Rain seeped through the field hospital's canvas roof, pooling in murky puddles around Isabelle Moreau's boots. The air stank of iodine and rotting flesh, a cloying sweetness beneath the reek of gangrene. She pressed a bandage to a soldier's gut wound, her fingers steady despite the tremor in her wrists. The boy couldn't have been older than nineteen. His eyes, glassy with morphine, fixed on the lightning scar snaking up her neck—a relic of 1896, raised and silvered like molten ore.
"You're cursed," he rasped, blood flecking his lips.
She opened her mouth to reply—and the world fractured.
Lightning. Not here, not now. 1896.
The hospital vanished. She stood in a Provençal meadow at dusk, lavender stalks bending under a bruise-colored sky. A storm clawed at the horizon, thunder rumbling like the growl of a caged beast. She'd been gathering herbs that day, her basket brimming with thyme and rosemary, when the air crackled. A bolt split the heavens, searing her throat, scorching the earth black where she fell. She woke days later in her mother's attic, her neck blistered into a jagged river of flesh. "Devil's mark," the priest hissed at her bedside, clutching his crucifix. "Burn her before the rot spreads." Her father had thrown a sack over her head instead, dragging her to the edge of the village. "Never return," he'd said, voice trembling. "You're dead to us."
The vision snapped like a wire.
Isabelle staggered, clutching the blood-slicked operating table. The soldier stared up at her, his lips blue. "You saw something," he whispered.
Before she could answer, the ground shuddered. Artillery. Distant shouts swelled into a roar—gas, gas, GAS!—and orderlies scrambled to yank masks over their faces.
"Nurse! The morphine!"
She fumbled for the glass vial. Her hands betrayed her again—the tremors worsening since the visions began. The bottle slipped, shattered on the floor.
"Useless," snarled the head surgeon, shoving her aside. "Go mop the dysentery ward. At least the flies won't judge you."
Isabelle fled to the supply tent, her scar throbbing. She pressed her forehead to the cold canvas wall, breathing in damp wool and gunpowder. The visions always came when she touched them—the Awakened. Soldiers with eyes like struck flint, their skin humming with stolen lightning. The Eye's agents stalking her through half-seen futures, their black coats blending with the mud.
And her. The woman with storm-gray eyes, standing atop a shattered world.
She unclenched her fist. A crumpled journal page slid free.
"The borders will dissolve. The chains will break."
The words blurred as rain soaked the ink.
That night, huddled in a shell-cratered church, Isabelle lit a stolen candle. The flame guttered in the drafts whistling through bullet holes in the stained glass—saints' faces gouged out by shrapnel. She opened her journal, its pages warped by damp and blood.
October 12, 1916
They're closing in. The Eye knows I See. But the Architect is coming. The storm—
A hand gripped her shoulder.
She whirled, journal clattering to the floor. A man crouched beside her, his face shadowed by a medic's cap. One eye gleamed amber in the candlelight; the other was milky, blind. His hands—wrong, too smooth, too young—rested on his knees, gloves stained with iodine and something darker.
"You're not supposed to be here," she whispered.
The man—no, not a man, not quite—smiled. His voice rasped like pages turning. "Neither are you, Isabelle Moreau."
She knew him. Not his name, but his shape. He'd appeared in her visions for weeks—a flicker at the edge of gunfights, a shadow in trenches. Always healing. Always watching. Once, she'd glimpsed him in 1596, standing beside a red-haired woman (Merydydd?) as she carved symbols into a standing stone.
"The Connector," she said.
His mismatched eyes narrowed. "They'll hang that name on me eventually. For now, run."
"From what?"
"Them."
Boots crunched outside. Isabelle snatched her journal. The Connector gripped her wrist. His skin burned, not with fever, but with the same dry heat that lived in her scar.
"Find the standing stone," he said. "West of Arras. Merydydd left it for you."
"Merydydd's dead. Three centuries dead."
"And yet." He pressed something into her palm—a sliver of rock etched with storm spirals. "Go. Now."
She stumbled into the rain. Shouts echoed behind her. Two figures in black trench coats emerged from the mist, their faces obscured by gas masks.
"Moreau!" one barked. "The Eye demands your service."
She ran.
The forest swallowed her, branches clawing at her arms. Artillery flashes lit the sky—Boom. Boom. BOOM—each blast a heartbeat. She tripped over a corpse, half-buried in mud, his hands frozen around a rusted rifle. The journal slipped from her grasp. She scrabbled for it, her fingers brushing the dead man's cheek.
*Vision: The soldier, alive, laughing with a woman in a sunlit field. A child on his shoulders. A letter in his pocket, unopened. "Ma chère Élise…"
Isabelle recoiled. The Eye's agents crashed through the trees behind her.
"Surrender, Moreau! You'll rot in a cell for this!"
She clutched the stone shard the Connector had given her. It pulsed, warm against her palm. West of Arras. She'd passed a shattered farmhouse hours ago, its roof collapsed. The stone was near.
A bullet whined past her ear.
The standing stone loomed at dawn, its surface pocked by shrapnel and age. Isabelle traced the carvings—identical to the scar on her neck. The visions surged unbidden:
1596. A woman with wild red hair (Merydydd) crouched in a Welsh cave, clutching the same stone. "The Weaver will come," she whispered. "Break the wheel." A shadowed figure (the Connector's ancestor?) handed her a flask. "Your death won't be the end," he said. "It never is."
1916. The Connector knelt in a waterlogged trench, his hands glowing as he sealed a soldier's chest wound. "Your war isn't here," he told the boy. "It's coming." The soldier stared at his healed flesh. "Who are you?" The Connector smiled. "A bridge."
The future. A woman in a white suit (the Architect) stood atop a ruined capitol, her voice booming across continents. "We are not weapons. We are the storm!" Crowds roared below, their scars bared to the sun. The Connector watched from the shadows, older but unchanged, his mismatched eyes gleaming.
Isabelle pressed her scar to the stone. It hummed, warm and alive. A hidden compartment slid open with a groan. Inside—a hollow lined with ash. Merydydd's ash.
She tucked her journal inside.
"Break the wheel," she whispered.
A gunshot cracked.
Pain bloomed between her shoulders. She collapsed into mud, the stone's carvings blurring above her.
The Architect's voice, closer now: "You lit the path, Isabelle. Rest."
The Connector, older but unchanged, standing in a future downpour: "Some storms are sown in silence."
Isabelle smiled. The sky roared.
They found her body at noon, half-buried in the crater. A private from Marseille rifled through her coat, paused at the stone's edge.
"Hey, Henri! Look at this!"
He pried the compartment open. Empty.
"Nothing," he spat, kicking the stone.
Above, thunder rumbled—the first peal of a storm that would outlast empires.