Guard Me Roughly

Chapter 1 Carmilla

CARMILLA

Moonlight never reaches this high.

The observatory crowns the highest fang of the Moonstone range, wrapped in air so thin the stars feel close enough to bruise my cheek. Frost coats the stone balustrades in mirrored scales, and each exhale drifts upward, eager to join constellations I have named and feared for centuries.

I stand barefoot in the central chamber, silk shift pasted to skin by sweat that should have frozen, bracing myself on the bronze rail that rings the hollow floor.

Quiet reigns—too quiet. The ward-crystals embedded in the dome’s ribs are supposed to murmur like sleepy doves, but tonight they brood in silence, as if the entire room is holding its breath with me.

My fingertips ache. Pale skin splits again, and tiny shards push through; opal slivers catch starlight before dropping, ringing on the copper grate below like the first chime of a passing bell.

The cracking has marched from wrists to elbow and now climbs the inner curve of my ribs.

A reminder: every vision devours a little more of what is mortal in me.

I breathe through the pain, align shoulders with northern axis, and direct my gaze at the armillary suspended over the pit. Hundreds of interlocking rings revolve in elegant contrapuntal orbits. Tonight those rings grind against one another, grinding like teeth in nightmare.

“Show me,” I whisper. The words leave small clouds that twist into runes and drift away.

The stars answer.

A filament of silver threads between the iron bands and stabs into my sternum. Sight folds outward.

First, sound: a roar—not from a throat, but from a horizon cracking down its middle.

Then heat, tidal and vicious, turns the marrow in my legs to steam.

I glimpse three skies, stacked like plates: emerald thunder, amber dusk, amethyst noon, rotating around a monstrous eye carved from ash.

All the familiar continents crumple inward, dragged as if by invisible chains toward that pupil.

Mountains kneel. Oceans straighten like spears.

I try to count how long the collapse takes, but numbers scorch away the instant I reach for them.

Lightning strikes the eye. No—worse. The lightning enters the eye and never emerges.

My sternum buckles. Crystal blooms across the left rib, each petal stabbing nerve and memory alike. I reach to touch the spreading lattice, but my hand swims through after-image smoke, and the vision tilts again.

Now I stand over a bone-white valley. Frozen wolves lie in concentric rings around a dark altar, their blood tracing a spiral that spins faster, deeper—becoming the pupil again.

At that altar kneels— Kylan? No, a silhouette only, but the outline of shoulders is unmistakable: built the way the northern alphas are built, carved for burden.

He lifts his face, and the eye behind him opens wider.

I lunge forward—this is mindspace, I should be able to move—but the landscape fractures. The altar becomes the Moonstone shrine, fissured and weeping magma. My apprenticed star-scribe, Laurel, stands inside the doorway, a map glowing in her hands like an accusation.

She mouths a word. I read it on her lips, though she is leagues away and days ahead in time: hurry.

The ground drops.

I slam back into my body with enough force to bruise my lungs. The rail shrieks under my grip; brassy tang fills my mouth. The vision lingers in echo—a sensation of falling even while standing still.

Across the chamber the dome’s keystone crystal erupts in violet sparks.

Runes scorched into the copper struts hiss and peel, releasing curls of molten lettering that float down like burning parchment.

Wards collapsing—first time in two hundred years.

The sanctuary no longer deems itself safe for me.

“Steady,” I croak, though no one is here to obey. I bring shaking hands to heart, feel the fresh lattice. Four new facets, serrated and tender, climb from sternum to collar. Cracks radiate, fine silver lines beneath skin.

This has never spread so quickly. Even the night Vorren fell and half the dragon seers bled out on their crystals, the change moved slower than a vine. The prophecy’s weight has doubled my sentence in a single breath.

I stagger to the star-map table at the chamber’s eastern verge. Thin glass panes hover above a basalt slab, each pane a floating chart of one realm. Tonight all three swirl, lines of longitude spiraling toward a single crimson dot pulsing in synchrony. I squint, forcing the glyphs to steady.

“Shrine coordinates,” I whisper. Of course. The map saw what I did: the altar, the fracture, the convergence of skies. The dot throbs again, brighter, demanding. I have been avoiding that place for decades, hoping the Convergence would choose another fulcrum. It will not.

My vow of isolation was a na?ve luxury. It dies tonight.

