Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
This was a boy with too-long limbs and dark hair falling into his eyes. He stood just beyond the line where the trees thickened, half in shadow, half in the weak spill of Stonewick’s streetlights.
He wasn’t crossing any lines.
He wasn’t challenging.
He was… waiting.
He was listening.
My chest tightened so sharply it stole my breath because this wasn’t the first time I’d seen something like this happen to him when he was a boy in visions.
But as I watched Gideon as a boy, I knew what I was witnessing was loneliness, raw and unarmored.
The boy’s shoulders were hunched as if he’d been told one too many times that he didn’t belong anywhere, and he was trying anyway, stubborn as an ache.
“He shouldn’t be here,” the second voice said, harsher. “If he’s from there, he’s touched. Marked. You know what that means.”
The first voice made a sound that might have been a sigh. “He’s a child.”
“A child becomes a weapon if you let it,” the second voice snapped. “That place makes weapons. He’s not even ours to worry about.”
Not even ours.
I wanted to argue with them, absurdly, as if the flame could hear me across time and alter the outcome.
I wanted to tell them that Gideon had become a weapon anyway—that their fear hadn’t prevented it.
If anything, fear had sharpened him. Rejection had given him an edge.
Neglect had taught him how to survive without tenderness.
But I wasn’t sure I could blame them, either. Shadowick wasn’t a place you spoke about in fairytales, especially in this town. Shadowick was the place you warned children about in half-whispered stories.
But still…
The boy in the flame took a step forward and looked longingly toward the village.
It was almost as if he wanted proof that warmth existed somewhere, but then I saw a flicker of something more run through his gaze as if something he’d lost had been hidden in Stonewick.
It didn’t make sense, but it was what I saw.
“I saw him yesterday,” the first voice continued, softer now. “He left something at the boundary.”
The second voice scoffed. “A curse, no doubt.”
“No,” the first voice said, and there was something like reluctant compassion in the tone. “It was… a little carving.”
The blue flame flickered, and the image shifted. The boy was closer now, his face turned up as if he could see something through the trees.
His eyes were dark, yes, but not cold. Not yet.
Gideon, as a boy, looked like someone who hadn’t decided what he was going to become.
But someone else decided for him.
“He’s not invited,” the second voice said flatly. “If we let him in, we let that place in. We let her in.”
Her.
Even through the distortion of the flame, I felt my birthmark stir, a faint sting like a warning prick.
The Priestess.
The first voice hesitated. “What if he doesn’t have anywhere else?”
“Then he learns that the world isn’t always easy,” the second voice said. “Like the rest of us did.”
My stomach twisted at the cruelty of his words. Wasn’t Stonewick about being driven toward the light?
But then I thought about everything that kept Stonewick safe.
Protection. Fear. Boundaries. Wards.
All the things that had kept Stonewick safe were the same things that had left a child outside, shivering in the cold.
My eyes stung from tears I hadn’t expected because I knew what it did to a person when they were told, again and again, that they didn’t belong.
Because I knew what it did when your only choices were to become hard… or disappear.
When I found out my husband wasn’t in love with me anymore…that our family had been built on lies, I felt like I didn’t belong. The family that I had helped to build was breaking down around me, and I had nowhere to go. Magic saved me. Hope saved me.
I watched the boy in the flame lift his hand, palm out toward the Stone Ward. He didn’t touch it. He just hovered his fingers that trembled slightly
He lowered his hand and turned away, walking back into the trees like someone who had run out of hope for the day.
The image distorted, but I heard one last phrase before it blurred to nothing.
“…his name is Gideon,” the first voice said. There was something like regret in it, as if naming him aloud made him real enough to feel guilty about.
For a moment the image almost didn’t make sense.
Gideon.
My chest tightened, the ache sharp enough that it felt as though the flame had reached inside and closed around my heart.
Because the Gideon I knew would never have looked like that. He would never have allowed anyone to see him as a lonely boy standing at the edge of warmth.
He had built his arrogance carefully, layer by layer, until it worked like armor. He polished it, wore it openly, and used it to keep everyone at a safe distance. Cruelty had become his crown, because showing anything softer would have destroyed him.
And now—now he was in my dreams looking tired and weak and uncomfortably humble, offering a stone he could have clung to like a lifeline, warning me without asking for anything in return.
He had helped the orcs.
He had… tried.
The boy in the flame and the man in my nightmares were suddenly the same thread, pulled tight across decades.
And it made me feel sick with a kind of sorrow I didn’t have time for.
My mother was with the Priestess.
The Wards were under attack again.
And I was standing in a hidden nook under a window, watching the childhood of the enemy like it was a lantern held up to my face.
The sprite hovered beside the blue flame, its tiny hands still moving in slow circles, patient as breath. It didn’t push. It didn’t demand I understand. It simply showed me.
As if the Academy had decided I needed this.
As if it wanted me to know that monsters were not born fully formed.
They were made.
My birthmark stung again, sharper this time, and I flinched, lifting a hand to my wrist instinctively.
“What more are you trying to tell me?” I whispered, not sure if I was speaking to the sprite, the Academy, the memory, or whatever thin part of the world Gideon had managed to slip through.
The sprite tilted its head, almost like a curious bird.
A sound reached us, but it wasn’t from the flame. It was from somewhere outside the Ward.
At first, the ruckus was distant, a dull crash as though something heavy had struck stone. Another noise followed close behind it, voices raised and urgent, the kind that carried panic even when the words themselves were lost.
My whole body tightened.
The sprite froze mid-motion, its small hands hovering over the blue flame. Slowly, it lifted one palm and swept it across the surface the way someone might cup a hand over a candle to smother the light without stirring the air.
The blue dulled, swallowed by fire that returned to its slow, quiet curl as if nothing had ever been there at all.
The noise outside grew louder—shouts now, unmistakable. The echo of running feet. The high, startled cry of someone who hadn’t expected the night to turn dangerous.
I backed away from the nook, my gaze flicking once more to the blue flame.
It burned steadily, indifferent.
The sprite hovered near my shoulder for a moment, as if it knew something I didn’t and had already decided I’d figure it out eventually. For the briefest instant, I felt a light brush against my thoughts, calm and steady, almost reassuring.
But the relief flicked away into the shadows between the cauldrons and was gone so quickly it might never have been there at all.
I turned toward the stairwell and dashed down the steps.
The noise outside wasn’t dying down.
If anything, it was growing louder.
And it was in the center of Stonewick.