Chapter 27
Fifteen years prior...
A blaze burned through the dark forest surrounding Samole.
The small northern farming village just outside of Belray grew thick with smoke.
Ash lined the turreted rooftops, blackening the snow collected there, and the townspeople rushed to evacuate the buildings nearest to the blistering roar of flame.
Men began working on a fire break. They demolished structures along the tree line, tireless in their fight against the spread of destruction. They barked orders as others fled with children tucked to their sides.
Townspeople threw buckets of sand onto winter’s dried grasses. The brush smoldered on, flaring in the wind and threatening the foundations of any cottage it touched.
With a layer of frost blanketing the ground of the North Corridor, such an event was rare. The fire had started all at once, stemming from the pines.
“I hear a babe crying from the woods!” a woman yelled to two men who had just emptied a barrel of sand onto a patch of thicket.
“In the woods, ma’am? Impossible—nothing can survive that inferno,” one said.
But the woman was confident that there was a child out there. She ran the town’s foundling home, and her heart split in two; she wouldn’t stand idle while the call of a babe in need cut through the night air.
“Then I shall just have to save them myself,” she snapped and marched toward the burning brush. The men did not follow, scoffing at her foolish whims.
When she reached the trees, it was as if the flames parted for her.
She trudged through slushy, melted snow, muddying the skirts of her thick wool dress.
Holding her breath, fighting against the suffocating urge to cough, she kept on through the mess of burnt bark and tree limbs that swayed around her.
There, a few yards into the smoldering woodlands, was an unmarred wooden basket. Within it lay a swaddled bundle, wailing up at the gray smoke-coated sky. She lifted the child from the basket and to her chest.
“I’ve got you,” she cooed gently. “You will be safe, my dear.” A promise she couldn’t realistically make as the flames licked down from the tree canopy above.
The child quieted as she carefully stepped out of the burning woods. When she reached safety, she could not believe her luck as the mouth of the beastly flame closed just behind her.
The men were gone; they’d likely run off to continue the fight against nature.
With the child cradled in her arms, the woman stared down at the babe. He was nude save for the warm linen swathed around him. A barely there tousle of brown hair topped his head, and his blue eyes pinched shut, as though unused to the light.
Sources, she thought. He looked like a newborn—a day old at most.
The foundling mother wrapped him tightly in the soft fabric that he’d been left in and cursed whoever could be so cruel as to leave a child in such dangerous circumstances.
Something fell as she shifted the fabric. The babe’s savior looked down to find a rolled piece of parchment and a flat, golden stone. She bent to retrieve both and unraveled the paper.
In the red glare from the burning woods behind her, she read...
“I beg you. Keep him safe. Give my son this memorandum when his Source magic rises. Only he can open it. Fear not what you don’t yet understand—Lira and Astros have granted the boy a future I could not promise him.
You hold the sun.
You hold the flame.
You hold the light.
-Firose Van Gran”
At that moment, the wind died down. The flames that had once threatened to engulf the town dissipated to a lower roar.
With a pounding heart, the woman tucked the page and stone into her bust. Instead of bringing the boy to the foundling home, she took him back to her flat to await the light of morning.