Magic was seven when the clouds smothered Chrome and everyone in it.

Seven, and just barely getting acquainted with the world.

For most of his life, he’d pushed it out of the way, tucked it away in a dark corner, never to be seen again. It often came back in flashes of memory, memories he would prefer to bury seven feet deep or more with a shovel and a prayer. Magic could never remember the specifics of when the trouble started, but he’d learned overtime to pinpoint it whenever the mere mention of it all made his blood freeze, his heart thud against his ribs, the mere effort of breathing difficult.

The morning of.

Disaster struck on a cold December morning.

Magic woke up to his mother requesting he accompany her on errands, his head foggy and muddled from a night spent huddled in his bed reading under poor firelight. He’d grudgingly gone to sleep with a fight; at his father’s request, Magic fussed about packing up the book he was reading. It was a gift from Mira, seeing as she was done with it and figured it would be better with him than her (she didn’t like reading books twice, which Magic found baffling). But sitting there on his bed—not even in it, on it—he slowly regretted his late nights spent by the candle and listened to his mother speak.

From what he was able to gather, they were in dire need of more flowers to pluck petals from—the brown and white speckled kestrians flowers and the small, yellow marigolds his mother kept pressed in a drawer had been drastically cleaned out by a previous fabric order. Amelia needed the flowers as soon as possible for some incoming orders, but didn’t want to leave him alone in the house.

He wasn’t keen on the idea of accompanying her; he quite liked shopping (it grew on him in the last few months), but what he really wanted was to keep sleeping. When he told his mother as much, she only chuckled and ruffled his hair.

“Once we’re done with errands,” she said, “you can come back up here and sleep—if you’re not too awake from the walk. We’ll even get you a flower, too, if you’d like.”

“A cantagrace?” he asked, slowly rising.

Amelia grinned. “If you want, we can get you a cantagrace in addition to the other flowers. And then, when we get back, you can take a nap.”

It was a fight he knew he wasn’t going to win.

So, to appease his mother (and out of a selfish desire to get something out of this trip), Magic agreed and accompanied his mother to the market. It was fairly crowded, a fact that he loathed; he didn’t like being in the same space as most of the townsfolk, not when he’d learned to recognize the backhanded compliments he’d heard to his face and behind his back. People, Magic learned fairly quickly, were often two-faced, petty, and quick to come to conclusions about things they didn’t know about. Little did people care to knock on his front door to speak with his mother or catch up with his father, who had been called early that morning to work a shift in the mines he wasn’t intended to work. Even rarer did people come to the door to invite Magic out.

Chrome was at its best when it buried its head in the sand, perfectly content to leave the southerners in the dust. And, to Magic, the more that people left him alone, the more he could pretend that people simply didn’t know who he was and that was why no one came by to talk with him, the easier life was.

Even if he felt compelled to stare at other kids kicking rubber balls to each other or giving each other piggyback rides running around the old, rickety watchtower in the center of Chrome. every time went out with his mother or father on errands.

Even if the thought of even asking to join made his stomach hurt and the glares they gave back made his heart pound and made him wish he were invisible.

It had not taken them long to arrive at the shop where they frequently bought flowers. Magic always loved the little store, even through its rotted wood porch, layered in copious amounts of fresh white paint to hide the decay, and its broken shingles, which were colored a sweet, baby blue. The overhang of the porch seemed to be the only thing intact at William Oreson’s boutique, and Magic sometimes wondered how a shop this old could look newer than the house he’d lived in for only seven years. And when he asked his mother as such, she laughed, a soft, willowy sound that he could never tell if it was out of genuine amusement or if she was just trying to tease him.

“It’s a popular store,” his mother said. “And Mister Oreson knows how to manage his prices.”

“Then why doesn’t he fix the house?” Magic asked, tilting his head up to look his mother in the eyes. She fixed him with a small smile, one that just barely tugged the edges of her mouth, before she crouched in front of him. Gently, she held onto his jacket sleeves.

“Mister Oreson is a very simple man. The house keeps him protected. That’s all he needs.”

Protected.

A simple word that carried so much weight.

He hadn’t known what to reply with after that, grudgingly allowing his mother to ruffle his hair in the way she usually did when teasing. Magic had at least learned to figure out those cues.

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And had things gone right that day, he would have accompanied his mother in the store, gotten the flowers they needed for dyes (alongside his own: a red-orange, carnation-like flower called a cantagrace that Magic adored because of how similar they were said to be to the color of Ori’s wings) and gone on their way. They might have even gotten lunch—the errand had woken him up tremendously and he was more than content to twirl the flower’s petals around between his palms, a pinwheel of fast-moving warm colors that made him grin from ear to ear.

He would have been, had a sound akin to the cracking whip of thunder not pierced the skies of Chrome and rolled the ground beneath his feet.

