Anamnesis

The negotiation went south the moment the innkeeper's brother recognised the shadow-glyph.

After that, it was mostly furniture.

“For the record, this is your fault.”

“You're the one who mentioned the old bloodlines.”

“I mentioned them delicately.” The lanky one caught a bottle out of the air, reversed it, and cracked it across the jaw of a man twice his size without breaking stride. “You're the one who stood there radiating menace.”

“I was being patient.”

“You were being terrifying. There's a difference, though I understand why you'd confuse the two.”

Three men came at the tall one at once. His shadows took the first, his blade took the second, and his elbow took the third. He didn't break rhythm. Didn't even shift his weight in a way that looked effortful.

“You know, we've rehearsed this a hundred times,” the smaller one with the mouth called out, spinning away from a haymaker and putting a table between himself and two advancing farmhands. “The approach, the cover story, the ‘we're just travellers seeking shelter’ routine. A hundred times. And every single time, it goes exactly like this.”

A farmhand lunged. The mouth sidestepped, caught the man's arm, and used his own momentum to redirect him face-first into a support beam.

“Oh, excuse me.” The shadow drove his shoulder into a man built like a grain silo and sent him staggering. “It's hard to make space for your drivel when you've hundreds of years of better memories to store.”

“Better? Better? Name one.”

“The southern capital. 1204. A nun tried to kill me with a censer.”

“That's not better, that's just older.” The mouth vaulted the bar, landed in a crouch, and came up with a wooden stool in each hand. “I'm talking about quality. Craftsmanship. Narrative arc.”

“You want narrative arc in a bar fight?”

“I want narrative arc in everything.” He threw one stool. It connected. “Life without structure is just – things happening.”

The room lurched.

Not the fight – that was still happening, somewhere, behind glass that was rapidly thickening. But the floor had gone soft and the walls were breathing and the sounds of breaking furniture were receding like a tide pulling out, replaced by –

Smoke, curling along the floor… not fire-smoke, thicker, moving with terrible patience. The air it carried tasted metallic and cold; how lightning smells before it strikes.

A new world took shape around me. Arriving and disappearing. Black sand. I was standing on it under a sky the colour of old bruises. Glyphs spiralled outward ahead of me, the patterns too complex to follow, too intricate to be accidental.

I knew her the way you knew things in dreams – not her face, which I couldn't see, but the shape of her. She stood at the edge of vastness, her hair ink-dark, longer than mine, and moving strangely. Around her feet, those glyphs. Spiralling outward. Expanding.

You're early.

The words arrived without sound – a thought fully formed.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

When you remember, she said, you'll understand why the fire keeps finding you.

The black sand shivered. The figure dissolved, there and gone like she'd never been anything more than a phantom.

Something else moved in the dark where she'd been, shadow-laced and indistinct around the edges. Too many teeth crowded into a mouth that shouldn't exist. Eyes like moonlight caught in splintered glass, each blinking at a different speed, like they were all dreaming something slightly different.

Sensation crawled across my skin like roots seeking water – primitive and persistent and absolutely fucking terrifying. And underneath the terror, underneath the wrongness of all those teeth and mismatched eyes, the worst thing:

Familiarity. Unwanted, the way a nightmare is familiar.

“You're not supposed to be here,” I whispered.

Its head tilted. Catlike. Not human.

Neither are you, it said, voice that purred and cut.

I took a step back.

It stepped forward.

Somewhere deep in the dark – so quiet I almost missed it, so certain it needed no repetition – the voice that wasn't my voice finished the thought for me.

We are what's left after the Beasts are buried.

The walls folded in –

The bells began tolling long before dawn, low and hollow, like they were trying to bury the day before it could rise.

I jerked awake in my bunk's narrow grip, sweat clammy against my neck, lungs tight with the residue of a dream I couldn't remember. The ceiling crack above me had grown longer again overnight, creeping with infinite patience. There was comfort, I supposed, in the way it spidered deeper every day, like even the stone could barely hold itself together in a place like this.

The Ward was already moving. A girl two beds over cried into her pillow – new, maybe thirteen. Old enough to know she was screwed. I couldn't remember her name. Didn't want to. Names were just another thing to lose.

“Up!” Someone barked. Feet slapped stone, and three bunks down came a scream – a warden had dumped a bucket of icy water over some poor bastard daring to stay warm an extra thirty seconds.

I swung my legs over the edge of my lower bunk, bare feet hovering above the freezing stone. My fingers sparked – a thin red line skittering across my palm before blinking out.

“You're leaking again,” Aife muttered from the bunk above, her face appearing upside-down like a judgmental bat.

“Good morning to you, too.”

“It's not. It's never good. Stop lying to yourself.”

She dropped to the ground, all sharp elbows and spite, russet braid yanked tight. Her shirt was inside out. She didn't fix it because Aife had exactly zero fucks left to give about the dress code.

