//FLASHBACKS CHAPTER//
Set during their childhood in Arlithe, ages 10 & 8.
The streets smelled of rot and wet stone. Rain hadn't stopped in three days. A boy with frostbitten fingers and sharp eyes darted through shadows, clutching a rusted tin of stolen bread.
Lucien.
He ducked into a broken cathedral, heart pounding—not from fear, but from habit. In Arlithe, stillness got you killed. But what he found in the ruins that night changed everything.
There was another boy, curled against a collapsed altar, blood streaked down his arm where someone had carved a botched curse rune. His eyes were open—icy blue and unfazed by the pain.
Lucien approached slowly, suspicious.
"You dying?"
The boy shrugged. "Maybe."
Lucien's eyes narrowed. "Then die somewhere else."
But as he turned to leave, a cold hand grabbed his ankle. Weak, but fast.
"…Don't leave me."
Lucien hesitated. For a second. Then he swore under his breath and knelt down, pulling out a strip of his own shirt to bind the wound.
"Now you owe me."
"I'll pay back everything," the boy whispered. "Even if it takes forever."
Later that week, under a dead sycamore tree, they carved a rune into a coin Lucien had stolen from a noble's corpse—a fusion of their curse marks.
"If one of us forgets, the coin won't."
"And if the world turns against us…"
"We turn against the world."
They buried it in the roots of the sycamore and marked the spot with chalk and crushed coal.