I turn from the table. A line of crystal dust marks my earlier stumbling path, each shard half moonlit, half stained with the darker hue of my blood. I follow that glittering breadcrumb trail down the curved stair into my private quarters.

The change in air is immediate: colder, carrying the musk of parchment, ink, and something older—my own fear. Bookshelves cling to limestone walls. A single iron heater stands idle in one corner; I never needed warmth, but suddenly I want it.

I draw a quick breath and use it to speak the room’s name. “Aethel.” Thin blue flames bloom inside the heater in answer. Obedient, but the blue is too pale; the spirit metal senses my weakness.

I move to the travel trunk against the south wall, flip brass latches, and throw the lid.

Inside waits the pack I assembled after my last near-fatal vision, when the idea of fleeing first occurred to me though I lacked the will.

Compasses carved from dragon tooth, weather-tight spellbooks, stitch-powders, a coil of silver thread that Laurel spun under a blood moon.

I shrug into a dark wool tunic, runes stitched along the seams to accommodate crystal growth. Boots next—knee-high, soft enough to feel ward pulse beneath every step. Every motion slices pain along the new fractures, but pain is merely data, my mentor used to say. Data forces precision.

A hiss escapes when I tighten the belt. The lattice tugs skin inward, as though the stone wishes to own the organ beating beneath it. I exhale until dizziness ebbs.

One item remains: a narrow wooden box bound in green ribbon. I carry it to the writing desk, set it beneath the lamplight, and unfasten the bow. Inside rests a single sheet of parchment, blank, and a quill cut from the feather of a dusk-heron. The note I never wrote.

Laurel deserves more than silence. She pledged herself to the sanctuary’s care, trusting the rumors of a stone-blooded recluse. How many nights has she sung outside the observatory, hoping the sound reached me? I owe her truth, or at least a direction.

I sit. The chair creaks, ancient wood protesting. Ink finds the nib. Words bleed onto paper:

Laurel,

The sky has spoken in screams.

I go to the shrine north of Frostglass Ridge. If I do not return, do not follow. Yet if you must, bring no mirrors, break no promises, and remember the first law: every prophecy changes when observed.

Guard the sanctuary’s hushed heart. May the stars roll kindly under your watch.

—C.G.

I sand the ink. The sheet folds once, twice, then sears closed with a thumb-print rune that only she can break. I slide it into a silver tube and set the tube in the chute that leads to the rookery.

“Deliver on first light,” I command. The chute swallows the cylinder with a clack.

A low thunder ripples overhead. I glance up. Hairline cracks spider the ceiling crystal. Frost dust drifts down. The sanctuary itself pushes me out the door.

Pack over shoulder, cloak clasped, I make for the ley gate on the far balcony. My stride lengthens despite pain. Floors pulse beneath boots: farewell heartbeats of a place that has been my cell and my cradle.

The balcony doors swing open before I touch them. Dawn still hides beyond the horizon, yet the sky glows faint rose. Snowfields sprawled below catch that blush and fling it back into my face.

At the parapet two stone gryphons flank the circular portal etched into the floor. I lay a hand on the left gryphon’s brow. The granite warmth surprises me; the creature remembers my kindnesses, the songs I sang while mending its weathered wing.

“Watch over Laurel,” I murmur. The statue’s eyes kindle amber. Promise accepted.

Wind shears across the balcony, tugging cloak and hair.

Strands of silver whip into my eyes. My reflection in a shard of ice startles me—skin pale as snowfall, lashes rimmed by frost, pupils paling under the prophecy’s residue.

And the lattice glittering at my throat, fine cracks branching like river deltas.

I look both fragile and inevitable, a contradiction only oracles know.

The ley gate awaits. A ring of sigils etched in abyssal obsidian holds a shallow pool of starlight.

I whisper the shrine’s coordinates, forming them backwards so the gate cannot betray me to any who spy.

The starlight convulses, deepening from silver to blood-red, and the portal yawns open, revealing swirling mist that smells of cedar smoke and distant thunder.

I hesitate. Leaving means forfeiting the quiet mastery I built here. It means cold roads, questioning eyes, and worst of all, the company of those who might watch me die a little each day.

But staying would be a betrayal of every life glimpsed in the collapse—wolves, dragons, humans, fae—all screaming in a single chord. I cannot plug my ears.

I step onto the first rune. Energy surges from sole to spine. The crystal in my ribs hums an answering note, high and brittle, as though pieces of me already remember this path.

