Chapter 2 – The Stranger in the Smoke
The fires were still burning when Nara finally turned away from the ruins.
Her body felt like stone — heavy, unyielding — but her mind was a storm she couldn't control. Every image, every sound from the attack clung to her. The laughter of the Dark Knights as they cut people down. The sharp clang of steel meeting flesh. The sight of neighbors she had grown up with lying in the dirt, their eyes open and empty.
She didn't know where she was going. She only knew she couldn't stay.
The road out of the valley wound into the hills, the same hills where she had gathered herbs that morning. The path she took was half-familiar, half-strange now that everything she had known was gone. The air grew cooler as she climbed, and the smoke thinned, but the silence remained — an unnatural silence that made the hair on her arms rise.
It was near dusk when she saw her.
At first, Nara thought it was nothing — a shadow stretching across the path in the fading light. But then it moved. A tall figure stood where the road curved, half-hidden by the drifting smoke from the burning village below.
The woman was draped in a deep crimson cloak that caught the dying sun and shimmered like liquid fire. Her face was covered by a black veil, fine as spider silk, and her posture was too still, too perfect, as if she were carved from something other than flesh.
"You run," the woman said, her voice low and warm, yet threaded with something that made Nara's stomach tighten. "But the shadow runs faster."
Nara froze, one hand going instinctively to the hunting knife at her belt. "Who are you?"
The woman tilted her head slightly, as though studying Nara the way a hawk studies prey. "Someone who knew this would happen." She took a slow step forward, and though the movement was unhurried, it made Nara's heart beat faster. "And someone who knows what you will become… if you survive."
Her words were strange — heavy with meaning, but impossible to grasp. "What do you mean?" Nara asked, her voice sharper than she intended.
The woman's eyes glinted faintly beneath the veil. They were a molten gold that caught the last light of day, holding Nara in place. "Vengeance is a fire, child. It can warm you… or devour you whole. Which will you choose?"
Nara swallowed hard. She wanted to demand answers, to ask how this stranger knew about the attack, why she seemed to be waiting for her here. But before she could speak, the woman stepped sideways — and was gone.
Not gone in the way of someone walking away.
Gone, as if she had been swallowed by the smoke itself.
Nara stood frozen, her fingers still gripping the handle of her knife. She didn't know whether to be afraid or to follow.
Instead, she kept walking, each step carrying her deeper into the hills, away from the only home she had ever known.