I wake to a sky that isn't a sky at all: just a vast, endless white. Too bright. Too empty. It swallows everything.
I blink, once, twice, my vision adjusting to the pale nothingness stretching above me. Snow drifts down in slow, soundless spirals. A flake lands on my cheek. It melts instantly.
I feel nothing.
I try to move. My body won't listen. It is heavy, stiff. Something is wrapped around me: wet, cold, pressing in from all sides.
The air smells sharp. Like iron. Like blood.
Then, I hear it.
A low hum, deep and endless. Then another, higher, trembling. More join in—dozens, maybe hundreds, a tangled mess of sound.
It crawls under my skin, through my ribs, behind my eyes. Colors flicker in the darkness of my mind: gray, purple, red.
The sounds come from below me. Around me. Inside me.
They are not humming.
They are dead.
I breathe in too fast, and the cold stabs at my lungs. My fingers twitch. My legs won't move. Something sticky clings to my skin—mud, blood.
I try to sit up. Pain rips through my back. I stop. I don't know why, but I don't want to touch it.
I don't remember why.
I don't remember anything.
Who am I? What am I doing here?
A sound. A crunch. Footsteps above me. A shadow moves across the too-white sky.
A man leans over the edge of the pit. His face is blurred, but his voice reaches me, steady and rough. It does not hurt to listen to.
His voice is blue. Like the sky should be.
"...A boy?"
----------
Elias
The war is over.
That's what they tell us, anyway.
But as I walk across the frozen battlefield, stepping over bodies stiff with frost, it doesn't feel like victory.
It feels like we've ended something much older than a war. Something we were never meant to touch.
Five years. Five years of cities burning, of villages wiped clean off the map, of children waking up to find their parents' corpses whispering to them.
Five years fighting something that shouldn't have existed—the Veyrn.
We feared them long before we ever raised a blade. They kept to their mountains, their ruins, their ice-bitten forests.
They never expanded. Never conquered. But they watched. And when one of them died, they didn't stay dead.
Necromancers. Corpse-callers. Demons in human skin.
At first, we thought we had the upper hand. We outnumbered them. We had steel, fire, siege weapons. But the dead don't stay down, and for every one we burned, they raised two more in its place.
The war might have gone on forever if not for one thing—the Veyrn could die. Truly die. Fire, starvation, steel.
Enough force, and they'd stay in the dirt. So we gave them all three. We burned their cities, poisoned their rivers, left their young to freeze in the snow. We became the monsters they always feared we were.
Yesterday, we finished it. The last of their kind fell with their last city. We slaughtered every one of them.
Or so we thought.
Now, we're here to make sure.
The grave yawns before me, a pit filled with broken bodies, twisted and piled like garbage. Even in the cold, the stink is thick. A younger soldier gags beside me.
"We really gotta dig through this?"
"Orders are orders," another mutters. "No risks. No survivors."
I don't want to be here. I've seen enough of the Veyrn to know that even dead, they're dangerous. But I need the coin. And I need to know—truly know—that this war is over.
I grip my knife, stepping toward the nearest corpse. A final precaution. A clean stab to the skull ensures there's no dark magic lingering inside.
The body is small, twisted, half-buried in the others. Looks like a child, but I've learned not to trust my eyes when it comes to the Veyrn.
I raise the blade.
Then, I see him.
A boy, barely breathing, eyes dull and gray. He's in a hole just beyond the body I was about to stab, half-hidden beneath a tangle of corpses. His skin is pale, streaked with blood and filth.
He looks human enough. Some other poor soul who got caught in the slaughter.
He looks human enough. A boy, thin and battered, half-buried in the dead. His skin is pale beneath the grime, his hair matted with blood.
His body shivers—just slightly, just enough to betray that he's still alive—but his eyes…
His eyes are empty. Cold. Like a corpse that hasn't realized it's dead yet.
And yet, he catches my gaze. Holds it.
There is no pleading in his expression, no fear, no relief. Just a quiet, hollow stillness, like he is waiting. For what, I don't know.
I should move on. I should finish my job.
But my hand tightens around the knife, and I don't move.
Why?
Why do I care about some half-dead boy in a grave full of monsters?
Then, before I can shove the thought away, the past slams into me.
Rain. Cold and endless. Hunger like knives in my gut.
My mother's body left to rot where she fell, no one to bury her, no one to care.
