The first breath she ever took was drawn through blood.
Thick and metallic, it coated her tongue and filled her lungs as if the world itself had rejected the air and offered gore in its place. She did not drown—though she should have. She emerged.
From a still, crimson puddle seeping into the roots of a shattered ash tree, she rose naked and slick with congealed life. The blood steamed in the cold. Around her, the forest whispered—not with wind, but with voices. Hollow moans tangled in the trees, some plaintive, others enraged, some weeping without form.
She blinked.
Above, the canopy formed a broken cathedral of skeletal branches. The sky beyond it was bruised purple, streaked with smoke. Not fire. Not light. Just smoke, curling without source.
She looked down at her hands. Pale. Trembling. Small scars ran along her forearms, too precise for accident, too fresh to be forgotten. She didn't remember them. She didn't remember anything. Only the word—
Redborn.
It echoed in her mind—not spoken, not heard. Given. Like a name, or a curse. She didn't know which.
Something moved in the trees. She turned sharply, knees buckling, barely steady on her feet. The world felt too big, too loud, too much. Leaves rustled without breeze. A pair of glowing eyes hovered in the gloom—no body, no breath, only presence.
"...alive..." whispered a voice—dry and papery, like dead leaves ground underfoot.
A flicker of blue mist passed near her shoulder. Another voice, more forceful, rose behind it: "Not alive. Born wrong. Blood-born."
More spirits emerged, their forms half-seen in the mist—humanoid, distorted, untethered from the rules of flesh. The dead. Watching. Judging.
She took a step back, but the blood beneath her feet pulsed.
Thrum-thrum.
It beat like a second heart, answering a rhythm she hadn't realized she carried in her chest. Her head spun. Her veins itched. A warmth—no, a call—crept through her fingers, rising through her core. She didn't know what it meant, but it was hers.
Then, a scream pierced the forest—human, desperate. Not spirit.
She turned toward the sound instinctively, legs gaining strength with each staggering step. The scream came again—closer now. A flicker of firelight danced between the trunks.
She ran.
Branches clawed at her bare skin. Brambles cut her ankles. The chill bit deep. Still, she ran—because something in her rebelled at the sound of pain. Some inborn instinct screamed that suffering should not be left unanswered.
She burst into a clearing.
A figure writhed on the ground, surrounded by three others in black, their hands glowing with sickly red runes. One held a skull carved with silver glyphs. Another raised a knife crusted in dried marrow. Ritual. Blood magic.
They turned toward her as she crashed into view.
"She's here," one of them hissed, voice thick with reverence and fear.
"Impossible. The Fool said she would be found in flame, not forest."
"She is blood. Look at her."
All three stared. Not at her nudity, nor her terror—but at the way her veins shimmered faintly, pulsing in rhythm with the puddle she'd risen from. Her blood sang, and they heard it.
"She doesn't even know what she is," the tallest one said, licking his teeth.
The one with the skull advanced.
"The Redborn... we thought it a myth. Yet here you stand. You who bled a god. You who unmade the Ninefold Pact. You who—"
"I don't know you," she rasped, voice hoarse with first use. "I don't know anything."
The skull glowed.
"No matter. The Fool will."
He lifted the skull high.
Instinct surged.
She didn't think. Her hand rose and closed into a fist.
The man screamed.
His eyes boiled red. Blood sprayed from his nose and ears. The skull dropped. He fell, twitching, smoke curling from his mouth. The others shrank back in sudden terror.
She stared at her hand. Trembling. Glowing.
The blood had answered.
The remaining necromancers turned and fled into the woods, their ritual abandoned. The man on the ground—once their captive—gasped for breath, then began to crawl away in silence, not even sparing her a glance.
She stood alone once more, surrounded by silence and the faint glow of her own pulse.
Redborn.
The word echoed again, deeper now. It didn't sound like a name anymore.
It sounded like a waring