The priests say the sun has always been watching.
Solen's mother said that was exactly the problem.
She told him this on the night she died, her cracked lips barely moving, her fingers wrapped around his wrist like she was afraid he might float away. It was watching, she whispered, and then it blinked. And you came out screaming on the same breath. She had smiled then — that strange, tilted smile he would spend the rest of his life trying to remember correctly. That's not coincidence, my love. That's a conversation.
He was seven when she said it. He is fifteen now, and he has never once looked directly at the sun.
Not because he's afraid of going blind.
Because he's afraid it will look back.
The village of Karath sits at the edge of the Sunward Shelf, which is what people call the cliffs when they want to sound holy, or the Drop when they don't. Most don't. The Shelf is where the land simply gives up — red rock crumbling into a thousand-foot fall, and below that, the Ashfields, and below that, nothing anyone has come back from to describe.
The sun rises directly over the Shelf every morning. Has for a thousand years, according to the Codex. Has since before the Codex, according to the elders. Has since the Beginning, according to the priests.
Has since it chose to, according to Solen's dead mother.
He was thinking about her — he was always thinking about her — when the sun flickered.
Not dimmed. Not clouded over.
Flickered. Like a candle reconsidering.
It lasted less than a heartbeat. Solen was the only one who saw it. He knew this the way he knew most things — not because someone told him, but because he looked around at the market crowd, at the water-carriers and the cloth-dyers and the priests in their ember-colored robes, and not one of them had stopped breathing.
He had.
He stood in the middle of Karath's morning market with an armful of his uncle's dried fish and his lungs locked shut, staring up at the Hollow Sun with his heart doing something horrible and rhythmic in his chest, and he thought:
It blinked again.
It's looking for something.
And then, quieter, in his mother's voice:
It's looking for you.