Magic couldn’t will his feet to stay in one place; the earth trembled and rocked, depriving him of balance until he nearly toppled into his mother’s elbow, arms locked around her knee as she took a single step forward.

Encroaching upon Chrome like vicious, prowling predators were clouds the color of midnight; thick, dense walls of smoke swept across the sky in a matter of moments. Each time Magic blinked the dark slid its tendrils further through the town, forcing the sky to shed its skin of blue and don a coat of black.

Sirens wailed, the telltale sign of something going horrifically wrong in the northern mines and it was all Magic could do to keep one hand on his ears, the other shoved against his mother’s leg in a desperate attempt to drown out the sound.

The sun’s beams were useless. Small rays managed to pierce the murk but it wasn’t nearly enough for salvation as small specks of soot sprinkled over the town like a dusting of snow, painful to the touch and suffocating to breathe. They coated Magic’s scalp, burned his face and nose when he breathed, stung his eyes as he blinked them away with tears.

Not a single soul in Chrome moved.

Until the realization struck, and they charged.

People stampeded towards their home like a herd of wild animals, pushing and shoving to get through the crowd towards safety. But Magic’s mother stood there, bearing the brunt force of people barging past.

He didn’t know when he’d gotten separated from his mother in the swarming crowd, only that in one moment he was clinging to her for stability. The next, he was curled on the dusty roads of Chrome surrounded by a suffocating heat that made him gasp for air. Shoes kicked into his side, stumbling over him. Others stepped on his fingers, his feet, strands of hair. People were screaming for loved ones, some desperate, others in despair.

And through it all, Magic was burning.

The dust fell with more urgency this time, coating the ground in a dirty imitation of diamond dust. Sulfuric scent burned his nose and mouth and he shrieked, hoping—praying—that his mother would find him. He didn’t want to be left behind. He couldn’t be.

She wouldn’t leave him here.

But she did.

Magic didn’t know how long he was stranded for in the tumultuous sea of stampeding bodies, only that he squeezed his eyes shut and sobbed prayers into the dust beneath his lips, hoping that it would be enough for his mother to find him.

When the prayers faltered, he turned to screams.

When the screams failed, he turned to pleas.

And when the pleas, too, invariably failed, Magic began to doubt if there was anything that could find him. Not even the shiny, small phoenix with its glowing feathers, its siren song, its bright, beaming light.

Until something snagged him from under the arms and dragged him kicking and screaming through the mass of struggling bodies. The further away from the ground Magic got, the harder it was to breathe. He struggled and kicked when a soft voice hissed in his ear, hot and uncomfortable.

“Keep moving,” said his mother. “Don’t look up.”

Which, Magic figured, was a useless thing to say. There was nowhere else to look aside from at the shoes of other citizens trying to get to their homes. Occasionally, Magic thought he spotted the still forms of other people—children, teens, elderly—caught up in the struggle, curled on the ground.

It didn’t occur to him until a few nights later, when the nightmares came to plague him—monthly at first, then gradually increasing until terrors became commonplace and nights without them were a blessing rarely seen—that he could have been one of them had his mother not scooped him up from under his arms and dragged him away from the screaming, the crying, the painful, agonizing smoke and behind closed doors.

And only when the doors closed and he fell to his hands and knees shaking and shuddering from expelling the taste of ash on his tongue did Magic realize that it was just him and his mother.

A realization that Magic felt like a closed fist around his chest.

There wasn’t much he could think to do in that moment, flailing and screaming against his mother’s shoulders as she wrapped her arms tight around his body and nearly tackled him to the ground to prevent him from disappearing back into the night—the night that was noon—aside from scream. In pain. In frustration. In grief.

His mother would later point out to him that they’d talked about these calamities before. About how fickle the mines were and how dangerous it was for his father to be there every day.

But the knowledge didn’t make living through it any less painful. It didn’t make the burning go away and it sure as hell didn’t fill the forming gap in Magic’s chest that nestled in the same area as his heart, a tiny little viper eating away at something precious. Because if he could have traded the emptiness in exchange for not feeling the burning on his skin every time his mother tapped him on the shoulder, cupped his face with her hands, kissed him on the forehead, he would have.

It was a stupid thought, he realized, to wish something for something that couldn’t be given. It never stopped him from trying—Stars, he tried every morning and every night running prayers inside of his head, lacking confidence to put them to words.

When Ori never came, he just wished harder, looked harder, hoping (half in spite and half in desperation) that the bird would just show up and relieve him of this hell.

She didn’t, of course.

Not when the mines first collapsed and plunged Southern Chrome into a pitch black void that burned from the inside out.

Not when the deceased miners were given their wake in the hopes that they would return to the light as they were brought into this world—at least that was what Magic was taught growing up.

As illumae vi nascita. Mas illumae, vi rivita.

Said by every soul like a mantra.

From light we are created. To light, we return.