The mark wouldn't stop glowing.
That was the part no one talked about. The soldiers had moved on. The square had emptied. The crying had quieted into that specific kind of silence that follows something terrible — not peace, just exhaustion. And still, beneath the thin fabric of Nyra's sleeve, the symbol on her wrist pulsed like a second heartbeat.
She pressed her palm flat against it as she walked.
As if she could smother it.
She couldn't.
Lira hadn't spoken since the square. That alone told Nyra everything. Lira always spoke. In the mornings, in the market, through fear and cold and hunger — Lira's voice was the one constant in Nyra's life, steady and present like the sound of water. Silence from her was not natural.
It was grief.
They walked side by side through the narrow paths of the lower realm, past cracked stone walls and the low flicker of hearth-light through windows. Doors that had been open that morning were shut now. Bolted. The village had folded into itself, the way it always did when something came through and took what it wanted.
"You should have hidden."
Lira's voice came out rough, stripped of its usual warmth.
Nyra didn't answer right away.
"Where?" she finally said.
"Anywhere. Behind me. In the crowd. Somewhere they wouldn't—" Lira's voice cracked. She stopped walking, turning toward Nyra with something raw and unguarded on her face. "Nyra. Your mark is still glowing."
"I know."
"That's not normal." Her eyes dropped to where Nyra's sleeve covered her wrist. "I saw the others. Their marks faded within seconds. Yours didn't. The soldiers — they bowed. Nyra, they bowed—"
"I saw."
"Does it hurt?"
Nyra thought about lying.
She was good at lying. Not cruel lies, just the small, practical kind — the ones that kept people from worrying, that smoothed over sharp edges so life could continue moving. She had learned that skill early, the same way she had learned everything else. By necessity.
But Lira was looking at her with those eyes, and Nyra found she couldn't.
"It doesn't hurt," she said. "It feels…" She paused, searching for the right word. "Awake."
Lira stared at her.
"That's worse," she said quietly.
Nyra almost smiled. Almost.
Her aunt was waiting at the door when they arrived.
She already knew. Of course she did — word moved through the lower realm the way smoke moved through a closed room. Fast and choking, finding every crack.
She was a small woman, her aunt. Narrow-shouldered, weathered in the way that years of hard living made a person weathered. She had raised Nyra without softness but also without cruelty, which in the lower realm was the closest thing to love you could count on.
She looked at the sleeve hiding Nyra's wrist.
Her expression didn't change.
That was the worst part.
No surprise. No horror. Only something ancient and resigned settling across her face, like she had been waiting for this. Like some part of her had always known it was coming.
"Come inside," she said.
Lira made to follow. Nyra's aunt looked at her once — gently, but clearly — and said, "Not yet."
Lira stopped.
Her eyes found Nyra's, and Nyra gave her a small nod. I'll be alright. Go.
Lira didn't look convinced.
But she went.
Inside, the fire was low. The house smelled of dried herbs and old wood, the same smell Nyra had grown up with, the smell she associated with the only stability she had ever known.
She sat across from her aunt at the table. Between them, the space felt heavier than it should have.
"Show me," her aunt said.
Nyra pushed back her sleeve.
The mark pulsed once in the firelight, slow and dark. Not like a wound. More like something breathing.
Her aunt looked at it for a long time.
Her hands, folded on the table, didn't move.
"I need you to tell me something," Nyra said. Her voice was controlled, careful — but something underneath it wasn't. "And I need you to tell me the truth."
Her aunt's gaze lifted.
"Did you know?" Nyra asked. "About me. About this. Did you know this was going to happen?"
The fire crackled softly between them.
Her aunt looked older in that moment than Nyra had ever seen her. Lines deepening. Eyes carrying something that had nothing to do with tonight.
"Not this specifically," she said finally.
"But something." It wasn't a question.
A long pause. Then — "Yes."
Nyra absorbed that quietly.
She had spent her whole life learning to absorb things quietly. Pain, disappointment, loss. She took them in and buried them somewhere deep and kept moving. It was the only way she knew how to survive.
But this one sat differently.
"You should have told me," she said.
"And what would you have done?" her aunt asked, not unkindly. "Run? Hidden? There's nowhere to run from bloodlines, Nyra. You carry what you carry. I thought — I hoped — if you stayed small enough, quiet enough, they'd never find you."
"They found me."
"Yes." Her aunt's voice dropped. "They found you."
Nyra looked down at the mark.
It had dimmed slightly — still there, still present, but quieter now. As though it had introduced itself and was now content to wait.
"What am I?" she asked.
The question sat between them like something dropped from a great height.
Her aunt was quiet for so long that Nyra thought she might not answer at all.
"Not what they think you are," she said at last. "Not just a bride."
"Then what?"
"Something older." She paused. "Something they've been looking for."
They came for her at dawn.
Nyra hadn't slept.
She had lain on her narrow bed through the long dark hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the village settling into fearful quiet. Somewhere in the distance, she had heard crying. A mother, probably. Or a girl who didn't understand yet what had been decided about her life.
Nyra understood.
She had always been good at understanding the things she didn't want to.
She had packed before sunrise. Not much — she didn't have much. A change of clothing, a small knife she'd carried for years more out of habit than hope, a dried bundle of herbs her aunt pressed into her hands without a word, and a thin piece of cord with a single worn bead on it that had belonged to her mother.
She didn't know why she packed the cord.
She just knew she couldn't leave it behind.
When the knock came at the door — three sharp, deliberate strikes — she was already standing.
Her aunt stood in the doorway between the rooms, watching her.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
Then her aunt crossed the room and took Nyra's face in both hands. Weathered palms. Familiar calluses. The same hands that had checked her for fever when she was small, that had braided her hair once and only once before deciding it wasn't a skill worth learning, that had always been more practical than gentle.