The not-voice stirred, like it had every morning since I was small. Not a hallucination. Not madness, maybe. Just – a voice not quite mine. It was like hearing your own thoughts in a different timbre, spoken by someone who'd significantly less tolerance for self-pity.

She's right, you know.

I didn't argue. No point.

I'd told Aife about it once, years ago, drunk on fermented fruit someone had smuggled into the Ward in their boot. She'd considered me before weighing in, with complete earnestness: Did you know your eyes go blank when it happens? Like you've stepped out of yourself for a meeting and left your body running. Then she'd stolen the rest of my cup and said it was probably just my magic finding a shape for itself, and I should be more worried I'd been arguing with myself forever and still wasn't winning.

She wasn't mistaken about the last part.

This was the strange thing. It should have been frightening – an uninvited presence your own mind, speaking when it hadn't been asked to. But it had been inside me so long it was furniture. You stopped noticing it until someone pointed it out.

“You look like death,” Aife said.

“Feel like it, too.”

You look fine, the not-voice sighed. You also have approximately forty seconds before Aife throws something at your head.

“Perfect. They say the Beasts like their meat tenderised.”

I snorted, yanking on boots that had seen better centuries. “Still banking on one falling in love with me, are we?”

“I've seen stranger things.”

“I'm betting on ‘snack’ over ‘soulmate,’ Aife.”

“With your personality? Possibly an appetiser they spit out halfway through.”

Ah. The warm comfort of friendship.

The Training Ward wasn't part of Cyrenthe's main Keep. This wasn't a place for polishing futures – it was for breaking them. They dumped the magic-touched strays here, the ones without glyphs already sleeping in their genes, the inconvenient born with power but no approved surname to wield it.

They called us trainees. We called ourselves what we actually were: maybe-ables. Nearly-worthies. Cannon fodder dressed up as contenders to fill out the numbers and keep the real heirs sharp. They trained us to fight, to weaponise our magic. Just not to win.

I'd been rotting in this stone-walled hellhole for nearly nine years. Long enough to know which pipes hissed before curfew. Long enough to learn that crying after lights-out was pointless. No one cared.

“Tunic,” Aife said, tossing fabric at my face. “Yours looks like you lost a fight with a hungry moth.”

“The moth always wins.”

“Tragic.”

I pulled on the spare she'd used last night as a blanket. It was scratchy, still warm from her body heat, and it settled over my skin like ill-fitting armour. I'd stopped growing two years ago, stuck at a height that put me eye-level with most people's shoulders. Compact, Aife called it. Scrappy. The instructors had other words: undersized, underfed, unlikely to survive first contact.

Well, I was certainly underfed. Nine years of Ward rations had left me sharp where I should have been soft, cheekbones drawn, collarbones visible above the tunic's loose neckline, wrists thin enough my training bracers never fit right. My skin had the pallor of someone raised below ground. The Ward wasn't underground – it just felt like it.

My reflection caught me off guard in the window's dark glass. Green eyes too bright for my drained face. Dark hair I'd hacked short two years ago in a fit of practicality, now grown out to an awkward length that I kept forgetting to deal with. Not exactly the face of a chosen one. But then I'd stopped believing in chosen ones around the same time I'd stopped hoping anyone was coming to save me.

The acolyte's brand itched above my collarbone – the ugly sigil they'd stamped into my skin the day I arrived, marking me as Ward property. Nine years, and it still hadn't faded.

Every Ward-rat got the same mark. But mine had always looked different. Like the artist's hand had trembled at the last moment. Like the pattern was trying to complete itself but didn't know how. Some of the others' marks had silvered over, softened with time. Mine stayed dark as the day they'd pressed the burning iron to my skin.

“Stubborn,” the healer had muttered. “Like the rest of you.”

The second bell tolled – and somehow it sounded lower, meaner. A warning we'd face consequences if we didn't move, like, now. I thought ahead to today's training session. Always the same walk, with Aife at my side, boots scraping stone, the air getting colder the closer we got to the ring. Like the Keep itself enjoyed watching us dread what came next.

Training in the Ward wasn't practice, either. It was punishment with structure and a timetable. They ran us until our lungs tore and our legs felt like borrowed meat. Rotations on rotations: sparring, grappling, endurance circuits that left vomit in the drains and blood under our fingernails.

Then glyphwork. Hours of it. Genuflecting on blackstone until our knees bruised purple, copying the same forms until our wrists cramped and our vision doubled. Again, and again, and again, as if repetition could carve talent into you the way it carved obedience. It couldn't – but they kept trying anyway, because cruelty was the only currency this place understood.

Because the Ward had a pecking order – of course it did. Even in a place built to grind us down, we found ways to rank the bruises. Natural fighters at the top, the ones who moved like their bodies already knew how to kill. Gifted glyph-workers just below, drawing clean circles without shaking, snapping commands into the air like it was nothing. The rare fuckers with both usually turned out to be House-born brats with questionable parentage, abandoned in the Ward to sink or swim. They were lucky if they could paddle.

