Pressed between sweating bodies, he stared in mute horror as the robed men chained another screaming woman to a wooden stake. Her eyes golden, bright as hammered sunlight flicked wildly, searching for mercy, finding none.
The fire beneath her feet bloomed.
Her shriek split the air.
A child burned next.
Then a man.
Then another.
All of them golden-eyed.
All of them turned into living candles before a crowd that cheered like they were watching a festival.
He tried to look away
but the crowd suddenly stopped laughing.
Silence rolled through them, cold and sharp.
Every robed figure slowly turned his hooded head toward him.
The sigil on their robes the sun with a gouged-out center caught the firelight, glowing like a living wound.
The Church of the True Sun.
Its mark burned itself into his memory like a brand.
A hand grabbed him.
Another.
A dozen.
He blinked
and he wasn't in the crowd anymore.
He was bound to a stake among hundreds of others.
Wood cutting into his wrists.
Smoke clawing at his lungs.
The pyres ignited in a wave, fire racing toward him like a starving beast.
The sun above him was eclipsed, a ring of fire around a void.
The void stared back at him.
And the symbol the True Sun's hollow eye swam in his vision, pulsing, throbbing, tightening like a fist around his skull.
The fire touched his toes.
He screamed
The eclipse snapped
and Percy jolted awake.
"Percy! Percy, lad breathe. Easy now."
The voice was worn leather and gravel, rough but warm. Osric leaned over him, bracing a hand on the edge of the bed. His beard was a stormcloud of white curls, unkempt and heroic in the way only very old men could manage. Thin scars ran down his cheek like old lightning. His eyes grey, sharp, too awake for his age studied Percy with a familiarity carved by decades.
Around them, the room was a small hurricane.
A cup hovered an arm's length above the floor.
Cutlery spun in slow orbit.
The chipped plate trembled like it was afraid to fall.
Percy's eyes blazed gold for a heartbeat
then cooled back to blue.
Everything crashed down.
Osric huffed. "You know, boy, one morning I'm going to walk in here and find you levitating the entire damn cottage."
Percy dragged a hand down his face. "Yeah. Sorry. Didn't mean to… float your dishes again."
"No need to apologise," Osric said, lowering himself onto the foot of the bed with a grunt. "Same nightmare?"
Percy nodded. "Same one."
Osric rubbed his jaw. "I've known you a long time, Percy. Long enough to know this isn't new. But it's getting worse. I've been hearing you thrash in your sleep almost every night."
Percy stared at the dying embers in the hearth, breath still shaky.
"It's been coming and going for… gods, I don't even know sixty years? Maybe seventy? Time's a blur these days."
Osric snorted. "Blur for you, maybe. My bones catalog every sunrise."
Percy managed a weak laugh. "But these past few weeks… it's been constant. Every night. The same dream. The same fire. The same symbol."
Osric's eyes sharpened. "The True Sun again?"
Percy nodded slowly.
"I think it's trying to tell me something," he whispered.
Outside, a cold wind rattled the shutters
and somewhere deep inside Percy, something old stirred. Something hungry.
Percy sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing the last tremor of the nightmare from his hands. Osric shuffled around the little one-room cottage, muttering to himself as he poked at a pan with exactly the wrong level of enthusiasm for someone who claimed to hate mornings.
"Breakfast is burnt," Osric declared solemnly, staring down at the smoking pan like it had betrayed him. "Again. I swear this stove is possessed."
Percy snorted. "It's you that's possessed, old man. Move over."
He brushed past him, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. A spoon drifted lazily off the table as he passed; Osric pressed it down with a practiced palm, not even glancing at it.
"Old man?" Osric scoffed, straightening with offended pride. "Old man? You dare call me old? You're eighty-four years old, you damn brat you're five years older than me!"
Percy slapped a hand over his mouth so fast the chickens outside startled.
"But Grandfather," he whispered loudly, eyes wide with fake innocence, "I'm only twenty-one."
He winked.
"I'll go into town," Percy said, grabbing the half-torn coat hanging by the door. "We're out of tomatoes, out of salt, out of basically everything."
"We're not out of plates," Osric countered, then squinted at Percy's expression. "Actually no, wait, you chipped the last one. Buy me a new plate while you're at it."
Percy rolled his eyes. "One day you'll thank me for my reckless dishwashing."
"One day you'll pay me back for it."
The door creaked open to a flood of cold morning air. Their farm stretched like a lazy beast waking from sleep fences patched with old rope, wooden posts leaning at angles only gravity understood, a handful of cattle chewing grass like philosophers, and chickens darting around with the frantic purpose of creatures convinced the sky might fall at any moment.
Percy stepped into it, inhaling earth, dew, and something faintly metallic his dreams never left him quickly.
"Don't forget the plate!" Osric shouted after him.
"If they have one older than you, I'll buy two!" Percy called back, jogging down the dirt path.
The town of Bristow wasn't much just a cluster of sun-faded buildings around a crossroads, the smell of fresh bread always wrestling with the smell of livestock. People bustled through the marketplace with baskets, sacks, babies, gossip… real life, noisy and stubborn.
Percy slipped in with the ease of someone who'd walked the same dirt for decades without ever leaving footprints.
"Morning, Percy!"
"Tell Osric he still owes me a fence post!"
"Percival, you growing your hair out again? Looks like you slept in a haystack!"
He waved them off with half-distracted smiles. The warmth of the townsfolk always felt like sunlight soft, steady but it didn't quite reach the shadow still clinging to him.
