Chapter 17: The First Breath
The world did not shatter.
It bent.
Snow lifted in great, silent sheets, rising rather than falling. Trees bowed until their crowns scraped the ground. The river at the valley's edge stilled, its surface smooth as glass, before trembling upward in frozen pillars that defied the sky.
The earth exhaled.
And with that breath, the air thickened—like water filling my lungs. Each inhale clawed at my throat, each exhale left me hollow, as though something greater than myself had claimed my rhythm. Around me, men gasped and staggered, their lips blue, their eyes wide with panic. Shields fell from nerveless hands.
Joran clutched his chest, fingers digging deep as if to wrench his own heart free. "It—beats—me," he choked, collapsing into the snow.
The children did not struggle. Their small chests rose and fell with perfect ease, their pale eyes unblinking, steady. They had always known how to breathe this air.
The watchers straightened from their kneeling vigil. Their blades remained planted in the soil, but their heads tilted back, jaws opening as if to taste the breath itself. Light—if it could be called light—spilled from their mouths in slow streams of black flame, feeding upward into the wounded sky.
Carrow staggered forward. His sword trembled but stayed aloft. "Do not yield," he rasped, his voice shredded raw. "Do not bend to it."
But his words were frail against the tide.
The girl in my arms pressed closer. Her voice was as calm as ever, though it carried an edge now, like frost sheathing steel. "You cannot cut the breath," she said. "It is already in you. To fight is to break."
Her eyes rose to meet mine, and for the first time I saw not a child, but something vast looking through her. A gaze that weighed, measured, chose.
The ground convulsed again, and from the cracks poured not flame, nor smoke, but shadows thick as tar. They curled upward like serpents, each pulse birthing more. Where they touched the snow, the whiteness melted into black. Where they brushed the bark, the trees groaned like wounded beasts.
A man screamed behind me. I turned in time to see one of the shadows crawl into him, seeping through his eyes, his mouth. His body arched, spasmed—then stilled. When he rose, it was not with the staggering confusion of the possessed, but with the precision of something remade. His eyes burned like the watchers'. His voice, when it came, was not his own.
"Chosen."
Others followed. The tide of shadows took them one by one, each cry cut short, each frame stiffening into that same unnatural reverence. In moments, half our number had been remade. Warriors I had fought beside for years now stood with heads bowed, awaiting command.
Carrow roared and struck. His blade cleaved one of the taken clean through, flesh and bone severed. But where the body should have fallen, the shadow within it held the form upright, knitting black sinew across the wound. The soldier's lips curved into a smile that was not his own.
Carrow struck again and again, each blow carving ruin into what remained of his man. Yet with every cut, the shadow's grip deepened, until Carrow's strikes grew wild and desperate, his strength waning.
"Stop," the girl said softly, though the word carried like thunder in my skull. "Steel cannot end what was never flesh."
I wanted to argue, to defy, to believe my captain's blade could hold the line. But the truth writhed before me in black veins and silent eyes. The girl's words were not prophecy. They were law.
The heartbeat thundered again, rattling my bones, drowning even the clash of steel. My vision blurred. The world tilted. And in that tilt I saw—just for an instant—something vast stirring beneath the skin of the earth. Not a beast, not a god, but both. Its breath was the wind. Its pulse the quaking ground. Its hunger the shadows that sought us.
"It does not rise," the girl whispered. "It wakes."
Carrow fell to one knee. Blood streaked his brow, his swordpoint buried shallow in the earth. Still he glared into the pit, defiant. "Then let it wake," he spat, voice breaking. "And let it see men still stand."
But the heartbeat answered him.
And when the watchers raised their blades as one, I knew the earth's first breath was not yet its last.
"— To Be Continued —"
"Author : Share your thoughts, your feedback keeps the story alive."