Elion pov
The first time I saw her, the sun dimmed.
Not metaphorically. Not the kind of dimming poets lie about.
The sky actually darkened.
It was noon when it happened. The kind of merciless noon where light feels like judgment, where shadows crawl beneath your feet and refuse to rise. I remember because the square was loud with it — heat shimmering on stone, vendors shouting, bells ringing from the temple spires like a warning nobody understood.
And then—
The light faltered.
It didn't disappear. It hesitated.
Like the world had forgotten how to breathe.
A ripple moved through the crowd before anyone noticed why. Heads tilted upward. Conversations stuttered and died mid-word.
I should have looked at the sky.
Instead, I looked at her.
She stood at the far end of the square, where the sunlight should have been brightest. Where it should have swallowed her whole.
But it didn't touch her.
It broke around her.
Light bent at the edges of her body like it had struck glass. No — not glass. Something deeper. Something older. As if the world itself refused to decide whether she belonged inside it.
She wore no crown, no armor, nothing that marked her as dangerous. Just dark cloth, travel-worn and dust-streaked, wrapped tight like she expected the world to try and peel her open.
Still, people were already moving away from her.
They didn't know why.
But they felt it.
That instinctive, animal knowing.
The kind that tells prey when a predator has entered the forest.
And yet she didn't look like a predator.
She looked—
Lost.
Her gaze moved over the square slowly, like someone searching for a place that had never existed. Not fearful. Not curious. Just tired in a way that felt too large for a human body.
Then her eyes found mine.
And everything stopped.
I don't mean the crowd. Not the bells. Not the wind.
I mean everything.
Sound collapsed inward, like the world had been cupped in giant hands and squeezed. The air thickened. My heartbeat stuttered once, twice, then slammed back into motion so violently it hurt.
Because at that moment, I knew.
Not who she was.
Not what she was.
But that she mattered.
In the way earthquakes matter. In the way prophecies whispered to children in candlelight.
Like something had shifted.
Like a door somewhere deep in the bones of the world had creaked open.
She looked at me like she felt it too.
Not recognition.
But it is inevitable.
And then—
The shadows moved.
Not the ordinary kind cast by buildings and bodies. These moves were wrong. They stretched toward her, thin and trembling, like iron filings dragged toward a magnet. The darkness pools at her feet, folding into itself, deepening, thickening.
Hungry.
A murmur rose in the square. Someone dropped a basket. Fruit rolled across the stones, bright and fragile and terribly alive.
"Don't," an old woman whispered somewhere behind me.
I didn't know if she meant me or the girl.
The sunlight flickered again.
This time, it hurt.
A pressure built behind my ribs, sharp and sudden, like my own heart was trying to tear its way out. I staggered, catching myself against a pillar, breath coming too fast, too shallow.
And still I couldn't look away.
Because she was still looking at me.
Not like a stranger.
Not like an enemy.
Like someone standing at the edge of a cliff, realizing they had been falling their entire life and only just noticed the ground rushing up to meet them.
Her lips parted slightly.
I thought she might speak.
Instead, the sky cracked.
It wasn't loud. That was the worst part.
No thunder. No roar. Just a thin, splitting sound, like ice fracturing across a frozen lake.
A line of darkness sliced through the blue above us. Narrow. Crooked. Wrong.
Someone screamed.
The crowd surged backward, panic igniting all at once. People shoved and stumbled, prayers spilling from their mouths in broken fragments. The bells began ringing again, but now they sounded desperate, clanging against the air like something trying to escape a coffin.
I should have run.
Anyone else would have.
But I couldn't.
Because she looked terrified.
Not of the sky.
Not of the screaming.
Of me.
And somehow, impossibly, that hurt more than the crack in the heavens.
"No—" she said, voice barely there.
Soft. Fractured. Like it had been dragged through years of silence.
The darkness at her feet surged.
The crack in the sky widened.
And in that impossible, unraveling moment, with the world tilting toward something vast and irreversible, a single, unbearable truth settled into my chest.
Not fear.
Not awe.
Not even dread.
Something worse.
Something that rooted me to the earth and split me open from the inside.
Because I knew, with the kind of certainty that lives deeper than thought:
If I took one step toward her,
everything would end.
And I wanted to anyway.