternal Circle. The halves must be weighed."
The thread between us didn't just hum; it yanked, a violent, physical jerk deep within my chest that made my vision blur at the edges.
In the absolute black, Rhen's hand found mine. His fingers were cold, but they threaded through mine, gripping with a desperate, final strength.
We didn't speak. There were no more words to be said.
As one, we drew our steel—the rasp of his broken sword and the softer whisper of my dagger clearing its sheath a unified promise in the dark.
And we waited for the door to come down.