The floorboards of the grand, empty house were old and unforgiving. Even with her bare feet, Elara could feel the faint tremor with each step, a tiny betrayal of her presence. She held the kitchen knife in her right hand, the cold metal a familiar weight. The moonlight filtering through the tall windows gave the blade a dull, silver gleam, not unlike the glint in her father's eyes when he was angry. He was angry often.
She was twelve years old and had been a ghost for as long as she could remember. The girl who had once been a small, bright thing was gone, replaced by a hollow shell filled with a quiet, burning hatred. It was a hatred that coiled in her stomach and tightened around her heart whenever a hand, any hand, came too close. A hatred that had started small, in the sting of her mother's slaps after a day of her father's rage, and had grown into a monstrous, living thing on the day her sister died. Elara had been three, her sister five, and the memory was a jagged shard of glass in her mind: her mother's furious face, her sister's still body on the floor, and a silence that had never left.
Tonight, the hatred felt different. It was a cold resolve. She crept down the long hallway, past the closed door of her eighteen-year-old brother, the golden son for whom all this was built. They had needed a boy for the family business, and they had gotten one. Elara and her dead sister had been the unfortunate, unintended by-products.
She reached her parents' bedroom door and pushed it open without a sound. The room was vast, dominated by the four-poster bed where her father lay. Her mother was a smaller shape next to him, her back to the door. Elara moved with a quiet purpose that belied her twelve years, stepping lightly over the Persian rug, the floorboards now silent beneath her feet.
She stood by her father's side, the moonlight catching the knife, and lifted her arm. The motion was a release, a single, decisive act to sever the string of her own suffering. In that split second, her mind was a blank slate, cleansed of the fear, the social anxiety, the phantom touch of her mother's hand. There was only the knife, the stillness, and the sleeping face of the man who had ruined them all.
But the silence did not hold. Just as she was about to bring the blade down, a piercing, deafening shriek erupted from everywhere at once. It was not a sound of this world. The very air around her seemed to tear apart. The moonlit room, the bed, the sleeping figures—all of it shattered like glass. There was a sickening lurch, a wrenching, twisting sensation that tore through her bones and her stomach.
And then, she was somewhere else.
The sky was a bruised, heavy purple, and thick, roiling clouds the color of soot hung low and menacing. The air was no longer metallic and crisp; it was heavy with a coppery scent that Elara recognized instantly. It was the scent of blood. Around her, people stood frozen in place, their faces pale and mouths agape but the ground beneath them was no longer the cobblestone of their town square. It was a patch of hard, black earth, soaked with a liquid that glistened crimson in the oppressive, unnatural light.
The shift had been without warning. It had come not with a beautiful, changing sky, but with a scream and a snap of reality. And in this new world, this terrible new world, there was no sign of safety, no hint of hope, only the shocking, undeniable horror of what they had been dropped into. Elara still held the knife in her hand, but it was no longer for her father. It was for herself, for the terrible truth that she had been spared from one hell only to be plunged into another.