Chapter 1 Lark
LARK
The lark-shaped pendant warmed against her chest like a captured star, its pulses matching the heartbeat of the firestorm blazing within the Everburning Forest. Flames danced between the towering evergreens, not with the mindless hunger of natural fire, but with terrible purpose.
Ribbons of orange and gold painted the late afternoon sky with something hauntingly familiar.
The blaze moved like a living thing, drawing patterns that tugged at the empty spaces of Lark’s missing memories.
A force deep within the firestorm called to her, an energy pulling at her core with primal intensity.
Every fiber of her being resonated with the storm’s wild power, humming like a plucked string.
Her body vibrated not with fear but with recognition, as if the blaze spoke a language she nearly understood.
The pendant’s heat spread through her chest with an unnatural warmth, urging her forward.
A small hand gripped her wrist, its human warmth breaking through the fire’s hypnotic song. Reality crashed back in waves: the crisp scent of pine boughs, their needles brushing gently in the wind, the hint of a metallic tang fading from her tongue.
“Lark, what are you doing?” Paq’s voice carried equal measures of fear and concern. “You have to stay here. If a god’s power is coming through the storm, armies will be fighting for it.”
Lark looked down through overhanging strands of her own wavy brown hair. Her green eyes cleared, the haze in her vision receding to see the boy standing there.
Fear had carved lines into his young face that shouldn’t be there, his angled jaw clenched tight as his eyes darted between her and the villagers who had gathered nearby. The crowd pressed together like cattle before a storm, all watching the firestorm’s advance with a mixture of awe and terror.
“Did I hear someone say there was a dragon?” The question rose unbidden from some deep well of certainty within her.
Paq nodded, his grip tightening as if he could anchor her to earth when the primal need pulled at her soul.
Despite her best intentions, she let her feet take another step toward the storm raging in the distance.
The pendant pulsed against her collarbone, each beat sending ripples of warmth through her body, matching the rhythm of the flames.
Every step toward the forest felt like walking through a dream.
It was all wrong, yet somehow right at the same time, dangerous and inevitable.
“I’m serious, Lark, you can’t go out there. Not yet,” Paq whispered, his voice cracking with urgency.
“There’s something out there.” Her hand rose to the necklace of its own accord, fingers curling around metal that should have burned but instead felt cool and familiar.
It was the only thing she had from her past, a representation of who she was from before; the version of herself she could not remember. “I can feel it,” she said.
“You can’t go alone. Wait for the harvest,” Paq urged.
“The forest isn’t a controlled area of the kingdom.
The Nordraven Kings and Lamar are constantly battling for control of its resources.
It’s not a friendly place for a lone wanderer.
Besides the armies, orcs, goblins, and shades roam the trees.
That’s just to name a few of the terrors, and that’s not including the unbonded dragons.
Firestorms attract all manner of nasty attention. ”
The warning should have chilled her blood, but instead it sparked another flash of that inexplicable certainty. “Not all dragons are inherently evil. It’s their riders who can turn them to darkness.”
Paq’s dark eyes narrowed, suspicion replacing fear. “How can you know that, but not your own name?”
The question struck like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the unending emptiness where her memories should be.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. The details of how she came to be here in the village with Paq swirled like smoke in her mind, visible but impossible to grasp.
“Maybe I heard it from those talking about the dragon,” she added, gesturing to the murmuring crowd.
But the excuse rang hollow even as she said it aloud.
This knowledge felt older, deeper, as real as the pendant’s heat against her pale skin.
She’d heard Paq speak of the Everburning Forest’s dangers before.
Of how something out there claimed at least one of the wheat harvesters with every run.
Yet an urge to go into the forest pulled at her, a compulsion that made her muscles tremble with the effort to stay still.
Smoke spiraled skyward, evening’s darkness pooling around the thunderhead that loomed over the forest like a god’s anvil.
Lightning flashed through the clouds, each bolt igniting new flames that fed the inferno’s persistent growth.
Thunder rolled across the land like the voice of a dragon, each growl felt through the strange sensations coming from her necklace.
