Over two months had clawed their way past since the fire, the blood, the screaming—and her mother's final, soul-shattering roar.
The jagged, scarlet memories still flared in Lux's mind, but the immediate world offered a stark, brutal contrast. No knights now. No dragons. No divine swords cleaving the sky into thunder. Just the incessant chirping of birds, the buzzing of unseen bugs, and the relentless, stubborn rhythm of her own hunger.
Lux survived.
Barely.
She'd escaped deep into the tangled, shadowed embrace of the forest that same night, her lungs burning with exertion and the acrid memory of smoke, her heart a fractured, aching void. At first, she'd simply collapsed beneath a low, thorny brush, letting the world turn without her, content to drown in the suffocating black of grief. But eventually, nature's chilling indifference reminded her—grief meant nothing to a stomach that growled, a body that craved sustenance.
She began to eat whatever she could find—tart berries, fibrous roots, the occasional wild fruit, still warm from the sun. Occasionally, with a developing predatory cunning, she caught something with crude, improvised traps or the swift, desperate strike of her nascent claws. Once, she even stole a plump rabbit from a territorial fox, nearly losing a hand for the brazen theft, the memory of the fox's snarl a sharp lesson. Each mouthful was a triumph against the encroaching emptiness.
Lux crouched beside a narrow, winding brook that morning, her fingers brushing over the cool, emerald moss that carpeted the stones. Her golden-blonde hair, now longer and threaded with the subtle crimson strands of her draconic lineage, was tied into a lazy, lopsided braid, tangled with leaves and the occasional twig. Her blood-red eyes, once wide with childish wonder, now narrowed with a predatory keenness against the glare of the rising sun, which painted the dew-kissed leaves in shades of blinding gold.
From a distance, with her small, lithe frame, she looked like any other wandering teenager—thin, scruffy, quiet, easily dismissed.
But predators can always recognize their own. A deep, instinctive knowing pulsed beneath her skin.
Across the stream, a wild pig, its hide a mottled brown, rooted clumsily for grubs beneath the leaf litter. Lux studied it, every muscle in her body still as carved stone, her breathing barely disturbing the crisp morning air. She moved only when the wind, a fickle ally, shifted imperceptibly in her favor, carrying her scent away from her unwitting prey.
Then, with a fluid, silent grace, she stood, pulling a hunting bow from her back. It was a crude, brutal thing—carved from a tough, gnarled branch, bones and feathers lashed together with sinewy vine and the raw, unyielding force of vengeance. She had scavenged it from a long-dead corpse, a grim trophy, and improved it with scraps of leather and stolen thread. The arrowhead was chipped obsidian, rough and unforgiving, stained dark from prior, successful uses.
The bowstring groaned—not from tension, but a low, protesting creak that sounded almost like offense. It hated being held by her, hated the dark purpose it now served.
She loosed. The release was silent, deadly.
The arrow, a dark streak against the emerald backdrop, hit the pig square in the eye with a sickening thud. The creature dropped without a sound.
Lux grinned, a flash of something feral and satisfied. "Dinner," she muttered, the word a rasp on her dry tongue, as she began to approach the still corpse with a hunter's anticipation—until the woods around her seemed to scream back, not with pain, but with human indignation.
A cry, sharp and indignant, split the serene quiet of the trees.
Then the crunching of hurried footsteps on fallen leaves.
Then angry shouting, a chorus of human outrage.
Within seconds, Lux was surrounded—half a dozen teens and young men, their faces flushed with anger, pitchforks and blunt spears trembling in their hands. They moved like a crude, uncoordinated wolf pack.
"Thief!" one snarled, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and bravado.
"That was our pig! Poacher!" another accused, his voice cracking.
"Come quietly, witch, or we drag you by your hair!" a third threatened, brandishing his spear.
Lux sighed, the sudden confrontation draining the hunger from her stomach, her appetite dying on the forest floor, replaced by a familiar surge of annoyance.
Annoyed but acutely aware of being outnumbered, she slowly raised her hands, palms open. "Fine," she said coolly, her voice low and even, a strange contrast to the rising tension. "But be warned: if one of you dares to lay a hand upon me, I swear, I will rip out your tongue and braid your spine into a grim necklace."
