Twenty-seven years before the bridge incident
The morning Mara Korh's father gave her away, the northern winds carried the scent of early snow and distant regret. She stood in the doorway of their cottage, clutching a cloth doll her grandmother had sewn from scraps of old dresses, watching as Father Matthias loaded his cart with provisions for the journey south. At nine years old, she understood that something momentous was happening, but the shape of it remained as elusive as the mist that clung to the mountain peaks surrounding their village.
"She has the sight," her father said for the third time that morning, his words directed toward the priest but his gaze fixed somewhere beyond Mara's shoulder. He spoke of her as if she were a harvest to be evaluated, a resource to be properly allocated. "Dreams of things before they happen. Knows when the storms will come before the wind changes. The villagers say she's touched by divine grace."
Father Matthias—a thin man whose robes seemed to hang on his frame like borrowed dignity—nodded with the practiced solemnity of someone accustomed to collecting gifted children. "The Sanctum of Lirathiel has nurtured many such blessed souls. If the child truly bears celestial favor, our order will help her flourish in service to the divine."
From the cottage's interior came the sound of her grandmother's weeping—harsh, broken sobs that seemed to tear something fundamental in the morning air. Nana Korh had fought this decision with the fury of someone who understood costs that others could not yet calculate, but her words carried no weight against her son's certainty or the priest's persuasive authority.
"She's too young," Nana had pleaded the night before, her weathered hands clutching Mara's thin shoulders. "Let her grow a few more years. Let her learn who she is before you teach her who she must become."
But Father had already decided. The bad harvest, the failed roof repairs, the mounting debts to the district lord—all of it could be absolved by offering their gifted daughter to divine service. The Sanctum would provide a generous donation to the family, enough to survive the coming winter and perhaps purchase better seed for spring planting.
More importantly, it would give meaning to the strange child who saw too much, felt too deeply, and asked questions that made the village elders uncomfortable.
"Kiss your grandmother farewell," Father instructed, his voice carrying the forced patience of someone eager to complete an unpleasant transaction. "You'll write letters, of course. The Sanctum encourages correspondence with family."
Mara entered the cottage one final time, finding Nana sitting beside the cold hearth, her face streaked with tears that seemed to age her beyond her seventy years. The old woman gathered her granddaughter into an embrace that smelled of lavender and woodsmoke and the particular sadness that comes from watching the innocent walk unknowingly toward suffering.
"Remember, little star," Nana whispered, using the pet name she'd given Mara after birth. "Remember that you are worthy of love simply for existing. Not for what you can do, not for what others need from you, but for who you are. Promise me you'll remember."
Mara nodded, though at nine she could not yet understand why this promise would become both anchor and torment in the years to come.
***
The Sanctum of Lirathiel rose from the southern foothills like a prayer made stone, its white walls gleaming in the afternoon sun as Father Matthias's cart wound up the mountain path. Tall windows reflected the sky with such clarity that the building seemed to float between earth and heaven, while towers spiraled upward in graceful curves that suggested divine inspiration rather than human engineering.
It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It felt like the kind of place where miracles might happen daily, where gifted children could flourish under wise guidance and gentle care.
For the first three years, it was.
Mother Celestine, the sanctum's leader, was a woman whose presence seemed to soften the edges of the world around her. She had silver hair that caught light like spun moonbeams and eyes the color of dawn sky, and when she spoke to the thirty-seven children in her care, each felt as if they were the center of her attention.
"Divine gifts are not burdens," she would tell them during morning prayers, her voice carrying the warmth of absolute conviction. "They are expressions of love—the eternal speaking through mortal vessels to bring healing to a broken world."
Mara thrived under this philosophy. Her strange dreams, her uncanny intuitions, her ability to sense the emotional undercurrents that others missed—all of it was celebrated as evidence of celestial favor. She learned to read ancient texts, to illuminate manuscripts with careful precision, to assist in ceremonies where her presence seemed to make the prayers themselves more potent.
The other children became her family in ways that blood relatives had never managed. There was Thomas, two years older, whose gift manifested as an ability to heal small injuries with touch and intention. Sera, whose voice could calm the wildest storms when she sang the evening psalms. Marcus, whose dreams showed him the needs of distant communities, allowing the Sanctum to send aid before disasters struck.
They were chosen ones, blessed ones, living proof that the divine had not abandoned the world to darkness and despair.
But then Mother Celestine died.
It happened quietly, during the night, as if she had simply chosen to step from the mortal world into whatever paradise awaited the truly faithful. Mara woke to the sound of muffled sobbing from the adult quarters and knew, with the terrible certainty that had always marked her gift, that their sanctuary had ended.
Father Aldric arrived within the week—a man in his forties whose smile never quite reached his eyes and whose interpretation of divine service differed significantly from his predecessor's gentle approach. Where Mother Celestine had seen potential to be nurtured, he saw resources to be exploited. Where she had found joy in the children's gifts, he found tools for advancing his own position within the church hierarchy.
"Discipline," he announced during his first address to the assembled children, "is the foundation of divine service. You have been pampered, indulged, allowed to believe that your gifts make you special rather than obligated. This will change."