They trembled slightly now.
Only slightly.
"Don't trust anyone," her aunt said.
"I never do."
"Don't let them see you afraid."
"I won't."
"And Nyra—" Her grip tightened just slightly. "Whatever you feel waking up inside you. Don't fight it. Not yet. Just... let it exist."
Nyra frowned. "What does that mean?"
But the knock came again.
And her aunt stepped back.
And the door opened.
The soldier waiting outside was not the same one from the square.
This one was older. Quieter. He had the look of a man who had done this many times before — not cruel about it, but not apologetic either. Simply efficient. Like delivering marked girls to the castle was no different from delivering grain.
Maybe, to him, it wasn't.
There were two others behind him, and a cart in the road. Inside it, through the gap in the dark canvas, Nyra could see shapes. Other girls. Shoulders pressed together, heads low.
She recognized one of them.
Maret, the seamstress's daughter. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. She had a small, round face and usually laughed at everything. She wasn't laughing now.
Nyra stepped out of the house.
The morning air was cold. The sky was that pale grey that comes just before colour fully decides to arrive, still uncertain of itself. She could feel her aunt standing in the doorway behind her and made herself not turn around.
If she turned around, she might not move forward.
And forward was the only direction left.
The older soldier looked at her wrist once.
His expression shifted — almost nothing, but she caught it. That same flicker the other soldier had shown. Something caught between recognition and unease.
"Vale," he said. Not a question. He already knew.
"Yes," she said.
He stepped aside without another word, gesturing toward the cart.
Nyra walked toward it.
Then — movement at the edge of the path.
"Nyra."
Her chest tightened.
Lira stood a few feet away, clearly having been there a while. Her eyes were red, her hair loose around her face, arms wrapped around herself like she was holding herself together. She must have come before dawn, must have waited in the cold rather than miss this.
Something in Nyra's chest cracked. Just slightly.
She changed direction.
The soldier didn't stop her — she made it fast enough that he didn't have a chance to decide.
She stopped in front of Lira.
Neither of them spoke for a second. Lira was the kind of person who always had something to say, some brightness to offer even in the worst moments. But there was nothing bright about this, and she seemed to know that trying would make it worse.
So instead she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Nyra.
Hard. Like she was trying to leave something behind.
Nyra stood still for a second.
Then she lifted her arms and held on.
Just for a moment.
Just long enough.
When they stepped apart, Lira's expression was determined in the messy, wet-eyed way that grief sometimes forced on people.
"You're going to be fine," she said. Her voice wobbled but she didn't let it fall.
Nyra looked at her.
"Maybe," she said honestly.
It wasn't comforting.
But it was real.
And Lira, of all people, knew the difference.
The cart ride was long.
No one spoke.
There were four of them inside, not counting the canvas and the dark and the smell of straw and fear. Maret sat closest to the opening, staring at her own lap. Two others — older, maybe early twenties — sat pressed against the far wall, both with that hollow look people got when they had accepted something terrible and were now just waiting for it to happen.
Nyra sat with her back against the side panel and watched the light change through the gaps in the canvas.
Lower realm first — she knew it by the sounds. The uneven road. The occasional bark of a stray dog. The distant clatter of morning life going on despite everything, because that was what life did.
Then the sounds changed.
Roads smoothed. Hooves changed rhythm on stone. The air smelled different — less ash, more damp green, something almost cold and clean underneath.
The upper realm.
She had never been.
She'd heard about it the way everyone in the lower realm heard about it — in fragments. Whispers. Stories that were either exaggerated or didn't go far enough. She had a rough shape of it in her mind, assembled from scraps.
The reality of it, she suspected, would be worse.
After a while, Maret spoke.
"Do you think they're all dead?" Her voice was small. "The other brides."
No one answered immediately.
Nyra considered the question the way she considered most uncomfortable things — directly, without flinching.
"Some might be," she said.
Maret looked at her.
"That doesn't scare you?"
Nyra thought about it.
"Being scared won't change what happens," she said. "So I don't see the use of it."
One of the older girls made a short, humorless sound. Not quite a laugh.
"Easy to say."
"I didn't say it was easy," Nyra replied.
Silence again.
Outside, the sounds of any settlement had faded entirely. There was only the road now, and the wind, and somewhere farther ahead, something Nyra could feel more than hear. A low, steady pressure at the edges of the air.
Like approaching something very large.
Or very old.
She looked down at her wrist.
The mark had been quiet for most of the journey. Dim. Patient.
But now, as they moved forward, it had begun to pulse again.
Slow.
Getting slower.
The way a heartbeat changed when the body recognized something.
Something familiar.
Something that had been waiting.
Nyra pressed her fingers over it and stared ahead, jaw set, breath even.
Don't let them see you afraid.
She wouldn't.
But beneath her ribs, something stirred — that same restless, buried feeling from the night before, the thing she hadn't been able to name.
It was stronger now.
And it wasn't entirely fear.
She wasn't sure what it was.
Only that it moved like recognition.
Like her blood already knew where they were going.
Like some part of her — the deep, wordless part that lived beneath thought — had always known.
The cart slowed.
Stopped.
Voices outside. The sound of heavy gates.
And then, through a gap in the canvas, Nyra caught her first glimpse of the castle.
Stone the colour of dried blood. Towers that cut into the sky like something angry. No warmth in it, no welcome — just mass and age and the quiet promise that what entered did not always leave.
She looked at it for a long moment.
Then she lifted her chin.
Fine, she thought, to no one and nothing in particular.
Let's see what you are.
The gates groaned open.
And they went in.