They didn't appreciate the poetry. Their faces remained contorted with suspicion and unease.
Still, she let herself be escorted—more accurately, surrounded and shoved—through the trees toward a modest village, a scattering of timber and thatch at the forest's edge. The air here was thick with the scent of woodsmoke and damp earth, a stark change from the wild, clean scent of the deep woods.
There, amidst the low hum of village life, she met the owner of the pig. A woman in her forties with strong, calloused arms and tired, surprisingly intelligent eyes—Mrs. Lawrence, they called her. Owner of three modest plots of farmland, a handful of livestock, and, as Lux would quickly discover, an uncanny ability to see through layers of lies and bravado.
Rather than throw Lux in a damp, muddy cage, as she half-expected, the woman surprised her by offering terms.
"Work for me," Mrs. Lawrence stated, her voice gruff but not unkind, her gaze steady. "Until the debt for my boar is paid. You broke nothing else, stole nothing but an animal that strayed. It wasn't truly wild. But then again, neither are you, I think." Her eyes lingered on Lux's strangely colored hair, then her sharp, unblinking gaze.
Lux wanted to argue. She really wanted to burn something, to lash out with the rising fury that simmered beneath her skin. But she was tired. Profoundly, bone-deep tired of the constant fight. So, she nodded, a curt, reluctant agreement.
The arrangement was simple, deceptively so. Feed the chickens until her palms were chafed. Clean the pens until the stench no longer made her gag. Haul grain sacks that seemed to weigh more than she did. And, perhaps most difficult of all, try not to act like a feral animal, a wild, untamed creature dropped into a world of domesticated routine.
That last part was hard. Instinct rebelled against order.
It was quickly noticed that Lux couldn't sweep properly; her broom handling was more like swinging a weapon, a furious, inefficient flurry. She had no idea how to knead dough, her hands too rough, too accustomed to tearing. She startled the placid sheep with her sudden movements. She glared at the clucking chickens like they owed her something, a primordial debt for past indignities.
"You couldn't even be a witch, child," Mrs. Lawrence chuckled, a surprising warmth in her tone, as she watched Lux wrestle with a stubbornly closed sack of feed. "That's a good sign in these parts."
But what she lacked in grace, in domesticity, she made up for in raw, startling strength.
"Strong girl like you," the woman said another day, tossing her a bucket of water twice her apparent size. "Might not have the sense of a goat when it comes to chores, but you carry like an ox. I'll take it." A wry, appreciative glint in her tired eyes.
Days bled into weeks, weeks into a slow, quiet rhythm. Lux worked.
She didn't mind the work, not truly. It was quiet. Honest. Boring, yes—a monotonous cycle of rising, laboring, sleeping—but boring was safer than bleeding, safer than running, safer than the gnawing, all-consuming grief that still haunted her dreams. The physical exertion numbed the sharp edges of her sorrow.
Until he came.
The tax collector. A weasel of a man with perpetually ink-stained fingers, a smile that was too wide, too obsequious, too fake, and eyes that lingered a moment too long, assessing, calculating. He asked the usual questions of the villagers—names, harvests, coin owed—but when he finally turned his slick attention to her, he leaned in too close, his breath hot and stale.
"Name? Papers? Parentage?" he purred, his voice oily. He asked for identification. No one else in the village had been asked. Only her.
Lux's stomach went cold, a sudden, familiar chill of dread. A prickle of pure, unadulterated irritation began to burn behind her blood-red eyes.
"How do you even know I'm not from here?" she muttered, her voice low, a controlled rumble.
He merely smiled like a freshly sharpened knife, thin and dangerous. "Oh, I hear things. Whispers carry, little stray."
She was detained that evening. The sun had barely dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in fiery oranges and purples, when they arrived.
Knights—if you could even call them that—escorted her. Their sloppily polished armor gleamed dull in the twilight, bellies jiggling with every heavy step, swords dragging behind them like tired, neglected pets.
"Questioning," they mumbled, their voices thick with disinterest. "Just routine, girl. Nothing to worry about."
Lux stared straight ahead, her face a mask, fists clenched tightly at her sides, but her pulse remained steady, stubbornly so. The training from her mother, buried deep, surfaced in this moment of crisis.
This was not routine.
And it was far from over.