I can't remember the last time I truly slept. For two days, I've been hiding beneath Mother's quilt, the one she made when I was small—before the storm lived so loudly inside me. Every creak of the house makes me flinch. Every shadow feels like another glass creature waiting to strike.

  My fingertips sometimes spark when I don't concentrate. I rub my wrist raw trying to steady myself, the skin there becoming as frayed as the edges of my sleeves that I can't stop picking at.

  Mother changes the bandage on my shoulder without comment, her touch so gentle it breaks something in me. Her lips press against my forehead when she thinks I'm sleeping, and I feel the wetness of tears that aren't mine. I flinch away, unable to bear her kindness. I don't deserve it. Not after Lior. Not after the ridge.

  "You need to eat something," she whispers, setting a bowl beside my bed. The smell turns my stomach, not because it isn't good, but because normalcy feels like a betrayal. How can I eat when Lior will never taste anything again? How can I accept care when the ridge is still scorched from what I did?

  I turn my face to the wall.

  When Mira visits, she brings apples sliced the way we used to share them in the orchard—the three of us, before everything. She doesn't push me to talk. Just sits at the edge of my bed, her weight a comfort I can't admit I need.

  "The Council met yesterday," she says quietly, not looking at me directly. "They're scared, but Tomas spoke for you. Said you were defending yourself."

  I almost laughed, but it would come out wrong. Defending myself? The storm inside me had been waiting, hungry. It recognised that creature. It wanted the fight.

  "Did I?" I whisper, my voice rough from disuse. "Or did I just finally become what I was always meant to be?"

  Mira's hand finds mine, and I hate how I crave the contact even as I'm terrified of it. What if the lightning arcs through me again? What if I can't control it?

  "You're still Kaela," she says firmly, but her eyes tell a different story. She's watching me like I might shatter—or worse, explode.

  She's right to be afraid.

  At night, I stand at the window, watching the village I've known all my life. Lamps glow in windows that never needed light before. Parents call children in earlier. Nobody lingers near the ridge path.

  Fear lives in Ashgrove now. In everyone. Not just in me.

  And they're right to be afraid.

  That night, I woke gasping from dreams of Lior's body, of glass creatures shattering and reforming, of lightning that pours from my hands unbidden. The storm inside me churns, pressing against my ribs like it wants to break free. I press my palm flat against my chest, feeling the unnatural heat there.

  "Quiet," I whisper, though I don't know if I'm talking to the storm or myself.

  Through my window, I can see the spot on the distant ridge where it happened—where I unleashed something I can't take back. In the moonlight, the scorched earth is a dark stain against the hillside. A mark of what I am now. What I've always been becoming.

  I slip out of bed and stand before the small mirror in my room. My reflection is a stranger: hollowed cheeks, shadows beneath storm-grey eyes that shift like clouds before rain. I look haunted. I am haunted.

  Behind me, on the shelf, sits the carved wooden figure Lior made for my sixteenth birthday—a girl with her arms raised to the sky. "The storm-dancer," he'd called it, teasing me about my obsession with weather and how I always seemed to know when rain was coming. If only he'd known.

  If only I'd known.

  I touch the bandage on my shoulder where the glass creature cut me. The wound throbs with a strange heat, different from infection. Sometimes I swear I see flickers of light beneath the edges of the dressing. The storm responds to memory.

  I can't stay here. The thought forms slowly, reluctantly, but with growing certainty. Not just for my family's safety, but because something is happening to me—something tied to creatures and powers I don't understand. Ashgrove has no answers for me.

  And I've already cost them too much.

  I waited two more restless days. I tell myself I'm healing, gathering strength for the journey. But truly, I'm delaying because leaving means admitting that nothing will ever be the same. That I can never be the Kaela who danced at festivals and picked apples with Mira and kissed Lior beneath the harvest moon.

  That Kaela died with him.

  On the third night, I watch Mother set the table for dinner—two bowls, as always, though she knows I barely eat. She hums softly, a lullaby from my childhood, and its tenderness makes my chest ache. She's trying so hard to hold our broken world together.

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  I know then that my presence is only prolonging her pain. Every flinch when she tries to touch me, every bowl of food left untouched—I'm hurting her by staying. By pretending we can return to what was.

  After she falls asleep, I begin to pack. Not much—a change of clothes, the hunting knife Father left me, a waterskin. I gather herbs from Mother's stores—healing roots and fever bark. Things I might need where I'm going, though I don't know where that is yet.

  I write a note for Mother, my hand trembling so badly that I have to start three times.

  I'm sorry. I love you. I can't stay and risk hurting anyone else.

  The words are inadequate, but what could explain this? How do I tell her that my grief for Lior is tangled with fear of myself? That the storm inside me feels ancient and knowing, like it's been waiting for something all my life?

  For Mira, I find the carved orchard cup we used to share cider from during autumn harvests. Three sets of initials carved into the base: K, M, L. She'll understand what I can't say.

