The mountain wind always tasted of iron, sharp on the tongue, like old blood never washed from stone.
Leo pressed his back against the cracked wall of the forgotten shrine, dust flaking into his hair, and tried to still the flutter of his breath. Evening had painted the cliffs in bruised violet, and the broken statues that guarded the slope stretched their long shadows across the grass, crooked sentinels that no longer knew whom they served.
He had not come for gods. He had not come for legends. He had only come for firewood. Yet something had drawn him here, some tug older than hunger, subtle as a half-remembered lullaby drifting through the air.
The villagers avoided this place. Always had.
They whispered that the stones spoke when the wind ran through them, carrying the voices of the forgotten. Some swore that a child had once vanished here on a midsummer's eve, swallowed whole by a crack in the floor. Leo had grown up on those stories, fed them at night like bitter herbs to keep fear alive in his bones. But fear bent easily to hunger, and hunger had sharpened its teeth upon him for too many days.
His bare feet brushed aside weeds, finding the faint trace of a stair half-buried in the earth. One step groaned beneath his weight, stone shifting as though the shrine itself stirred from slumber. The air cooled, sharp and damp, raising gooseflesh along his arms.
Inside, the ruin lay hushed. The only light was the moon's thin breath, threading through a jagged hole in the roof. Broken pillars slouched like drunks at the edges of the chamber, their carved faces blurred by moss. The floor gleamed faintly green, slick with dampness.
At the center waited a basin, half-filled with rainwater. Glyphs wound across its rim, their edges worn smooth by centuries. Yet Leo could still make out fragments: twin serpents carved in a looping coil, their heads straining toward one another, fangs almost touching.
Kneeling, he peered into the water. His own reflection trembled back at him, a boy with dark eyes, hair in disarray, features still too soft to be a man's. But for the briefest heartbeat, another face slid over his, an older, leaner, with a hardness that did not belong to him. Cold eyes, ancient eyes, regarding him as prey.
Leo blinked and the vision broke. Only his reflection remained.
That was when the whisper came.
It did not enter through his ears. It was not the wind. It was a thought pressed against his thoughts, slick as oil, patient and invasive.
Found you.
Leo flinched, stumbling back so quickly that water splashed over the mossy floor. His chest thundered. He scanned the shadows, half-expecting one of the villagers to step out and laugh at his fear, but the shrine stood silent. Empty.
At the bottom of the basin, stirred by the rippling water, something glowed faintly. A shard no larger than his palm, dull as ordinary stone on the outside but threaded with veins of pale fire within.
It pulsed once, like the beat of a heart. His heart stuttered with it.
He knew he should run. Every tale spoke of cursed relics, of ruins that consumed the unwary. His mother's voice echoed from memory, scolding him for venturing too far into places where silence had teeth.
But his hand betrayed him. It moved of its own accord, fingers brushing aside the water.
The shard was warm to the touch - then hot - then alive.
The whisper deepened, curling through his mind like smoke.
Do you want strength? Do you want a name the world will remember? Take me.
The warmth seared his palm. His breath caught, not with pain, but with something stranger, vaster. It felt as though a tide had risen within him, pulling at the shore of his soul.
Memories scattered like leaves in the gale. The faint hum of his mother's lullaby, had she ever sung it, or had he only dreamed it? The coarse taste of barley porridge on a winter night. The ache of being no one. For a terrifying moment, he felt those fragments loosen, as if the shard itself were sampling them, weighing which to keep.
"Stop," Leo gasped, clutching his chest as if he could hold the pieces of himself together.
But the shard would not release him. It clung, burning its veins of light beneath his skin until his hand seemed fused with it, marked by serpents of pale fire.
The whisper gentled, as though it had no need to press harder.
You are mine now, and I am yours. But everything has a price.
Outside, the mountain wind shifted. It no longer tasted of iron. It carried rain, and beneath the rain something older, wilder, watching.
Leo staggered to the doorway, his breath ragged. The shrine behind him seemed deeper than before, its shadows breathing, though he had not moved an inch. He pressed his marked hand to his chest and whispered to himself, as if to anchor the fading outline of who he was.
"I'm Leo. Just Leo."
The shard pulsed once more. The voice chuckled within him, low and knowing.
Not for long.
And in that violet dusk, the boy understood. The world would remember him, whether he wished it or not.