The valley of his childhood did not know fear—not truly. Each morning began with the hush of dew-laden grass and the faint, clean chill that came before the sun warmed the soil. Birds chattered between bands of light, hopping along low branches and stone fences, their songs layered over the soft murmur of a waking village. Children's footfalls beat irregular paths through wildflowers and between half-buried stones, bare feet stained green and brown from the fields. The boy's world was small and complete, bounded by the familiar: the cadence of his father's stories told by the fire, his mother's calm voice shaping songs and scolding in equal measure, and the constant tug-of-war of siblings whose laughter and bickering stretched from dawn to dusk. Their village, a cluster of carefully fitted stone homes and tangled kitchens gardens, smelled of damp earth, woodsmoke, and baking grain. It was small, but vibrant—people woven together by duty, habit, shared meals, and the unchanging rhythm of planting, harvest, rest.
That day was meant to be a festival, a day carved out of the plaincloth of life and dyed with color. Banners of woven cloth and pressed leaves hung between the old oaks, edges fluttering in the gentle breeze. Long tables were dragged into the clearing, set with loaves of still-warm bread, baskets of fruit polished by careful hands, smoked meats, and jugs of fresh-pressed juice. Villagers in their brightest garments—patched but lovingly dyed—bartered and bantered, trading eggs for cloth, stories for favors, laughing too loudly in the way of people trying to push last year's shadows out of sight.
The boy's father hoisted him onto sturdy shoulders so he could see over the press of bodies. From that height, the world was a sea of faces and color, and in the middle of it all stood the old story-drummer, hunched but proud, hands resting on the skin of a battered drum. He began to pound out ancient rhythms as his voice rose, telling tales of guardian beasts and heroes with eyes like stars—stories the boy half believed, half dismissed as ritual words adults liked to repeat. His mother moved among the tables, hands dusted in flour, baking flatbread in iron pans over the communal fire. She hummed melodies older than any of their names, notes curling through the air like a second kind of smoke. The boy's younger brother tugged at his tunic, demanding one more wrestling match by the stream, while his sister squealed in mock outrage when cold water splashed her ankles, then laughed so hard she fell into the grass.
The world was whole, stitched together without visible seams. The future felt like a wide, unwritten scroll waiting patiently for the boy's clumsy ink.
As the sun climbed toward its highest point, something shifted—subtle at first, like a wrong note in a familiar song. A thin chill wound down the valley, not the crisp kind that came with early frost, but a flat, strange cold that raised the hairs along the boy's arms. The wind did not behave as wind should. It slithered through, refusing to bend the grass or stir the banners, yet one by one, the candles and lamps in the houses flickered and went out, flames surrendering as if pinched by unseen fingers.
Shadows lengthened in odd directions, stretching where the light said they should not be. Clouds that had drifted lazily across the sky thickened and churned, boiling up from the horizon as though hurled from some deep, unseen chasm. The elders muttered, their easy smiles collapsing. Some touched their foreheads and hearts in the village's old sign of warding. Others narrowed their eyes and scanned the sky, searching for familiar shapes of storm fronts and failing to find them.
The drumbeats faltered, then stopped. The storyteller's voice trailed away, words dying on his tongue as he turned toward the stone bridge that marked the village's edge. A new scent crawled into the air—metallic and bitter, like blood left too long in the sun, undercut by something scorched and unnatural. Birds slipped from the trees without a sound, abandoning the branches in a silent exodus. No one noticed until the songs were gone.
Light warped, color draining around the edges. The sky deepened from blue to a bruised violet, then to a shade that didn't have a name. It felt as if the sun itself were flinching, pulling back, leaving the valley under a light that wasn't quite its own. Then the sky howled.
It was not a storm.
It was a thing—an enormity that made the boy's childish myths feel shallow. It descended in coils and fragments, a calamity woven from shadow, exposed bone, and rivers of red-gold fire. A thousand shifting arms threaded through the air, tipped with claws, hooks, and empty, burning eyes. It moved like smoke and avalanche at once, swallowing sound wherever it passed. Houses buckled as if made of paper. Trees that had stood for generations snapped like twigs. Its mere presence shattered glass and clay, sent animals into silent collapse, and drove some of the oldest villagers to their knees, clutching their chests without understanding why.
The square erupted into chaos. The careful choreography of festival day tore apart in a heartbeat. Mothers screamed their children's names, grabbing, dragging, shoving them toward imagined safety. Men reached for axes and hunting bows, fingers clumsy, faces blanched with the realization that wood and string meant nothing here. Shouts overlapped, turning into a single, ragged cry.
The calamity struck the town square with a sound that defied language. It was not thunder, nor wind, nor any roar the boy had ever heard. It was a pressure that pushed him down from the inside, a vibration in his bones that made his teeth ache and his vision smear. The world shuddered; his knees hit the ground no matter how he tried to stay standing.
His father's arms closed around him and his siblings, a wall of muscle and warmth trying to hold back the end. "Stay close," his father murmured, voice tight but steady, breath hot against the boy's ear. "Don't run unless I tell you. Do you hear me?" Beside them, his mother's hands gripped his shoulders and his sister's hair, fingers trembling. Her voice, usually so certain, cracked and shook, spilling half-formed prayers and frantic promises. "It will pass. It will pass. We just have to hold on…"
Around them, familiar faces flickered and vanished. Neighbors who had bartered for eggs that morning were there one heartbeat and gone the next, snatched up by a lashing arm of shadow, crushed under falling stone, or erased in bursts of light that left only scorched outlines. Houses split down their centers with sickening cracks, masonry tumbling into twisted heaps. Fields at the valley's edge liquefied into bubbling pools of fire and ash, crops dissolving into smoke.
The boy watched the sky rip open. For a moment that felt like forever, he saw stars where the sun should have been, stars too bright and too close, their light cutting through the calamity and casting the village into jagged, wrong-angled shapes. The world's familiar geometry bent, split, and stitched back together in configurations that made his eyes burn.