Crimson Glow

The Void Between

The rogue’s snarl is so close I can smell the rot on his breath.

My lungs burn. Branches tear at my arms, my face, my already-tattered dress. The forest has turned hostile. Roots rise to trip me, thorns reach like fingers. Even the trees seem to lean inward, blocking the moonlight, trapping me in darkness.

But worse than the physical pain is the feeling.

The rogue’s emotions crash into my back like waves. Hunger, sharp and primal. Rage, hot and mindless. The savage joy of the hunt. It’s not my hunger, my rage, my joy, but I feel it all as if it were, the sensations pressing against my skin until I want to claw them out of my chest.

I’ve always been like this. Feeling what others feel. The pack’s unease at gatherings, my father’s hidden sorrow, the oracle’s sudden terror during the ceremony. Other wolves don’t seem to share this curse. They move through crowds easily, unburdened by the emotional weight of everyone around them.

I learned to survive it by staying small. Staying quiet. Staying alone.

But there’s no escaping this. The rogue’s feelings chase me as relentlessly as his body, and I’m drowning in sensations that belong to a monster.

My foot catches on something. A root, a rock, I don’t know. I stumble. The rogue’s triumphant howl splits the air, and with it comes a surge of vicious satisfaction that makes bile rise in my throat.

Not like this. I can’t die like this. Hunted like prey, alone, with my father’s blood still wet on my hands.

The boulder appears out of nowhere.

My vision explodes into stars as my head cracks against ancient stone. The impact drives me to my knees, then forward. I crumple like a puppet with cut strings. The last thing I feel is the rogue’s hunger, overwhelming and terrible, before darkness swallows Then everything changes.

I open my eyes to find myself standing, though I don’t remember getting up. The forest is gone. The rogue is gone. Even his horrible feelings have vanished, leaving a silence so complete it makes my ears ring.

Beneath my bare feet, ice stretches endlessly in all directions.

I turn in a slow circle, my breath misting in air that’s suddenly cold enough to burn my lungs. Above me, nothing. No sky, no stars, just darkness so complete it feels solid. Below me, only the ice, smooth as glass, reflecting that same crushing darkness back at me.

“Hello?” My voice comes out small and frightened. It doesn’t echo. The emptiness swallows the sound completely.

I take a step forward.

The ice shatters.

Not beneath me. That remains solid. But everywhere else, cracks race outward like lightning frozen in crystal. And from those fractures, life erupts. Grass pushes through in impossible shades of green and gold. Flowers bloom in colors I have no names for. Midnight blue petals that seem to absorb light. Silver-white blossoms that glow from within. Crimson blooms that pulse like beating hearts.

“No.” I jerk backward, but it only makes it worse. More cracks. More growth. Vines unfurl and climb toward nothing. Trees burst from the breaking ice, their trunks twisted and ancient, their leaves shimmering like captured starlight.

Destruction and creation, happening simultaneously. Death and life flowing from me in equal measure.

My hands begin to shake. I press them to my chest, trying to make myself smaller, trying to stop. But with each ragged breath, the transformation accelerates. Where my exhaled breath touches the air, frost forms and falls like snow. Where the frost lands, the ice fractures. Where it fractures, impossible beauty grows.

“What’s happening?” The words break on a sob.

I look down at my hands and scream.

They’re changing. Shifting. Human fingers one moment. Pale skin, torn nails from my desperate flight. Then wolf claws burst through, white-furred and deadly, the shift I’ve never been able to achieve before happening now without my control. Then something else entirely. Something that gleams like obsidian scales, sharp and beautiful and wrong.

Back to human. Back to wolf. Back to that other thing. Faster and faster until I can’t tell what I am anymore.

“Stop it!” I shake my hands desperately. “Stop, stop, stop.”

Then I feel it.

Not a physical sensation. Not pain or cold or fear.

Emotion.

Vast and ancient and utterly not mine. Sorrow so deep it drives me to my knees. Grief that spans centuries. Love so fierce it burns. Regret that has no bottom, no end, no relief.

I gasp, clutching at my chest as feelings too immense for one person crash over me. I’m drowning in them, crushed beneath their weight. These aren’t my emotions. They can’t be. No one person could contain this much and survive.

“What are you doing to me?” I manage to choke out.

“Showing you what you are.”

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. Soft as moonlight. Ancient as the first dawn.

I force my eyes open through tears that aren’t mine and see her. A figure forming from silver light itself, features blurred and shifting like water. Beautiful and terrible all at once.

“Who…” I try to speak but the emotions are still flooding through me, making it hard to breathe, to think, to be anything except a vessel for feelings that belong to someone else.

“You feel what others cannot,” the voice says gently. The figure moves closer but doesn’t touch me. “You bridge what should remain separate. This has always been your gift. Your curse. But you have not yet understood what it means.”

The overwhelming emotions begin to recede, leaving me hollow and gasping. My own feelings rush back in to fill the void. Fear. Confusion. A desperate need to understand.

“I don’t…” I shake my head. “I just feel things. Other people’s things. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just, I’m just sensitive or broken or—”

“You are what should not walk, yet must.” The figure’s voice carries weight that makes my bones ache. “What was ended, yet begins again in you.”

The scene around us shifts.

The ice and garden vanish. Now I stand on a battlefield. Bodies everywhere, the ground soaked with blood. Wolves and vampires fighting side by side against something else. Things that move wrong, that have too many teeth, too many eyes, that radiate power so immense it makes my bones ache.

And the feelings.

Oh gods, the feelings from those things. Chaos and hunger and wrongness, all twisted together into something that makes me want to vomit. They feel like discord made flesh. Like a thousand different emotions screaming at once with no harmony, no order, just madness.

“What are they?” I whisper.

“What you will become,” the voice says, and I feel her sorrow wash over me again. “Or what you will stop. The choice has not yet been written.”

In the center of the c*****e, a sword blazes with light so pure it hurts to look at. Silver-white and burning, driven point-first into the earth. I don’t know what it is, but I feel its presence like a living thing. Grief and determination forged into steel. A mother’s love sharpened to a killing edge.

“When silver meets shadow,” the voice whispers, beginning to fade, “the mirror will show what you are. Two halves cannot stand alone. The broken must mend or all will shatter.”

“Wait!” I reach for the dissolving light. “I don’t understand! What mirror? What silver and shadow? What am I supposed to do?”

But I’m already falling, the battlefield dissolving beneath my feet.

The last thing I feel is her sorrow, wrapping around me like a mother’s embrace.

“Do not let them kill you before you understand,” she whispers. “You are the bridge, child. Learn to bear the weight of both sides, or be crushed between them.”

Then darkness.

Complete and absolute.