2. Eirene
TWO
EIRENE
He’s small. Human. Maybe eight years old, though it’s hard to tell with the way he’s curled in on himself, shaking and bloody on the black soil.
His clothes are simple—peasant stock, nothing expensive—and they’re torn in places that don’t correspond to any visible wounds.
As if claws reached through the fabric to touch what was underneath.
The Gate snaps shut behind him.
I drop to my knees beside him, ignoring the screaming protest of my blood-drained body.
His face is pale, too pale, with dark circles beneath eyes that are open but unseeing.
The pupils have swallowed the irises entirely—black pools reflecting things that aren’t there, can’t be there, shouldn’t exist in any realm.
“Mama,” he whispers. “Mama, I can’t find—”
His voice cuts off in a choke. Blood wells from his nose, his ears, the corners of his mouth. Wounds that have no source, no explanation. The Shadow Court has touched him, and it’s still touching him, still reaching across the barrier to claim what stumbled through its domain.
The Veil demands payment for passage. Blood, memory, or service.
This child has no blood left to give. He has nothing to serve with. And if I don’t act in the next thirty seconds, the boundary will take everything else—tear his mind apart, leave him a hollow shell breathing but empty, another victim fed to the insatiable darkness.
Let him go. His blood will count as tithe. The Gate will seal properly. One death to prevent a thousand.
It’s not wrong. The math is simple, brutal, and accurate. One child dies, the boundary stabilizes, the world keeps turning. The Veil doesn’t care about innocence or age or the fact that someone is crying for their mother. It only understands payment.
I reach for the boy’s face.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I’m so sorry.”
Not an apology for letting him die. An apology for what I’m about to steal.
My fingers press against his temples. The twilight magic rises in me, dark and familiar, answering the call I make without words. This is the part of boundary witchcraft the Veil-wardens call treason. The forbidden technique. The reason executioners exist.
Memory extraction.
The tithe.
I close my eyes and pull.
The memory surfaces from the boy’s fractured mind, rising to meet my magic with the ease of a bubble floating to the surface of dark water. It doesn’t belong to him anymore—the Shadow Court’s touch has loosened it, made it easier to take. Small mercy.
A woman’s voice. Soft, warm, threaded with love so pure it makes my chest ache.
Hush now, little one. Mama’s here. Mama’s got you.
The memory blooms behind my eyes—a small bedroom, firelight flickering, a woman with the boy’s nose and chin leaning over a narrow bed. She’s singing. Not a song I recognize, but the melody is simple and sweet, designed to chase away nightmares and coax a frightened child into dreams.
Sleep, my love, while stars keep guard…
I take it.
The memory tears free from the boy’s mind and floods into mine, bringing with it the warmth of the fire, the smell of wood smoke and lavender, the absolute certainty of being loved and protected. For a single, searing moment, I have a mother. I have safety. I have home.
Then the Veil snatches it from me, hungry and greedy, consuming the stolen moment as payment for the boy’s passage. The boundary shimmers, settles, steadies. The tears begin to close.
The child goes still beneath my hands.
For one horrible heartbeat, I think I’ve killed him.
That the extraction was too much, that his fragile mind couldn’t survive the loss.
But then his chest rises. Falls. Rises again.
The bleeding stops. The black pools of his pupils begin to contract, revealing pale blue irises, ordinary and untouched by shadow.
He’ll live.
He’ll never remember the melody she sang.
I sit back on my heels, trembling with exhaustion, sick from carrying another person’s grief.
The memory is gone—fed to the Veil—but echoes remain.
A phantom warmth in my chest. A melody I can almost hear, playing on repeat at the edge of my consciousness.
This is what happens when you steal pieces of souls. They leave traces. Scars.
I carry dozens of them now. Dozens of strangers’ most precious moments, living inside my head alongside my own fading memories of a childhood I barely remember.
First steps and last words. Wedding days and deathbed confessions.
The taste of someone’s grandmother’s bread. The sound of a father’s laugh.
None of them belong to me. All of them refuse to leave.
You chose this. You could have let him die.
But I couldn’t. Not really. Not ever.
Mercy is a crime, according to the Veil-wardens. The memory tithe is forbidden because it cheats the boundary of its proper payment, gives the Veil less than it demands, creates debt instead of balance. Every time I save a life this way, I weaken the barrier a little more.
I do it anyway.
Because the alternative is watching children bleed out at my feet while the boundary drinks its fill. And I’ve done a lot of terrible things for the Veil. I’ve given it years of my life, rivers of my blood, the silver in my hair and the hollows beneath my eyes. But I won’t give it that.
Some things, I keep for myself.