The night smelled like rain and iron.
Aeris Vale could taste blood in the back of her throat each time she breathed. It was warm, metallic, familiar — like something she had been swallowing her entire life without noticing.
The execution courtyard was quieter than she expected.
Candles flickered along the stone walls, their light barely touching the center of the courtyard where she knelt. The shadows they cast stretched long and thin across the marble floor, converging beneath her like black roots.
Her hands were bound in front of her.
Aeris lowered her eyes to the ground, watching her own shadow tremble against the stone. It moved strangely, as if the wind touched it but not her.
I should be afraid , she thought.
But the feeling wouldn't come.
Her heartbeat was steady — slower than it should have been.
Footsteps approached. Familiar.
She didn't need to look up to know who it was.
Her father always walked like that — calm enough to make others nervous.
"Aeris."
His voice carried across the courtyard, gentle but formal. The voice he used in political meetings. The voice he used when decisions were already made.
She lifted her head.
Cassian Vale stood before her in ceremonial black, the Vale family crest pinned over his chest. His expression was composed, almost peaceful, but the skin beneath his eyes looked tired.
Behind him stood her brother, Lucien, perfectly still. And her mother, Selene, whose gaze refused to meet Aeris's.
Something about that felt wrong.
"You understand why this must happen," her father said.
"I understand," she replied.
Her voice sounded smaller than she expected. It echoed faintly against the stone walls.
Rain began to fall in soft, scattered drops, darkening the marble beneath her knees. The air cooled against her skin, and for a moment she remembered being a child in the Vale estate garden, watching storms roll across distant hills.
The memory felt close enough to touch. Then it slipped away.
"Begin," her father said.
A figure stepped forward — a masked academy official holding a narrow execution blade. Its metal surface reflected candlelight in thin, trembling lines.
Aeris's eyes drifted again to the ground. Her shadow looked… wrong. It wasn't aligned with the candles. It stretched toward the blade.
The air around her seemed to tighten.
She could hear something faint beneath the sound of rain. A whisper Not from the witnesses Not from the executioner. From the stone floor From the dark shape beneath her.
Wait.
The thought came from nowhere. A pressure inside her chest.
The executioner raised the blade.
Aeris felt time slow — not dramatically, not like a story — just enough for her mind to notice details that shouldn't matter.
Water dripping from the blade's edge. Her brother's clenched jaw. Her mother's trembling hands.
Her father closing his eyes.
The shadow beneath her moved On its own.
It reached toward the blade like a hand trying to catch falling glass.
For a single second, Aeris understood something.
Just a quiet realization forming beneath everything else.
Something is wrong.
The blade fell and Cold metal touched her throat. Pain arrived as a distant thing, slow and unreal, like it belonged to someone else.
Her body tipped sideways against the marble.
The candles blurred. The courtyard ceiling dissolved into gray sky. The last thing she saw was her shadow.
Darkness came gently. Like sleep.
Then—
Her lungs filled with air so sharply it hurt.
Aeris sat upright with a gasp.
Wooden ceiling. Morning light. Familiar bedroom walls.
Her hands were free.
Sixteen years old again.
Her heart began to race And on the wall beside her bed— her shadow sat upright too, half a second late.
[End of the chapter 1.]