Kira woke to gray light filtering through the cave mouth.
For a long moment, she lay still beneath her furs, watching dust motes drift in the pale morning. The fire had burned to ash overnight, and cold air crept across her face. She pulled the blankets higher and let herself breathe.
The previous night came back in fragments. Sitting by the fire at sunset, closing her eyes, reaching inside for that single point of mana that had defined her entire life. Feeling nothing, as always. The quiet disappointment that had settled in her chest, heavy and familiar. Exhaustion. Sleep.
She closed her eyes and checked herself, the way her father had taught her to check a snare or a trail. Carefully, completely, without expectation.
Of course, she thought. Nothing has changed.
She sighed and pushed back the blankets.
Breakfast was the same as every breakfast. Dried meat from yesterday's successful trap, berries she had preserved in the autumn, water from the spring behind the cave so cold it made her teeth ache.
She ate sitting at the cave mouth, looking out over the valley. Snow covered everything below, smooth and white and silent. Somewhere down there, buried under drifts, lay the ruins of her village. Her home. Her family. Everyone she had ever known.
She had not gone down in weeks. There was no reason to. The soldiers had come and gone. The dead were gone. The village was only broken wood and frozen ash now.
But supplies were running low. The dried goods she had scavenged in those first desperate days would not last forever. The useful tools had all been found long ago.
One more look, she decided. Before the deep snow makes it impossible.
She finished her meal, banked the fire for later, and strapped on her boots. Her mother's herb pouch hung at her belt. Her father's skinning knife rode at her hip. The soldier's dagger was tucked into her right boot.
The walk down took most of the morning.
Snow had drifted deep in places, but she knew the paths her father had taught her. The ones that stayed clear even in winter, the ones that avoided hidden drops and loose stone. The mountains did not care how much mana a person had. They cared what you noticed, what you remembered, what you did.
She noticed the tracks of a fox, three days old. She remembered which ridge held the afternoon sun. She did what her father had taught her, and the mountains let her pass.
The village came into view around midday.
It looked the same as it had the last time she had come. Ruined, empty, snow piled against broken walls and fallen roofs. The square where she had played as a child was just a white expanse now, marked only by the hump of the old well.
Kira stood at the edge for a long moment, then walked forward.
She started with the houses on the east side, the ones she had not fully searched before.
The miller's house first. His son had taunted her after her second testing, years ago, "One point, one point, Kira's got no point."
The words did not hurt anymore. They were just sounds from a boy who was probably dead now, buried somewhere under the snow.
The miller's kitchen had been picked clean months ago, but she checked the root cellar anyway, prying open the frozen door.
Inside, she found only rotten potatoes, frozen solid. Mold covered everything else. Nothing usable.
She moved on.
The fletcher's workshop next. Arrows and bowstaves, all broken or warped by weather. A half-finished bow that might have been beautiful once, its wood now cracked beyond repair.
She took nothing.
House after house. Broken furniture, frozen cloth, pots with holes, tools snapped in half. Whatever the attack had not destroyed, the winter had finished.
By mid-afternoon, Kira had found nothing worth carrying back.
She sat on the edge of the old well, breathing mist into the cold air, and thought about the future.
She could stay in the mountains. The cave was safe, the hunting good, the land familiar. She knew these slopes and valleys better than anyone alive. She could survive here for years, perhaps forever.
But for what?
She thought of Therin, the young soldier with the scar along his jaw. Northwatch, he had said, If you ever make it.
She thought of the world beyond the mountains. The kingdom, the cities, the ancient bloodlines with their mana-rich lands and their certainty that people like her were nothing.
If I leave, she thought, I will need things to trade.
She stood up, brushed snow from her coat, and looked at the village with new eyes. Not searching for what she needed to survive, but for what might have value to someone else.
The search became different after that.
She stopped checking root cellars and kitchens. Instead, she looked in workshops, in bedrooms, in the small hidden places where people kept things that mattered.
In the seamstress's house, she found a silver hairpin, tarnished but real. She tucked it into her pouch.
In the carpenter's shed, she found a box of good nails, not bent or rusted. She wrapped them in cloth and set them aside.
Under someone's bed, she found a small leather bag of copper coins. Not many, but enough to buy a meal somewhere. She took them.
And then, in the last house at the far edge of the village, she found something unexpected.
Old Marren's house had collapsed inward, its roof fallen and its walls bowed. Marren had been old when Kira was young. A chicken farmer, half-blind, bent-backed, always smelling of feathers and woodsmoke. He had been born with perhaps fifteen mana, low enough to place him among the Low Born, but he had never seemed to care. He kept his chickens, lived his life, and sometimes gave Kira eggs when she passed by.
Kira picked her way through the wreckage carefully, watching for unstable beams.
She found his bed frame, splintered. His table, broken. His chair, missing one leg.
And on a shelf that had somehow survived, tucked against the remaining wall, she found a small glass sphere no bigger than her fist.
She picked it up carefully. It was warm, not from the sun but from something inside.
Memory stirred. Winter nights years ago, walking past Marren's house after dark and seeing a soft glow through his window. Her mother's voice explaining: "His chickens need light in the deep winter, or they stop laying. He bought a mage-light. Cost him almost everything he had, but it has lasted fifteen years now."
A magical light. A simple thing, a spell trapped in glass. It could glow forever provided enough mana, never fading. Common in cities, her mother had said. Rare in villages, where such things cost more than most people could afford.
Kira held it in her palm.
He would be happy if someone used it, she thought.
She tucked it carefully into her pack, next to the coins and the nails and the hairpin.
The walk back to the cave was uphill and slow. Darkness fell while she was still halfway, but she walked by starlight, by memory, by the feel of the trail under her feet.
When she finally reached the cave, she was exhausted. She rebuilt the fire, ate a quick meal, and sat for a long time staring at the small glass sphere.
She placed it on a ledge near her bed. The glow was long gone without mana.
I could sell this, she thought, In a city, someone would pay well for a magic light.
Kira lay down and pulled her blankets up. Her eyes grew heavy, and she thought about nothing at all.
She did not check her mana before sleeping. There was no point.
She only slept, with Marren's light nearby. She did not notice that the light lit up dimly for a few moments before falling into darkness once again.