Prologue

I was seven years old the night the world ended.

I remember the scaling, the scream, and the panic.

I remember not wanting to die then wishing I could. I remember it the way your body remembers pain before your mind catches up. Before you have the language for it.

Fire. And the smell of pine turning to ash.

My mother’s hands were the safest place I had ever known. Rough from the herb gardens, always a little warm, always finding me in the dark without needing light to do it. That night she found me the same way.

She pulled me from my bed before I was awake.

The sounds came next. Things I didn’t have names for yet. A crackling that was too loud and too close. Underneath it were voices, many of them. And underneath that, something that wasn’t a sound at all. A feeling. Like the air itself had decided to become an enemy.

“Don’t stop,” my mother said. Her voice was steady, it didn't match the world burning around us. “Whatever you hear, whatever you see. Don’t stop.”

I didn’t ask where we were going. I held her hand and ran.

The forest was wrong.

I knew our forest. I had grown up in it, learned its rhythms, slept against its roots on summer nights when the pack house felt too loud and too full. I knew the way it smelled before rain. I knew which trees the owls preferred and which paths the deer made at dawn.

That night it didn’t smell like ours anymore.

It smelled like blood and burning and something else underneath – cold and evil and without mercy.

My mother ran faster. I ran with her. The fire was behind us and then it was beside us and then it was ahead of us and there was nowhere left that wasn’t orange and roaring and hungry.

She stopped.

A man stood in our path. The fire didn’t seem to bother him.

His shadow was tall, patient, with the particular stillness of someone who had purpose and never needed to rush because everything eventually comes to him anyway.

And his laugh.

I remember his laugh. Low and cruel, like the fire and the screaming and the dying were all happening for his entertainment and he was pleased with it.

My mother pushed me behind her.

I heard them speak. His voice and hers. I couldn’t hear the words, my heart was too loud, the fire was too loud, everything was too loud. But I heard the shape of it. An argument. A refusal. My mother’s voice stayed steady in a way that must have cost her everything she had left.

Then a sound I have never stopped hearing. Flesh and something breaking.

Then nothing.

The evil man reached for me through the dark smoke, his claws red and sharp.

“There you are.”

I ran. No thinking. Tears and smoke in my eyes. His voice made me want to hide in my mummy’s arms.

“Run, little one.” His laughter twisted through the air. “I like the chase.”

Whatever I heard, whatever I saw, I didn’t stop.

Bare feet on cold ground. Branches tearing at my elbows. The orange glow faded behind me as the dark forest swallowed me whole.

I ran until my legs stopped working.

I ran until there was nothing left of me but the running.

Somewhere in the dark between that night and every morning after it, I lost everything.

My herbs. My home. My mother’s hands in the dark. And the face of the man whose laugh burned worse than the fire.

But the kind of evil that finds you once… doesn’t stop.