And me, a child—too weak, too small, too nothing—watching as the soldiers marched past, as their boots splashed through the mud, as not one of them looked my way.
Not one of them stopped.
I force the memory down, but it leaves something behind. Something bitter. Something I thought I'd buried.
I curse under my breath and kneel beside the boy. My voice comes out rough, scraped raw by too many years of shouting, too much smoke, too much loss.
"Can you move?"
----------
I don't know why I trust the man. Maybe because his voice doesn't hurt. It doesn't slice through my skull like the others. It doesn't twist or shatter or burn.
It is steady. Deep. A cold blue in a world of screaming red and suffocating white.
Or maybe I just have no choice.
He pulls me up, and pain lances through me. My body is stiff, unwilling, like it's forgotten how to move.
My legs shake, brittle and weak, barely able to hold me. I feel like I've been here forever—buried, frozen, waiting.
The world sways. Gray. White. Red. It tilts, blurs, rushes together in smears of color I can't understand.
Then I see them. The soldiers.
Their armor glints in the dull light, smeared with blood, their boots sinking into the filth. One steps forward. He lifts his sword. Then—
The sword plunges down, slicing through skin and bone with a wet, awful sound—like a boot sinking into thick mud.
The body jerks, but not because it's alive. It's just the force of the strike, the way dead things still move when you break them.
Then it happens.
A scream—high and sharp—erupts inside my skull, not from a mouth, not from lungs, but from somewhere deeper, somewhere wrong. It scrapes against the inside of my head like claws on stone.
Red. White. Black.
The body stays still, but I can hear it writhing. Howling. Shrieking without breath, without a voice.
The colors twist and break apart, folding into something jagged, something hungry.
I squeeze my eyes shut. It doesn't help. The screams aren't in the air. They're inside me.
Another sword. Another scream. The colors splinter, crack, fold into each other, twisting into something unbearable.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but it doesn't stop. The dead are wailing. And no one hears them but me.
I try to speak, to make it stop, but nothing comes out. My throat is raw, stripped down to nothing but a broken rasp. The sound is lost in the cold, swallowed by the stench of blood and rot.
A hand tightens around mine. Steady. Warm. Real.
"Come on," the man says. His voice doesn't waver. It doesn't shake. It stays, grounding me in the storm.
A deep, endless blue.
----------
Elias
I lead the boy to the pond near my cabin, though I don't know why. Every step feels like a mistake waiting to happen.
The smarter choice—the safer choice—would have been to leave him back in that pit. Or finish what the war started.
My hand lingers near my dagger as we walk. Just for a second. A habit. A question.
If I let him live, what am I inviting into my home? What am I risking?
He doesn't notice. He just follows, silent and empty, staring past me like I'm not even there. Like none of this is real.
I could still walk away. Send him off into the woods. Pretend I never saw him. But when I glance back at him, his thin frame trembling in the cold, those too-pale hands hanging limp at his sides, I realize something.
I don't feel fear. Not really.
I feel pity.
It sinks into my bones, heavier than any weapon I've carried. I let out a slow breath and push forward.
When we reach the water, I kneel beside him, but he doesn't even flinch. Just moves forward, kneeling at the edge, staring at his reflection. His hands dip into the pond, slow and mechanical, scrubbing the dirt from his face. Then they move to his hair.
And I see it.
White. Not the gray-white of age, not the sun-bleached strands of a starving child. Pure white. Like fresh snow. Like something that should not be.
My stomach twists. My fingers are on his shoulder before I even think. "Who are you?"
He blinks up at me, and for a second, I swear he looks through me. Past me. Somewhere far away. Then he just says, quiet and empty, "I don't remember."
A lie? A trick? My grip tightens. But those eyes—those lost, hollow eyes—are too honest. If there's a lie in him, he doesn't know it himself.
I take a slow breath. "Look," I say, forcing my voice steady. "I'm Elias. Should've said that earlier." I pause, searching his face for something—anything. "If you're afraid of me… don't be. I'm a soldier, but I'm not going to hurt you."
Nothing. No fear. No relief. Just that empty stare, like I'm not even here. Then, finally, he speaks.
"Your voice is very blue."
I stare. The words knock something loose in my brain, but I can't make sense of them. Blue? What the hell does that mean? Is he delirious? Lost in some dream he hasn't woken up from?
I don't know. But I know this—if anyone else sees that hair, that unnatural white, the boy won't live to see another sunrise.