Chapter 3
LILY
The world slammed back into me. Wet leaves cushioned my fall, their dampness seeping through my clothes like cold fingers. Pain radiated from my ribs, sharp and immediate. Each inhale cut like swallowing broken glass.
When I finally managed to lift my head, everything was wrong.
Trees surrounded me. Ancient oaks stretched toward a star-scattered sky. The air tasted of moss and wild things, nothing like the exhaust and electricity of home. My heart hammered against my ribs as understanding crashed over me in waves.
Gran's hourglass. The glowing sand. The impossible pull.
A small hand grabbed mine.
“Get up!”
I turned to find a girl staring at me with desperate eyes. She couldn’t be more than ten, with tangled blonde hair and a torn dress that looked like it belonged in a history book. Terror radiated from her in waves.
“What—” My voice cracked. Nothing made sense. The girl, the forest, the wrongness of it all.
Then I heard it. Hoofbeats thundering through the trees. Men shouted orders. The sulfur-sharp crack of gunpowder.
I froze. My legs went numb. My ears filled with static. I whirled toward her. My hands tightened on hers. “What’s going on? Who. . .”
“Run!” she screamed again, dragging me forward.
I stumbled after her, boots skidding over wet leaves and hidden roots. She darted through the trees, barefoot and silent as smoke. Behind us, the pounding of hooves grew louder. Branches snapped. Metal rang out. Orders cracked through the dark.
They weren’t just chasing us.
They were hunting us.
Adrenaline flooded my system. My legs obeyed before my mind caught up. We sprinted through the undergrowth, branches tearing at my clothes. She moved like a wild creature, barefoot and silent, leading me through gaps I could barely see.
Behind us, the pursuit grew louder. Torches flickered between the trees, casting wild shadows that danced and leaped. I heard them calling to each other, coordinating, closing in.
A branch snapped too close.
A figure stepped into our path.
Tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a long coat that belonged to another century. A revolver gleamed at his hip, polished metal catching the torchlight. His face was hidden in shadow, but his stare crawled over us—calculating, predatory.
I shoved the girl behind me on pure instinct, but hands seized my arms from behind. Strong. Unforgiving. I twisted and kicked, fighting with all I had, but it was no use. They were not just stronger than me—they trained for this. This was what they did. Hunt people.
“Let go of her!” I shouted as a man closed in on the girl.
“And why would I let a Weaver go?” my captor snarled in my ear, his grip tightening until my bones ached. “That's what we're here for.”
Weaver. The words meant nothing to me, but the venom in his voice made my blood run cold.
They dragged us between the trees toward the torchlight. My mind raced, trying to process what was going on.
We emerged in a clearing—torchlight on one side, the men forming a half-circle around us.
My captor’s grip tightened as I took in the scene, men on horseback, their uniforms precise and military but wrong for any army I recognized.
Long coats reinforced with leather, high collars, brass buttons catching the firelight.
Everything about them screamed order, discipline, control.
And sitting astride a dark horse, utterly still in the chaos, was the most devastatingly handsome man I had ever seen.
The thought hit me like a physical blow, completely inappropriate given the circumstances.
Firelight carved his features sharp: strong jaw, storm-colored eyes that missed nothing, dark hair that looked one breath away from falling across his brow.
He was young, late twenties maybe, but carried himself with an authority that made the others defer to his slightest gesture.
His gaze cut to me—then lingered. Not pity. Not curiosity. Assessment. It dragged down to my jeans, my modern boots, my sweater that had no place in this century, then snapped back up. For one heartbeat, disbelief flickered across his face before control slammed back into place.
Everything else fell away. The shouting. The torches. The chaos. Just his gaze holding mine across the smoke-thick air.
Something coiled in my chest—sharp, impossible. Recognition without understanding, as if the air itself bent between us, pulling taut like a thread drawn tight.
The young girl began to fight like a cornered animal, all desperate fury and sharp elbows. But then her struggling stopped. Her breathing steadied. She looked directly at me, and her eyes were full of starlight.