He stopped at Mara's vegetable stall, a spread of tomatoes shining like tiny red lanterns.
"Well if it isn't Osric's boy," Mara said with a grin, arms crossed. "He send you to do the shopping because he burns everything again?"
"He claims the stove has a personal vendetta."
"It does," she said. "Against him."
Percy chuckled. "Tomatoes and salt today. And… maybe a plate."
"Ah," Mara leaned in knowingly. "You broke another?"
"No comment."
She packed the tomatoes into a cloth bag, then tapped his wrist lightly. "Tell your grandfather I said hello. And that if he skips Harvest Feast again this year, I'm marching down to that farm myself to drag him."
Percy paused just a breath, a flicker in his eyes.
"Yeah," he said softly. "I'll tell him."
Grandfather.
The word felt comfortable on his tongue.
Even if it wasn't true.
Even if neither of them ever said it out loud.
He thanked Mara and moved deeper into the market, surrounded by noise, life, laughter yet carrying the faint echo of golden eyes burning in a dream he couldn't shake.
Percy was almost home he could see the pasture fence, see the crooked roofline
when two armored figures came into view, standing far too close to Osric for comfort.
Their sun-marked robes shimmered in the wind.
Church soldiers.
Percy's chest tightened.
Osric stood between them like a lamb cornered by hunting dogs.
Percy didn't think he just ran.
Both soldiers' hands flew to their weapons.
"Osric!" Percy yelled.
Steel flashed halfway out of scabbards.
"WAIT!" Osric's voice cracked like a splitting beam. "WAIT that's my grandson!"
The soldiers halted, but suspicion glued their fingers to the hilts.
"Grandson?" the taller one repeated. "We have no record of either of you."
The shorter soldier popped open a thick census ledger, pages fluttering like a judge's verdict.
His finger scrolled down, back up, then again.
Nothing.
The tall soldier grunted.
"Explain."
Osric swallowed, then forced a steady breath.
"We weren't here for the last census."
"Obviously," the soldier sneered. "Names."
"Osric Vale," the old man said.
The soldier's gaze slid to Percy like a razor across skin.
"And you?"
Percy kept his voice steady. "Percival Vale."
Both soldiers wrote the names down, slow and deliberate, as though carving them into stone.
"And why weren't the Vales counted last time?" the shorter one demanded.
Before Percy could answer, the taller soldier began to circle him slow, predatory as if inspecting livestock at a market. Percy felt the man's eyes dragging over him, reading his body like a confession.
"Age?" the soldier asked, stopping just behind his shoulder.
"Twenty-one," Percy replied.
The soldier stepped closer, studying him openly now.
His gaze flicked to Percy's near–shoulder-length hair, a messy brown mane that looked like it hadn't seen a comb since harvest season. He eyed the barely-there stubble along Percy's jaw more a suggestion of a beard than the real thing.
Then his attention dropped to Percy's frame.
"Lean build," the soldier murmured. "Muscle on the shoulders. Back. Hands rough…" He lifted one of Percy's palms with two fingers, as though checking the quality of grain. "You've been working fields for years. Look like a farm boy."
He clicked his tongue once.
"But strong enough. Young enough. The Church could still train you."
His eyes narrowed. "Tell me, boy… are you devout?"
Percy held his breath for half heartbeat then turned, nodding toward the wooden door of their home. Carved into it was the radiant symbol of the True Sun, worn by weather and age.
"Of course," Percy said smoothly.
He even added the blessing every child in the kingdom was expected to know.
"May the True Sun protect and guide you."
The soldier watched him a heartbeat too long.
Then continued writing, the tension thick enough to choke on.
Osric speaks before Percy could breathe.
"We moved here a year and a half ago. After his father passed."
The tall soldier narrowed his eyes.
"From where?"
"South of the marsh line," Osric replied.
"And why leave?"
"A bad harvest. Tax collectors breathing down our necks. And after losing his father…"
Osric let his shoulders sag with just enough weight.
"We needed quieter soil."
The soldiers exchanged that silent, sharpened look again one full of judgments they didn't bother voicing.
"And the boy's mother?" the tall one said.
Osric's face fell with well-practiced grief.
"She died giving birth. Been just us ever since."
Percy didn't move, didn't blink.
He felt their gaze crawling over him, prying under his skin, searching for cracks that might reveal something unnatural.
The shorter soldier stepped closer.
"And you?" he asked Percy. "Any wife? Fiancée? Any woman carrying your child?"
Percy blinked, thrown. "…No."
The soldier grunted.
"Good. We can't afford unrecorded wombs heading into a Leap Year."
He said the words like a warning, like an accusation.
"The High Throne wants every household accounted for," the soldier continued.
"No missing families. No hidden births. No surprises. Not this time."
His hand settled meaningfully on the hilt of his sword.
"Now," he said, closing the ledger with a harsh snap,
"you'll be recorded. Full names. Origin. Occupation. You're cattle folk?"
Osric nodded. "Yes. That's all."
"And if we find out you lied about anything…"
The soldier leaned in so close Percy could smell iron on his breath.
"You'll burn for it."
Percy's pulse thundered in his ears.
For a moment just a breath the world shimmered gold around him.
Osric's hand gripped his arm.
The soldiers mounted their horses but lingered, staring long enough to burn the Vales into memory.
Only when they rode off did Percy finally exhale.
Osric trembled.
Percy didn't.
Not anymore.