The transformation was gradual at first—longer prayer sessions, reduced meals, the elimination of play time in favor of additional study. But as months passed, Father Aldric's true nature emerged with the inexorability of poison seeping through soil.
He was clever about it. Never violent enough to leave visible marks, never cruel enough to be easily reported to visiting church officials. Instead, he wielded shame like a master craftsman, turning the children's gifts against them, convincing them that their abilities made them inherently sinful, inherently suspect.
"Your visions come from pride," he would tell Mara during private confession, his voice carrying the authority of absolute religious conviction. "The divine speaks through humility, not through the arrogance of believing yourself worthy of special revelation."
When her dreams showed him truth he didn't want acknowledged— the way he counted the sanctum's donations with greedy fingers, when she sensed the darkness that clung to him like incense—he declared her corrupted by vanity and sentenced her to days of silent prayer and fasting.
The other children fared no better. Thomas's healing gift was declared presumptuous, an attempt to usurp divine prerogative. Sera's voice was silenced during ceremonies, her beautiful singing replaced by harsh recitations of penitential psalms. Marcus's prophetic dreams were dismissed as the products of an undisciplined mind requiring correction through vigorous physical labor.
But worse than the individual punishments was the systematic erosion of their sense of worth. Father Aldric possessed an artist's talent for identifying precisely which words would cut deepest, which accusations would burrow into young minds and grow like thorns. He convinced Mara that her grandmother's love had been mere sentiment, that her parents had given her away not for divine service but to rid themselves of a burden.
"No one wanted you," he would whisper during the private sessions that grew longer and more frequent as the years passed. "Your family celebrated when the cart took you away. The church itself debates whether gifts like yours come from heaven or from darker sources."
By her fourteenth year, Mara had learned to make herself small, quiet, forgettable. The girl who had once illuminated manuscripts with confident strokes now worked with hunched shoulders and downcast eyes. Her gift for sensing truth became a source of constant pain, showing her the lies that surrounded them while providing no power to escape them.
It was during this period that she first noticed the strange phenomenon that would eventually define her life. When Father Aldric's attention became too intense, when his presence in her cell grew too oppressive, she discovered she could somehow... recede. Not physically—she remained in the same place—but something about her became harder to focus on, easier to overlook.
At first, she thought it was a coincidence. Father Aldric would enter her room with clear intent, then seem to forget why he had come. His gaze would slide past her as if she were furniture, unremarkable and unworthy of notice. On particularly difficult days, she found she could walk through common areas virtually unseen, even by other children who knew her well.
The ability grew stronger as her situation grew worse. The more thoroughly she was dismissed, diminished, and ignored, the more profoundly she could fade from attention. It was as if the sustained experience of being treated as worthless had taught reality itself to overlook her presence.
Salvation came from an unexpected source. Brother Augustine was a traveling cleric from the capital, sent to conduct the annual review of outlying sanctuaries. He was middle-aged, soft-spoken, with the kind of gentle authority that made people want to confess their troubles without being asked.
His arrival threw Father Aldric into barely concealed panic. Suddenly, the sanctum blazed with manic cleanliness, the children were fed decent meals, and the harsh discipline was temporarily suspended in favor of performances designed to demonstrate their spiritual development.
But Brother Augustine possessed the experienced eye of someone who had investigated too many institutions where power had corrupted purpose. He noticed the way the children flinched at sudden movements, the careful distance they maintained from Father Aldric, the hollow quality in their recitations that spoke of words learned through fear rather than understanding.
More importantly, he noticed Mara.
"You seem troubled, child," he said during what was supposed to be a routine interview. They sat in the garden courtyard, where afternoon sunlight filtered through ancient olive trees and made patterns on stone that reminded Mara painfully of her grandmother's cottage.
"I am well, Brother Augustine," she replied, the response as automatic as breathing. Years of training had taught her to provide answers that satisfied authority figures while revealing nothing of substance.
But Augustine was not easily satisfied. "Your aura is... interesting," he said thoughtfully. "Most children your age radiate presence, even when trying to be unobtrusive. But you seem to exist in a state of deliberate unremarkability. That's not a natural development. It's a learned response to prolonged diminishment."
For the first time in years, someone was seeing her clearly—not the performance of piety she had learned to project, but the frightened girl who had discovered that survival meant becoming forgettable.
The tears came without warning, years of suppressed grief and terror pouring out in great, wrenching sobs that seemed to tear something loose in her chest. Augustine sat quietly beside her, neither offering comfort nor demanding explanation, simply providing the rare gift of patient attention.
When she could finally speak, the words tumbled out in a torrent—Father Aldric's systematic cruelty, the way he had twisted their gifts into sources of shame, the private sessions that left her feeling hollowed out and worthless. She told him about the other children, about Thomas's hands that no longer dared to heal, about Sera's voice that had forgotten how to sing with joy.
Augustine listened with the stillness of someone accustomed to hearing terrible truths, his face growing increasingly grave as the scope of the corruption became clear.
Three days later, Father Aldric was gone.
But the justice Mara had expected never came.