Lark tugged at the pendant, its swelling of warmth a distraction, but the chain held firm.
She felt for a clasp or a weakness so she could remove it, but none existed on the seamless golden links.
Somehow, the necklace was bound to the storm.
That tingling thrill of recognition danced strongest where the lark-shaped pendant rested against her clavicle, as if trying to remind her heart of something her mind had forgotten.
“Lark, you’re doing it again,” Paq warned. “It looks like you’re about to go running off into the forest at any moment, and I’m not the only one taking notice.”
The villagers whispered; their scowls heavy with suspicion directed at her. She felt their eyes like physical things, pressing against her with the weight of judgment.
“I won’t go,” she forced herself to say. “I won’t, I promise.”
“Good because the harvesters need you,” Paq said. “Delger says it’s been a struggle since Cleft and Boyd disappeared three storms ago. I’ve heard the storms get more violent as the Flashover approaches. Can you believe it’s going to happen this year?”
“The Flashover?” The word echoed strangely in Lark’s mind, like a bell rung in an empty temple. A shadow of meaning flickered at the edges of her consciousness, there and gone like smoke on the wind.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the Flashover?
” Paq said, propping his gangly hands on his narrow hips.
Where his hand-me-down rags hung loose on his slight frame, Lark’s muscular physique filled the borrowed clothing: brown pants and a stained long-sleeved shirt Paq had come up with for her.
her. She was taller than other women in the village.
Under the smudges of dirt, her skin had a lively glow, her features more prominently defined, like the busts of the goddesses at the village shine.
Lark often caught the young men staring at her with intrigue, much different than the judging glares they directed at her when others were around.
Lark shook her head, and a lock of red umber hair came free, curving around her flawless face.
She tucked it back into her bun, the simple motion carrying an odd sense of habit.
The word “Flashover” sat heavy on her tongue.
She savored it, hoping to spark some recognition from her past. But like everything before a few days ago, only fog remained.
A haze thicker than the smoke that clung to the thunderhead, obscuring seventeen or possibly twenty years of memories.
She had no way of knowing exactly how much time she’d lost to the amnesia.
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t know what the Flashover is.”
Paq’s face lit up with the fierce joy of sharing secrets. He peered up at her, his gap-toothed smile showing where adult teeth were just beginning to emerge through pink gums. “You’re pulling my leg. Honest, how can a lady as old as you never have heard of the Flashover before?”
“I’m not an old lady,” Lark protested, the words carrying an edge of uncertainty. She viewed herself as young for a woman, stronger than everyone else in the village, and more capable, despite her lack of knowledge. But how could she know her true age when the past was nothing but shadow?
“To me, pretty much everyone here in the village is old, except the other kids,” Paq said. “You’re no old hag though. You’re much better looking than any other lady in this village. But you still should’ve heard of the Flashover. Especially because it’s happening this year and it’s so rare.”
“Paq, don’t be rude.” Ellowin’s arrival carried the grace of a summer breeze, her thick brown curls bobbing above pointed shoulders. “You can’t insult a woman and then follow it up with a backhanded compliment. She said she can’t remember what the Flashover is, so leave it at that.”
Despite their supposed dozen-year age gap, Ellowin’s smaller frame and youthful glow made her seem younger than Lark, though that assessment, like everything else about Lark’s past, rested on shifting sands. Giggles sounded from somewhere nearby.
The snickers of watching children died on Lark’s piercing look, their retreat instant and telling.
It wasn’t just the young ones who reacted this way.
Throughout the village, eyes slid away from hers like water off glass, everyone keeping their distance.
Everyone except the harvesters, who met her gaze with judgment.
She understood their wariness. She was the stranger, the one without roots or remembrance, found wandering the road with not even a name to call her own.
“The Flashover happens once every five hundred years,” Paq said, his voice deepening slightly. “All four realms align, creating an overlap between the worlds.”
“There’s more than one world?” Lark asked.
“Where do you think the elves, dwarves, magi, and everything magical come from?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it.”
