Just after sunrise

Crescent Hollow

The screaming was real this time.

Ayla had been sitting, meditating in her Spot when it started. She’d been hearing the screams so often lately—in her visions, in her dreams—that it took her a moment to realize these were different.

She shot to her feet and took a step towards the village… then froze. What she saw through the trees was chaos. Like the screams that had shaken her from her peaceful repose, it took her a few seconds to fully grasp what she was witnessing.

The village was overrun with strangers. Strangers wearing black and red metal. The Sisters of the Twin Moon—her people—were the source of the screaming. They were racing and fleeing without an apparent sense of direction or purpose, the strangers giving chase.

An elderly woman named Geleria, too old and weak to run, began casting a spell. A hex or a curse, Ayla guessed. But even the simplest hex took time to cast, not to mention the ingredients needed for maximum efficiency—ingredients Geleria clearly hadn’t been carrying around the village with her. And even if she did manage to get the hex off, what good would a curse be against someone standing right in front of her, ready to strike?

A pair of strangers—Ayla guessed they had to be some sort of soldiers—stopped in front of Geleria and slapped her hands, breaking her concentration and ruining the spell. She said something Ayla couldn’t make out from this distance and spat in one of their faces. The soldier’s back was to Ayla so she couldn’t see his reaction, at least not on his face. What she could see was a blade suddenly extend from his wrist.

Time slowed down. Ayla watched with helpless horror as the soldier lifted his blade, and with one swift, smooth motion, ripped it across Geleria’s throat. A fountain of blood gushed into the air; Geleria’s already limp body crumbled to the ground.

Ayla hurried over to a tall oak and took cover behind it, peering cautiously around the trunk. Her instincts screamed for her to go the Sister’s aid. But how? She was a small teenage girl incapable of magic. What could she even do?

The soldiers’ numbers continued to grow as more poured into the village. Ayla watched helplessly as more of the Sisters attempted to fight back, chanting at rapid speed, their hands and fingers twirling through the air. With better spells in their arsenal than poor old Geleria had, a few managed to conjure up some hastily-made illusions. But hasty meant weak, and they were far too easy to see through. The soldiers passed right through the illusions without so much as a pause.

Then Ayla saw a pair of her sisters, Ferdy and Fay, and a new kind of horror overtook her.

They were running, screaming, about a half dozen soldiers on their heels. Her mother followed, carrying a cast iron pan and swinging it wildly at the soldiers. She struck one on the side of his helmet. He stopped short, turning on the woman, and curled his hand into a fist.

Then Ayla saw one of the most bizarre magics she had ever seen. A shining sheet of metal extended from the soldier’s bracer—the same bracer that had held the other soldier’s blade and that all the soldiers wore—and quickly collapsed onto his clenched fist. The metal seemed to almost melt onto his fist as it fell, encasing it. His fist now glinted of metal and seemed nearly double the size it had been just moments before.

When he struck her mother in the face—a single blow—Ayla heard a sickening crack that had to be the woman’s skull breaking. Like Geleria had barely a minute earlier, her mother slumped to the ground. Dead.

A memory—long forgotten—surged forward, hammering at Ayla’s heart. She was a very young child, barely more than a baby, being held in her mother’s arms. Her mother was looking down at Ayla and smiling, humming a peaceful lullaby. Despite her deviant red hair, she had been loved. At least, at first. But only by her mother. Outside of her home, she had been looked at with contempt and revulsion.

The other Sisters hadn’t held back their disgust to spare her mother’s feelings. They spoke plainly about the aberration she had born, their cruel words laced with enmity and hostility. Her mother had always been fierce—one of the strongest members of the Sisters—both in magic and influence. A leader. But the hate and vitriol thrown at her child had eaten at her. Corroded her. As the months passed, she smiled less and less at little Ayla. Stopped singing to her entirely. Held her not at all.

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When, exactly, her mother had begun to outright agree with the Sisters and had begun treating Ayla as nothing other than the freak she was, Ayla couldn’t be sure. It had grown slowly, the love gradually draining completely from the woman. Soon, the only mother Ayla could recall was the cruel woman she had become.

