The air tastes like metal again.
Evening has fallen over the farmhouse, but the light refuses to die properly. It smears along the edges of the horizon in molten gold, too bright and too fragile at once. Everything feels off—charged, trembling. The wards still hum faintly from training, their gold lattice visible when the wind shifts. They’ve been like that since morning, shimmering like the skin of a bubble about to pop.
I sit at the window, watching the fields stretch away in the dark. Beyond the wards, the mist rolls thick and low. My reflection stares back at me in the glass—pale, exhausted, and very much not the girl I was before all this.
Behind me, Grams hums softly as she draws runes along the table with powdered chalk. Each symbol glows briefly, then fades into the wood. “Your
