The first breath was bitter.
I woke to the smell of damp wood and smoke. My eyes opened to a slant of moonlight cutting through a torn curtain, falling across a room that felt as though it had not known warmth for years. The walls were bare, the floor worn smooth by pacing feet. A cradle stood in the corner, empty but rocking slightly in the wind.
I sat up slowly, my body different again — smaller than Kael's, lighter, the bones fine but the muscles weak from hunger. A lock of hair fell into my eyes. I reached up and touched it. Long. A woman's hair.
Her memories came in whispers at first: a name — Anara.
A husband lost to a factory fire six months ago.
A child lost to fever three months after that.
No family left.
A small village on the edge of a river that had dried to a thin brown thread.
The grief wasn't loud. It was quiet and cold, like a winter river moving under thin ice. Her despair had no screams, no rage. It was the silence of someone who had already wept herself dry.
I rose, feet bare against the cold floor. A single candle guttered on a chipped wooden table. Its flame bent in the draft, casting the room in slow-moving shadows.
On the table lay a scrap of paper. The edges were crumpled as if it had been read and folded a hundred times. I picked it up with fingers that were not my own.
The note was simple.
I'm sorry. I can't keep living like this. I'll go to the bridge tonight. I don't want to wake up tomorrow.
The words struck harder than any whip.
I let the paper fall back to the table, my breath caught in my throat. The rope had haunted Kael. The pistol had haunted Elias. Now, a bridge haunted her — and the black river below it promised the same false peace.
Her thoughts stirred within me, tired and distant, as though spoken by someone already half-gone.
"There's nothing left here. No child to hold. No reason to wake to another empty dawn. If I slip quietly into the water, at least the night will take me gently."
I gripped the table to steady myself.
The wood felt splintered under my palm, the grain rough, grounding me in the present.
"No," I whispered into the empty room, voice shaking.
"Not you too."
The wind rattled the window. The cradle rocked again, a slow creak like a sigh.
I could feel her resolve in the stillness of her body, in the steady calm of someone who had already decided. There was no fire in her, no rage — only the aching desire to end the long winter of grief.
I had stopped a soldier.
I had stopped a boy.
I had stopped a man in chains.
But this… this was different.
How do you save someone who no longer wants to be saved, who sees death not as an escape from pain but as a reunion with those she has lost?
I stood at the window and looked out.
The moonlight turned the road pale, silvering the roofs of sleeping houses. Far away, at the end of the lane, I saw the faint shimmer of the river.
And I knew where her feet would take us when the sun fell again.