Ayla wept. Not for the mean old woman lying dead in the square. But for the mother who had once loved her.

The screaming went on. Ayla didn’t want to look any more, wanted to somehow just will herself invisible or disappear into the dirt. She covered her eyes. Maybe if she stayed here, behind these trees, they wouldn’t find her. They’d finish their horrible work and just move on.

Who were they? Why were they doing this?

Ayla knew so little of the world outside of Crescent Hollow. She understood she lived in a place called Brightholme, but little else. These interlopers could have been anyone. Strangers from far away, or attackers from a nearby city. It mattered little. They were killing her people all the same.

A fresh scream hit her ears, somehow familiar. Ayla pulled her hands from her eyes and hazarded another look around the oak.

It was Po. She was on her belly, crawling away from a soldier who was slowly, deliberately stalking her. Ayla got to her feet, every part of her screaming to go help her cousin, the only one who had ever treated her kindly.

Ayla got to her feet and took a step away from the big oak, ready to go to Po. But instead of her feet moving forward, Ayla found them frozen in place. Her knees, stiff. Her body trembling all over.

Her mouth opened, as if to scream. “Stop!” she would shout. And the soldiers would stop and they would leave and Po and the rest of her sisters would live and come to love her for saving them all.

But instead, Ayla merely fell to her knees and scurried back behind the tree. Tears flowed freely, and she couldn’t bear the thought of watching her cousin die. But that somehow seemed one betrayal too many. So she looked around the tree again, watched as the soldier finally caught up to Po.

The young girl screamed in pure primal terror and seemed to look directly at Ayla. There was no way Po could see her from so far away, or through the tree cover. But she was the only one who had any inkling that Ayla had a “Spot” somewhere out here. And whether Po could see her or not, Ayla felt sure it was her she was reaching out to. Begging her to come to her aid. To be her savior.

But that aid never came, and Ayla was no savior. Instead the soldier went about his work, quickly and efficiently, and Ayla’s young cousin screamed no more.

After that, things began to quiet down. The soldiers walked confidently around the village and into the Sisters’ homes, all with practiced purpose. Ayla saw more of those blades swing down towards women laying on the ground, either delivering the coup de grace or just confirming their deaths.

The soldiers were thorough. Their massacre was total.

Ayla spotted a woman, unarmored, walking among the soldiers with casual ease. The soldiers were deferential to her, stepping aside or standing straight as she passed. The woman seemed not to notice them at all, instead focusing on the carnage around her.

Ayla had never seen anyone like her before. Her hair was long and high and utterly out of control, streaked with an array of colors Ayla hadn’t known could exist in human hair. She had two deep red lines of paint streaked beneath her eyes; the paint alone suggested there was something dangerous about this woman.

And her dress was really pretty.

Ayla shook her head, disgusted with herself, recognizing she had just had the single stupidest thought of all time. A “pretty dress”? In the midst of all this death and destruction?

But she couldn’t deny the strange juxtaposition this woman presented. Fierce, menacing, some kind of leader… and wearing a pretty black dress with frilly laces and over-sized bows.

The woman continued to study what remained of the village. Ayla was captivated by her, couldn’t take her eyes off of her. Whoever she was, she had a magnetic quality about her that demanded Ayla’s full attention.

The woman suddenly stopped. She stood perfectly still, her brows furrowed in concentration. She looked like a wild animal who had just picked up the scent of her prey.

Ayla immediately and inexplicably felt exposed. She was well-hidden, she knew. And so far none of the soldiers had shown any interest in the woods that surrounded the village. But she couldn’t shake the feeling… the feeling that the scent this woman had just picked up was her own.

Ayla ducked farther behind the tree and slid down, her back against the trunk, until she was laying on the ground. She panted, terrified, sure that somehow, some way, this woman had found her.

But she was just being paranoid, she thought. With everything that had happened in such a short period of time, it was understandable. There was no way the woman could have seen her.

On her stomach now, Ayla hazarded another look around the tree. And she saw the woman, smiling and striding confidently straight towards her.