  I place it on her windowsill where she'll find it in the morning, along with a sprig of lavender from Mother's garden—our old signal for secrets shared.

  The storm stirs beneath my ribs as I slip out before dawn, restless and alert as if it knows we're running. My grey eyes catch a flicker of their reflection in a rain barrel—they're shifting again, the colour of storm clouds about to break.

  I take one last look at our cottage. Mother is there, safe in her dreams for now. By the time she wakes, I'll be gone. It's better this way. A clean break, like setting a bone that healed wrong.

  The village sleeps around me as I make my way toward the boundary stones. No one stirs, not even the baker who usually rises first. The world feels suspended, holding its breath.

  I'm almost past the orchard when I hear her.

  "You weren't even going to say goodbye?"

  Mira steps from between the rows of trees, her gold-brown hair loose around her shoulders instead of in its usual braid. She looks like autumn incarnate, like home itself.

  The storm inside me quiets for a moment, a painful reprieve.

  "I can't stay," I say, my voice cracking. "You saw what happened on the ridge. You saw what I did to—to Lior." The name sticks in my throat. "I'm not safe."

  "So you're just leaving? Where will you even go?"

  I shake my head. I don't know. Away. Somewhere, no one can find me until I learn to control this—if I even can.

  "Everyone's afraid of me now." I rub my wrist, feeling the storm coil tighter. "They should be."

  "I'm not," Mira says, but I see her glance at my hands, checking for sparks.

  "You are," I whisper. "And you're smart to be."

  She steps closer, and I step back. The distance between us feels vast and uncrossable, though we're barely an arm's length apart.

  "I found your cup," she says. "On my window." Her voice catches. "Just like when we were little and you'd signal for midnight meetings."

  I nod, unable to speak past the lump in my throat.

  "I knew you'd try to leave without saying anything. That's why I've been keeping watch." She gestures to a small bundle by the tree—a blanket and a water flask. "Three nights now."

  The thought of her waiting in the cold for me, knowing I'd run but not stopping me—it nearly breaks what's left of my composure.

  "Mira, I—"

  "Don't." She cuts me off. "Don't apologise for what you need to do. I understand. I just... couldn't let you go without—" She pauses, searching for words, then looks down at her hands.

  I notice she's twisting something between her fingers—a familiar woven pattern that catches the pre-dawn light.

  "Remember when we made these?" she asks softly, holding up the braided leather bracelet we created together when we were twelve. Three colours of leather: dark brown for me, golden tan for her, and a bright sun-yellow for Lior. We'd spent an entire afternoon perfecting the braids, giggling and planning our futures in Ashgrove, before we understood anything about storms or death or leaving.

  "We swore we'd always be friends," I whisper, the memory sharp enough to cut.

  Mira nods, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "We said these bracelets would protect us. That as long as we wore them, we'd find our way back to each other."

  I remember. We were so young, so certain of our place in the world. So unaware of what was sleeping inside me.

  "I lost mine," I admit. After the Harvest Festival, after Lior... I couldn't bear to look at it.

  "I know." She steps forward, and this time I don't retreat. "I found it. In the ashes, after... after that night."

  With gentle hands that only tremble slightly, Mira reaches for my wrist—the one I've been rubbing raw. I'm too stunned to pull away as she carefully ties the bracelet around it, right over the chafed skin.

  "A piece of before," she says softly. "Something to remind you of who you were. Who you still are, underneath it all."

  The kindness nearly undoes me. Something in my chest cracks open—not the storm, but something human and fragile. I want to tell her everything I'm afraid of: that the storm isn't just in me, it is me. That I felt alive on that ridge in a way I never have before. That I'm terrified of what that means.

  Instead, I let her secure the bracelet, and I memorise the freckles across her nose, the flecks of gold in her green eyes. This might be the last time I see her.

  "Find out who you are now," she says, her voice breaking. "And then come home. Promise me that, at least. Don't die out there before you understand what's happening to you."

  Her fingers linger on my wrist, warm against my pulse. For a moment, I let myself lean into that warmth, remembering countless summers in the orchard, winters huddled by the hearth, the three of us—and then just the two of us—connected in a way that felt unbreakable.

  Until it broke.

  I can't promise. But I nod anyway, because it's easier than saying all the things caught behind my teeth: that I'm sorry for bringing darkness to our village, that I still see Lior's body every time I close my eyes, that the storm inside me has been there my whole life, waiting.

  She steps back, arms crossed over her chest. Not stopping me. Letting me go.

  The weight of the bracelet against my pulse grounds me as I turn away from everything I've ever known: the orchard trees, the village rooftops, the people who loved me before I became whatever I am now.

  The storm in my chest hums, almost eager as we face the wilderness beyond Ashgrove. It wants this journey more than I do. It's been waiting.

  And that terrifies me more than anything else.