"From blood, remembrance. From death, the gate."
There is no moon tonight. Only cold.
I shouldn't remember this. I was an infant, swaddled in ash, laid upon an altar of black stone. But I do. I remember everything.
Thirteen robed figures circle me. Shadows stitched by candlelight. Masks of bone and gold with eyes that never blink. Their voices don't rise. They descend. Low. Reverent. Like earth falling into a grave.
The mark weeps light from my skin. Silver and salt carved into flesh too young to scar.
I don't cry.
I only watch.
The High Voice steps forward. Her mask is older than the others—cracked down the center, held together by a thread of golden hair. In her hand, a knife. Curved. Black as the void behind mirrors.
"The First must be willing," she intones. "The First must not weep."
The others bow.
"From death, the gate. From silence, the name."
She raises the blade. The candles bow with her. Something stirs in the deep silence. Something hungry. Something old.
One figure lifts her head.
"There are other ways."
The High Voice doesn't turn. "This is the way."
"She carries something older than the mark. Older than the gate."
"She carries danger."
"So did we all, once."
The candle nearest me gutters. Dies.
"You forget what this cost," the second woman says. "She didn't ask to be born with your silence."
The High Voice turns. Cold fury radiates from behind the mask. "You would call her mine?"
"No. Only that she is not only yours to end."
Blue light explodes from my hand.
The altar cracks. The floor splits. A yawning mouth of ancient stone opens beneath me, and from the deep, a wailing rises. Raw. Hungry. The voice of something that has waited eons to feed.
I burn.
The gates swallow me whole.
The High Voice stumbles back. The black knife clatters to the stones.
The light dies.
But I don't.
Somehow, impossibly, I survive.
And I remember.