A week passed, and a fragile new normal settled over Frics's life. It was a life split in two, a day world and a night world that existed under the same sun.
His day world had colour again. With the money from his "lucky find," his mother had filled their pantry. The thin, watery soups were replaced by thick stews with actual meat, and the bread was fresh. His father had a bottle of the expensive medicine the doctor had prescribed, and while it wasn't a cure, the rattling in his chest subsided into a softer, less alarming cough. The brightest change was Elara's new shoes. They were second-hand, but sturdy and black, and she polished them every night until they shone. Seeing her hop and skip without fear of tripping on a loose sole was a quiet joy that made the weight of Frics's secret feel almost bearable.
His other world, the one that existed in the dusty twilight of the Zenith factory, also found its rhythm. The visits became a ritual. Frics would save a choice piece from his own improved dinner—a bit of sausage, a morsel of flaky fish—and present it to Zaneraya. She accepted these offerings with the same regal condescension, but he noticed she no longer waited for him to leave before she began to eat. It was a minuscule shift, a tiny crack in her wall of pride, but it felt significant.
Their conversations were stilted and brief. He'd ask questions; she would provide cryptic, dismissive answers.
"Where did you come from?" he'd asked once. "A place you would not comprehend," she'd replied, meticulously cleaning a whisker.
"Who cursed you?" "Someone with more power than sense."
She was a fortress of secrets, and he was a boy camped outside her walls, granted just enough access to keep him useful. He stopped asking so many questions. He fell into his role as purveyor and warden, and she, in turn, would occasionally grant him another piece of guidance—a hint that led him to a small cache of overlooked aluminum siding, or a whisper that told him which parts of the factory floor were dangerously unstable. His pockets were never empty anymore.
It was on a Tuesday afternoon, a week and a half after their bargain was struck, that their fragile routine was shattered.
The day was typical for Oakhaven: a thick, grey blanket of smog hung low in the sky, smelling faintly of sulfur and damp asphalt. Frics was sitting on an overturned crate, watching Zaneraya nibble at a piece of dried fish he'd brought. A strange stillness had fallen over the factory, the usual distant city noises seeming muffled and far away.
Then, the light changed. The grey fingers of sunlight pouring through the grimy windows dimmed, not into the soft gold of evening, but into a bruised, sickly yellow.
"That's weird," Frics muttered, looking up.
The sky outside was churning. The stagnant grey smog was being twisted and pushed aside by roiling clouds of an unnatural, deep indigo. The air grew heavy, charged with a strange electricity that made the fine hairs on his arms stand on end.
Zaneraya froze, the fish forgotten. Her head snapped up, her sapphire eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling. A low sound rumbled in her chest, but it wasn't a hiss of contempt. It was a guttural growl, deep and visceral, a sound of pure loathing.
"What is it?" Frics asked, a knot of dread tightening in his stomach. "Just a freak storm, I guess."
"That is no storm," she snarled, and the venom in her voice made him recoil. Her fur was standing on end, her slender body coiled like a spring, radiating a tension he had never seen in her before.
The wind began to howl, shrieking through the broken panes of glass and rattling the corrugated metal sheets of the roof. Then came the thunder. It wasn't the distant, rolling thunder of a summer storm. This was a sharp, percussive sound, like giant hammers striking a celestial anvil. It was rhythmic, a terrifying, deliberate beat: BOOM… boom-boom. BOOM… boom-boom.
"What is that sound?" Frics yelled over the din.
"It is their arrogance!" Zaneraya spat, her eyes still locked on the roof as if she could see through it to the heavens beyond. "The sound of House Thunderborn! They beat the sky like a war drum to announce their power, caring nothing for what they disrupt or destroy!"
House Thunderborn. The name landed in Frics's mind like a physical blow. He knew of House Illumine—her house, he now guessed—but this was the other side of the story. The ones she had defied. The source of her curse. The scale of his secret suddenly exploded, from a personal misfortune to a conflict between dynasties of beings who could beat the sky like a drum.
A flash of brilliant, searing light stropp-stropped through the factory, followed an instant later by a deafening crash that shook the very foundations of the building. Frics cried out and dove behind a pile of machinery as the smokestack just outside the factory wall exploded. Bricks and mortar rained down on the roof with a series of deafening impacts. The lightning hadn't been yellow or white; it was a violent, electric blue, the exact shade of Zaneraya's eyes.
When the shower of debris subsided, Frics peered out from his cover. His heart was jackhammering against his ribs. He looked for Zaneraya. She hadn't moved. She stood rigid in the center of the floor, staring upwards, her small form a beacon of defiant fury against the gloom.
The storm raged for another minute, the rhythmic thunder shaking the world, and then, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. The wind died. The unnatural darkness receded, leaving the factory in an eerie, ringing silence.
Frics slowly got to his feet, his legs trembling. "Are they… are they gone?"
Zaneraya didn't look at him. Her body was still tense, her ears flattened against her skull.
"For now," she whispered, and her voice was stripped of all its arrogance, leaving only a raw, chilling fear. "That was a warning. A display. They are searching."
She finally turned to look at him, her eyes dark with a terror that mirrored his own.
"They are hunting."