“First, there’s our world, Sataran,” Paq counted on dirt-stained fingers. “Then there’s Aetherion, the realm of the gods. That’s where magical energy comes from. It shows up here in the form of Hyalite orbs and Yogo Sapphires, which contain the energy magi, elves, dwarves, and so on wield.”
“And dragonriders?” Lightning split the sky and Lark tasted something strange on the air, a faint metallic tang that quickly faded from her lips.
“Yes, I don’t know exactly how it works; they use a Hyalite to do it, but that’s a whole other talk we can have later,” he said. “Next, there’s the fae realm. Not much is known about them, but it’s where magical creatures like dragons and rimeshade came from.”
“Rimeshades don’t exist,” Ellowin cut in, but her voice carried an edge of uncertainty, as if speaking of them suddenly made it possible.
“Yes, they do,” Paq insisted. “Barson told me about an orc village in the North that was completely turned to ice because a frost wielding shade took hold there. There were no survivors.”
“If there weren’t survivors, how did they know it was a rimeshade? Some dragonriders can wield ice. Barson is spreading rumors. You shouldn’t look up to him just because he’s a harvester,” Ellowin said.
Their argument about Barson’s tale faded into the background as Lark’s attention fixed on the thunderhead over the forest. It moved unlike any rainstorm that had come through the village recently.
It wasn’t driven by earthly winds, but by currents of power that made the old-growth forest shiver in its wake.
“What’s the fourth realm?” she asked, the words rising over the siblings’ bickering.
“Thalindor. It was the world where the children of the gods were sent to live.”
“Children of the gods?”
“He means elves, dwarves, magi, orcs. They’re the races that can wield power without having to bond with a dragon,” Ellowin clarified.
“Why would they come here to this world if they have one of their own?” Lark asked.
“Nobody around here seems to know. Maybe because of the dragons, but then why did the dragons come if they had a world of their own, too?” he replied.
“The dragons came because of the Hyalites,” Lark found herself saying, the knowledge flowing like water from a weeping dam, “but stayed because of the bonds they formed with those who can hone their powers.”
“That’s an idea,” Ellowin scoffed.
“She could be right,” Paq argued. “There’s a prophecy that sounds similar. It’s about the Flashover though.”
“What is it?”
“Paq, don’t. He’s going to tell it wrong,” Ellowin said.
“I’m telling the story,” he spit.
Ellowin huffed, spinning on her heels and leaving them to join the stirring crowd.
“When all four realms align, a dragon and rider will bond with Aether’s power...”
As he spoke of the prophecy, Lark barely heard him.
In her mind’s eye, she saw a rider emerging triumphant from storm clouds, a Hyalite blazing with divine light and held firmly in the rider’s grip.
The image carried the weight of truth. Not imagination but memory.
Not prophecy but promise. The pendant’s heat spread through her chest like liquid fire, and somewhere in the storm’s heart, something ancient stirred in response.
“The ending is kind of bleak,” Paq’s voice drew her back. “If they fall to the darkness, death and destruction will spread in their wake.” After the last word left his lips, they stood in chilling silence.
As darkness gathered, Lark found her attention drawn to the approaching wall of water, the Giving Rain. It advanced like a curtain of liquid night, its leading edge shimmering with life.
Around them, the villagers moved with practiced urgency, preparing the harvesters for their deadly task. Their tools caught the storm’s light in ways that made the etched runes seem to writhe, symbols bound to serve the time-honored tradition they were about to commence.
A final strand of lightning forked through the dissipating storm anvil.
With shocking clarity, her first true memory surged to the front of her mind’s eye.
It included a man’s face appearing with crystal clarity.
His jaw was sharp as winter wind, those forest-green eyes holding secrets deeper than the realms themselves.
Brown hair fell in rough waves around ears that carried the slight point of man’s mixed with elven bloodlines.
In his hands, he cradled a box embossed with unfamiliar symbols.
They seemed to beat in time with her pendant’s heat.
The memory felt so real she could almost touch him, almost grasp what secret he held. ..
Then it was gone, scattered like a shattered pane of glass, and with it the warmth from her pendant. Questions hounded her, yet the emptiness where the answers should be yawned wider than ever, a chasm darker than the night sky.
Why can’t I remember?