And then there was everyone else.

Aife and I lived in the messy middle: too sharp to be ignored, too chaotic to be celebrated. She was better with blades, fast and vicious in close quarters, and never won on strength but on pure, distilled pique. Me? I could fight. Take hits. Think in the ring. Read angles and set traps while everyone else swung wildly.

But it was the glyphs that made people stare – and not because I was the best. The clean-circled girls hated I lacked discipline. The brute boys hated my magic didn't play by rules they understood. My glyphs didn't always land where I aimed. Sometimes they burned too hot. Sometimes they didn't burn at all.

But when they worked – when something in me clicked into place – even the air seemed like it was waiting for me to stop pretending I was small.

That was the problem.

In the Ward, average was safe. Average got overlooked. Strange got you watched. Strange got you tested in rooms that smelled like copper and mildew and something chemical underneath, strapped down while ink-stained bastards muttered too noisy and utterly useless.

They'd already tested me twice. Said I sparked wrong. Said the magic inside me was too old, too loud. Sometimes, when I blinked too long, I swore I saw mangled glyphs flickering behind my eyes, fading before I'd named them.

Maybe it wasn't my magic they feared. Maybe it was me. The one the Beasts looked at and turned away from. The girl even power wouldn't choose.

Still. Nine years survived. Twenty years old with all my teeth, most of my skin, and enough fight left to be dangerous. Which meant I was either good at staying alive – or the Crown had plans for me.

Neither option felt like winning.

“You ever ask,” I said suddenly, stepping over a rogue glyph shimmering under my boot and hoping no one noticed, “why the Beasts choose at all?”

The glyph faded the moment my foot cleared it. But for one half-breath it had been there. It had responded. To me.

The stone beneath my next step was cold and ordinary.

Aife raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. “Because the Accord requires it. Keeps the whole realm from cracking open or whatever.”

“And you believe that?”

“I believe it's the story they tell us, so we'll march willingly into the ring and let monsters judge our worth.” She shrugged. “Whether it's true? Can't change it, so couldn't give less of a shit.”

Fair point. But it bothered me. The Accord was supposedly forged in blood and ash, in a temple now lost for centuries beneath the Cerulean Sea. Some said it was a trick – a Beast's pact written in a dead language no one was meant to understand. I'd heard all the stories, every wild supposition, but nobody had ever explained to me what it actually did. What it meant. Why I had to waste my days training to uphold it.

It just was. And it always required sacrifice.

Though lately, the sacrifices were coming harder and faster. Selection used to happen every five years or so, the old-timers claimed. Enough time between Cullings for the Ward to refill, for the Crown to pretend they weren't grinding through us like grain through a mill. Then it dropped to three years. Then eighteen months ago, another Selection. And now…

Now the bells were ringing again, and that didn't add up to anything good.

“The Crown tells us fuck all,” Aife had said when I pointed it out to her. “Maybe they're running out of fancy bloodlines. Maybe the Bleed's getting hungrier. Maybe the Beasts are dying faster than they can replace them.” She'd shrugged in the dark. “Does it matter? We're still meat for the grinder either way.”

She wasn't wrong. But our instructors had been tenser lately, whispered conversations stopping when Ward-rats walked by, extra drills and harsher punishments. Something was changing.

Our routine didn't change a whit, though. They kept training us to be chosen, whether we wanted that or not.

Aife and I joined the tide of bodies in the corridor – fifty-six magic-scarred strays with nowhere else to go except this holding pen carved into the bowels of the citadel. Windowless stone, ceilings low enough to force bowed heads, pipes hissing in the dark like they wanted out, too. Beds bolted to the floor. Each corridor ending in a glyph-locked gate watched by guards whose faces were schooled into granite.

I'd tried once – years ago – to slip past the second checkpoint. Glyphs had woken like hounds with teeth bared. One girl made it as far as the outer stair. They brought her back scorched and silent.

After that, most of us stopped thinking about escape.

We weren't guests. We were assets on hold until the Crown decided to spend us.

My mother was dead, my sister and father gone to the Bleed. No sponsor, no crest, no coin for a contract release. No one coming for me – and after a while, I'd stopped pretending anyone ever would. The Ward was the only thing between me and the gutter, or the Beasts in the Bleed waiting a league beyond Cyrenthe's walls.

Preparation, they called it. We should be grateful the Crown cared enough to house and feed us. But gratitude was for those who still believed they'd been saved.

If I could just keep my head down one more month – until my twenty-first birthday – they'd have to let me go. One signature, and I'd slip from the Crown's gaze like grease from a knife. Freedom was close enough to grasp: stale city air, cold dusks, no one barking orders.

I could almost taste it.