Chapter 1 #2
Then the pressure came.
I felt it more than I saw it. A pressure squeezing, tightening around him from every direction at once. His face went red, then purple. His eyes bulged and his mouth stretched open in a scream that never made it past his throat.
His head burst. His body hung there for a breath longer, still held by whatever invisible force had caught him. Then it dropped and hit the ground like a thing emptied out.
I woke up standing in the village square.
Bare feet on cold stone, my nightgown thin against the wind, the exact spot where they held the trials.
Grandmother found me there before anyone else did.
She wrapped her shawl around my shoulders and carried me home without a word, her arms trembling.
When I told her what I’d seen, the man in the air, the pressure, the red rain, her face went pale, but she stroked my hair and told me it was just a nightmare. Nothing more.
No one died that way in the village. Not that year. Not the year after. The vision was wrong, and I held onto that. I needed proof that my sight could lie, that not every nightmare wore prophecy’s clothes.
The third vision came when I was still a girl.
I woke up in the forest, halfway between the village and Grandmother’s old cottage in the deep woods. Standing in my nightgown with bare feet and pine needles sticking to my skin, the moon new and the darkness so complete I couldn’t see my own hands in front of my face. But I remembered the dream.
Sophia. Walking through trees. A man’s shape waiting for her in a clearing, tall and broad and perfectly still. She walked toward him like she couldn’t help herself and reached out her hand.
He took it.
Then nothing. Just cold, just dark, just the feeling of something ending that should have gone on forever.
I didn’t tell Grandmother what I’d seen. Told myself it was like the man in the air, a vision that wouldn’t come true.
Sophia was fine. Sophia was right there in the cottage, braiding my hair that morning and calling me “little Red” and laughing when I blushed. A year passed. The vision faded and I almost forgot it. Then one morning I woke up and Sophia was gone.
Grandmother’s face was like stone that morning. She held a note in her hands, read it three times before she spoke. “She ran off with a man. That’s all there is to know.”
I didn’t believe it. The note didn’t sound like Sophia because, deep down in my heart, I knew she would never abandon Grandma and me. But then I thought about the vision I had. The man’s shape in the darkness. Sophia reaching for him like she couldn’t stop herself.
I knew at that moment I should have told Grandma. I had hoped the vision away, and now it was too late. Could I have stopped it? If I’d told Grandma what I saw, would Sophia still be here?
The fourth vision came after I married William.
Emma. My friend Emma, on her knees in the dirt, screaming over a boy.
A child I didn’t recognize, crumpled on the ground with his neck bent wrong, so wrong, and blood soaking through his shirt in a dark spreading stain.
His eyes staring at nothing. Whatever had killed him had done it without mercy.
Snapped him like a twig and tossed him aside.
I woke up on Emma’s doorstep. Standing in the dark with my hand raised like I’d been about to knock. My nightgown soaked through with sweat, my feet bare on the frozen step, my stomach heaving. I made it to the bushes beside her fence before I vomited and hurried back home.
Luckily, Emma had no son. She wasn’t even married yet, and the longer I waited for the vision to come true, the more it faded.
Months passed. A year. Emma married Heinrich.
Emma had her first daughter, then a second.
Two healthy girls with Heinrich’s broad shoulders and Emma’s easy laugh.
No boy. No torn throat. No blood in the dirt.
I let the relief settle into my bones like warm water and let the vision fade to something old and harmless.
Then Thomas was born. Fat cheeks and wild curly hair and a laugh that could fill a room. I held him the day Emma brought him into the world and something cold moved through my chest. That face. Those curls. The same boy from the vision I’d buried years ago.
I said nothing. Smiled and cooed and handed him back to his mother, then went home and sat in the dark and told myself I was wrong.
That the sight had lied before. That this boy would grow up and climb trees and break his mother’s heart with worry and live.
He had to live, because the alternative was unbearable.
The fifth vision came two winters after my marriage.
William. My husband — the man who called me by name, Talia, and kissed my forehead when I worried too much, who smelled like pine sap and wood smoke and never once asked about my strange dreams.
I saw him torn apart.
A creature with teeth and claws, something that moved too fast to see. I watched it rip him open, watched him try to crawl away and fail, watched the light leave his eyes while his blood soaked into the forest floor.
I woke up at the tree line. Standing where the village ended and the deep forest began, my bare feet in the frost, my face turned toward the dark between the trunks.
The place that would eat him alive. William found me there — followed my footprints from the cottage through the mud.
He wrapped his coat around my shoulders and led me home and asked what was wrong.
I told him everything, begged him not to go hunting that day, begged him to stay home.
He laughed and kissed me and promised he’d come back.
He didn’t. They found pieces of him scattered across a clearing.
Him and the six men who had walked into the forest beside him.
Seven men torn apart so thoroughly that they couldn’t tell which pieces belonged to whom.
After that, the village declared the deep forest forbidden.
No hunting parties past the second ridge.
No woodcutting beyond the marked trees. Klaus held it up as proof.
Not just of a cursed forest but of something darker.
Witchcraft, he whispered to anyone who’d listen.
A curse laid by ungodly hands. Klaus used the fear well.
Held meetings. Quoted scripture. Reminded the village that the devil walked among good people in disguise, and that God demanded vigilance.
He’d been looking for an excuse to tighten his grip on the village for years. Seven dead men gave him one.
Now I’d seen myself drown. The counting. The faces watching. The rope binding me in half as water filled my lungs and someone marked the seconds. My doom was coming.
The fire had died to embers while I reminisced about the past. The cottage was cold and dark around me. I should have gotten up, rebuilt the fire, and tried to sleep like a normal woman. I didn’t move.
Everyone I’ve ever loved walked through this door. Sat by this fire. Slept under this roof. If I left, I would lose them all over again, the last traces of them, the places their hands had touched, where they had spoken, where their bodies had left warmth.
I couldn’t.
Maybe the vision wouldn’t come true. The man in the air had never happened.
No one had died like that, not that year, not the next.
The William vision had come true, but three out of five was not prophecy.
It was coincidence. Thomas was healthy and alive and growing taller every month.
My sight lied as often as it told the truth.
I chose to believe it was lying about him.
I could stay. I could hope.
It was all I had.