Spellcast (A Fire in the Sky #3)

Prologue Where It Ends

Prologue

Where It Ends

The final day

The evening sky bleeds fire.

My arms and legs pump, blood throbbing in every nerve as I race for home, the acrid stench of smoke stinging my nostrils.

Home.

The village of my youth, my world . . . the only one I have ever known, where I live my half life alongside my family, my people, whether they realize it or not. Very well—not. They don’t realize it because . . . they don’t know I exist.

No one knows I am here, there, anywhere.

Because I am not.

They do not know it.

They cannot know.

This is my reality. A truth long held, even as I’ve fought it with everything that grinds and churns inside me. A desperate heartbeat that stubbornly pounds, that will not quit. Teeth that bite and will not release.

They cannot know they belong to me and I to them because I am nothing.

A whisper that fails to be heard.

A vapor that fails to be seen.

And yet I have to get to them. I cannot hide. I cannot stay away.

As though I can do something. As though I can save them, I run, muscles straining and aching as the air takes shape, becomes a tangible thing, burning around me in crackling pops and hisses.

The embers-soaked wind tears at my eyes and hair, flinging the hood of my cloak back off my shoulders.

I go, pushing on through the melting heat as though I can stop death from rolling forward in a great consuming wave.

My feet skid to a stop atop the hill overlooking the village, snow piling up at the toes of my boots.

I look down into the vast bowl of the valley where dozens of cottages and shops huddle closely together for warmth against the endless winter.

The spire of the meetinghouse at the center of town stretches skyward like a hand clawing to the heavens, desperate to escape the nest of flames engulfing everything below.

It’s too late.

There is no saving anyone.

Red-orange cinders snap and rise, swept up on the angry wind, twirling over the air, reaching me, singeing me, the fiery flecks scorching through my clothes and blistering my flesh. Still, I do not move. Do not utter a sound. Can only gawk with a hammering heart and disbelieving eyes.

Great winged beasts of various colors soar above town like carrion birds circling the buffet of corpses below. For they are all dead. There is no surviving the inferno.

Dragons cut through the smoke with slow flaps of their wings, curving through air that glows red against the black night. They dive and dip, shaking the sky so forcefully that I can feel the wind they stir where I stand.

It’s too unbelievable. Myth coming to life before my eyes. History returning.

I blink. Rub my stinging eyes. Doubt my vision. Marvel and wonder if I’m caught in a dream—a nightmare. Except acrid smoke burns my nose and the heat from the blazing village radiates toward me, licking my face. And there’s the smell. The stench of death.

This is no dream.

I choke out a gasp. My legs wobble, threatening to collapse. I bend over at the waist, my hands dropping to my knees for support as I pant raggedly, gazing at the hellscape.

The fire roars, loud and vicious, a monster bowing and twisting, snarling, gobbling up everything in its path as it hastens through the timber and thatched-roof buildings, taking them out like they’re nothing more than brittle wisps of straw.

I spot a few bodies, villagers running, chased from their homes by smoke and fire, some of them aflame. They dash wildly. Except escape is impossible.

From the fire.

From the beasts.

From death.

There is no running. No fleeing. No salvation.

My gaze darts, straining, stinging, attempting to take it all in. It is too much. I start in one direction, then another, staggering, and then falling, dropping to my knees, lips moving, speech impossible.

“Da.” I manage to spit the sound past my lips in a weak warble, calling to my father even though he cannot possibly hear me.

Suddenly, a black figure nose-dives, moving fluidly over the sky, iridescent against the night.

I watch as the single beast plunges toward a fleeing figure at the edge of the village.

A woman intact and not ablaze. For a moment I think she might make it to the tree line where I stand. She might actually escape.

Go, go, go, go. The word pumps through my mind.

She’s plucked off the ground, swept up as the primeval beast seizes her and lifts her. Up, up, up. Too far away to make out her features, but I’m certain I recognize her. Isstad isn’t so populated I don’t know every one of its denizens. Every one of its dead or dying denizens.

Her arms and legs flail, fighting even though she has no hope. She is a small, insignificant human, a gnat caught up in those great talons.

I straighten and step back reflexively as her screams reach me.

I slide back into the trees, slipping into shadow, deeper into night, trying to distance myself from the horror. But it will not stop. It follows me.

The dragon tosses her in the air like a child flinging a ball, and then another dragon, this one yellow as the sun, swoops in, catches the woman in a single claw, and turns, flying backward in swift strokes with the small figure clasped in its talons.

The beast pitches the shrieking female directly into the jaws of another black dragon—a huge one with a jagged scar cutting down its face—that consumes her in a single bite, silencing her forever.

I jerk and clamp a hand over my mouth, muffling my shrill scream.

It’s instinctive, this need to keep myself small and silent and hidden away with predators so near.

Still, after all these years, I cling to life.

Perhaps self-preservation is something that never goes away.

Like the pump of blood in your veins, it subsists.

I am the sole survivor.

The only one left in my world, in this place where I live my half life. The place of my everything, now, is nothing.

Rubble.

Ruins.

Death.

I drop, melt away, fade into the cold embrace of woods, the sky a red miasma before me.

The sharp, pungent smell of the world on fire fills my nose as I peer through the press of trees, forever unseen.

That hasn’t changed. I’m invisible still.

A shadow drifting through the world. Lost to my curse.

Lost to obscurity. No one left to remember me.

No longer Arden. Not a girl. Not the woman I’ve become. No one.

Lonely . . . but now alone.

Alone in the truest sense. Alone in every way.