The man on the horse shifted, but his eyes didn’t leave my own. Just slightly, a tilt of his head, the barest narrowing of his eyes. As if he'd heard something the others hadn't.
Then the air changed.
It started as a whisper—a sound like silk tearing. The vibration traveled through my bones and made my teeth ache. The girl's eyes blazed brighter, impossibly bright, and suddenly the clearing erupted.
Threads.
Thousands of them, materializing from nothing—gossamer filaments catching torchlight, reflecting it back in silver and gold. They wove through the air like living things, beautiful and terrible, crisscrossing in patterns too complex to follow.
One brushed my cheek. Cold. Electric.
The world fractured.
“What. . .” My captor's voice died as the threads converged.
One of the hunters cried out, clutching his sword arm. It hung useless at his side, fingers splayed and trembling as if the strength had simply left him. Another stumbled, his leg buckling beneath him for no visible reason. He hit the ground hard, confusion twisting his face.
“Ambush!” someone shouted. “They're in the trees!”
But there was no one in the trees. Just those threads, multiplying, spreading like spider silk across the clearing. The horses screamed and reared, their eyes rolling white with terror at something only they could sense.
A hunter to my left swung his blade at shadows. “There! I see them! Three—no, five—”
“Nothing there, you fool!” Another man, weapon raised, spinning to face threats that didn't exist.
The grip on my arms loosened as my captor turned, distracted by the chaos. His face went slack with confusion, then fear, as he stared at empty air and raised his weapon with shaking hands.
The man on the horse was motionless. He kept his eyes on me—as if I were the only real thing left. Then his voice cut through the chaos like a blade.
“Hold formation!” Sharp. Commanding. “It's illusion—they're not real!”
But his men were already scattering, lost to their own private terrors. One swung at empty air. Another backed against a tree, trying to decide where to strike.
“Stand down!” the man shouted again, but the order dissolved into the pandemonium.
He sat rigidly in his saddle, jaw tight with barely contained frustration.
His hand moved to his weapon—hovered there, but didn't draw.
While his men descended into chaos, he watched with that same cold intensity, his gaze sweeping across the clearing in measured increments as if trying to piece together what his soldiers couldn't see.
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His knuckles whitened on the reins.
But he didn't charge in blindly like the others. Didn't slash at shadows or cry out warnings about phantom enemies. Whatever discipline kept him mounted and controlled made him more unsettling than the panic around him—a single point of terrible stillness in the storm.
A hunter stumbled between us, breaking whatever spell had held me frozen. He swung wildly, and his sword clattered to the ground. He stared at his own hand like it belonged to someone else, fingers refusing to close.
The clearing descended into madness. Men fought invisible enemies. Horses bolted. The torches guttered and sparked, casting wild shadows that only added to the confusion.
And still those threads wove tighter, directed by unseen hands somewhere in the darkness beyond the firelight.
The grip on my arms had loosened completely now. My captor was too distracted by whatever phantom he was seeing. I wrenched free just as someone grabbed me from the other side.
The little girl. Her small hand fierce around my wrist, her eyes still blazing with that impossible starlight.
“Run. Now.”
I ran. Branches clawed at my sleeves. My breath came ragged in my chest. The forest blurred into streaks of green and shadow. The girl’s glowing threads flashing once, then gone.
“Wait!” I called, but my voice was swallowed by the wind. She’d vanished into the undergrowth, a flicker of light devoured by the dark.
I didn’t know where I was going. Only that I had to get away—from those men, from whatever power had caused those threads. The ground was uneven, slick with moss and roots that snaked like veins beneath the earth. My pulse hammered in my ears louder than the thunder building overhead.
A root caught my foot. Pain lanced up my leg as I stumbled forward. The world tilted.
I hit the ground hard, the air ripped from my lungs. My head slammed against something unyielding—stone, maybe. White light burst behind my eyes.
The last thing I saw before darkness took me was a faint shimmer in the trees. Threads of light, still burning, still waiting.