Wind catches the cloak’s edge, wrapping it around my hips like a lover afraid to let go. I unclasp it and throw it over the nearest gryphon’s back. The cold against new crystal will hurt, but departures should sting.

On the second rune the sanctuary quakes.

Behind me, stained-glass windows burst, scattering shards that freeze mid-fall, suspended by a final vestige of ward magic.

Each piece reflects a different history: my first vision, my last apprentice’s tears, the smile of the dragon seer who taught me the cost of foresight. I bow my head to them all.

Third rune. The ley pool rises, tendrils of light licking at my boots like living fire. The taste of iron floods my mouth; I realize I’m biting my own lip. Fear tastes old, familiar, almost comforting.

“Watch me, Laurel,” I whisper toward the chute hidden inside the tower stones. “Learn how ending begins.”

The portal flares. A heartbeat later cold blossoms around me, so swift it scours the breath from my lungs. The observatory vanishes, replaced by a tunnel of star-flecked dark. I am weightless, rippling across lines of power older than language.

Inside my chest, the crystal answers, soft pulses keeping time. One pulse for the life I leave, one for the path ahead, one for the heartbeat I felt in the vision—the silhouette kneeling at an altar, shoulders steeped in grief and resolve.

Kylan Grimvale. Alpha of the north.

I whisper his name into the dark corridor. The syllables flash along the ley line, seeking him, warning him, courting him—perhaps all three.

The air ahead brightens. A gate mouth yawns. I brace, feet braced apart, knees soft. Impact hits like plunging through iced water.

I emerge on a snow-packed ridge under a sky still simmering with night.

Moonlight silvers the peaks; wind scythes across open rock.

The altitude is lower than the observatory, yet the air smells thicker, laced with pine resin and woodsmoke creeping from distant hearths. Territory of the Shadow Pack.

I draw my first full breath of exile. Frost explodes in my lungs, bright and wild. The vision’s after-taste lingers—but beneath it, a strange steadiness unfurls. The world does not end in a single heartbeat. It begins ending, slowly, monstrously, and that stretch gives room for action.

The portal behind me collapses with a sigh. Starlight drains into the sigils and blinks out. I tap the obsidian rim twice to erase coordinates; powder sifts away in the wind. Without runes, the ring resembles an innocuous circle of black stones half buried in snow. Good.

I slide the pack off one shoulder, retrieve a slim compass carved from storm-dragon tooth, and hold it at eye level. The needle spins, then steadies, pointing north-northwest—toward the shrine. Toward the altar where blood once answered prophecy with sacrifice.

Snow begins to fall, soft flakes that cling to lashes and the fresh crystal at my collar. I lift the hood of my tunic, though fabric rasps against the new facets and sparks discomfort. The gift and curse of turn-stone skin: it aches, yet it cannot be cut; it burns, yet frost finds no purchase.

Boots crunch as I start down the ridge. Each step radiates pain through the web of cracks, but I welcome the clarity it brings. Pain keeps the mind awake. Pain is the ticket price for truth.

Somewhere ahead, a wolf howls—long, low, layered with raw grief. Another voice answers, higher and sharper, echoing Yarrow’s name. The sound threads under the moon, seeking a reply that never comes.

I close my eyes mid-stride and answer, not with my throat but with pulse-magic. A single reverberating note slips through stone and snow, carrying solace where words would ring hollow. The howl fades, replaced by silence that feels less empty, perhaps only to me.

I quicken pace. Dawn hovers behind the eastern peaks, warming the horizon to pewter. My breath fogs, and the crystal in my ribs aches with each lungful, but the road ahead draws me as surely as gravity draws rivers downhill.

This is the beginning. The sanctuary watches my back, the shrine pulls my feet, and somewhere in the dark between them, an alpha grieving his dead awaits a prophecy he never asked for.

I promised the stars I would not fail them again. And the stars, as ever, remain indifferent—but they blaze fiercely behind thinning cloud, guiding even a creature half woman, half mineral. Guiding, and judging, and witnessing.

Let them witness me now. I will outrun the collapse if only long enough to bend its trajectory. I will walk until the stone in my heart either shatters or hardens into a new shape the realms can lean upon.

Snow crunches. Breath burns. The ridge falls away beneath my stride, and I move forward, alone but no longer apart, into the shivering stillness of the world that waits to be saved.