Cassian walked back into the village with his hands laced behind his head, Azhur’s last words still turning over in his mind like a stone he couldn’t put down.
Your father has his reasons.
"What reasons," he muttered, kicking a loose pebble along the packed dirt road. It skipped twice and vanished into the tall grass at the path’s edge. He kept walking. The sun sat high and warm over the rooftops, and the whole village smelled of baking bread and woodsmoke ordinary, unbothered, ignorant of everything that had just happened under the trees. Too ordinary, after the quiet of the forest. He almost resented it.
"Cassian!"
He stopped mid-stride. A few paces ahead stood Zayd, arms crossed, one eyebrow already raised in the particular way that meant Cassian was in trouble for something. Beside him stood the girl Cassian had been quietly, hopelessly in love with since the very first day he’d seen her.
Aurelia.
Blue eyes. Pale skin. Hair so white it caught the light like fresh snow he’d never seen hair that color on anyone but her; even the old merchant’s had gone more of a dirty gray than true white. She was kind in the quiet, easy-to-miss way that made most people overlook her entirely, and painfully shy on top of it, which Cassian suspected was half the reason he’d fallen for her in the first place. He still didn’t fully understand the other half.
Her ability was ice not the soft frost children scraped off windows in winter, but hard, clear ice that even Cassian’s hottest flame had never once managed to melt through. Like him, she hadn’t mastered full control yet. Under pressure, the power still slipped between her fingers before she meant it to.
Zayd was her opposite in almost every way that mattered. Confident. Disciplined. He followed the village’s rules without complaint, which was more than could be said for Cassian on his best day, and the adults trusted him for it the way they never quite trusted Cassian. His ability was sand, and unlike either of his friends, he already held it with something close to full control could shape it, harden it into an edge, ride it, even fold himself into it for a few seconds at a time.
Cassian felt the familiar twist of envy whenever he really looked at him. Zayd’s power came easier. People liked him without him having to try. He never seemed to disappoint anyone, least of all himself.
"So, Cassian," Zayd said, breaking the silence with a slow grin, "are you going to tell us where you were this morning?"
"Training."
"Again?" Aurelia asked, her voice barely rising above the breeze.
He nodded. "I have to get stronger."
"Why?"
He looked at her like the answer should have been obvious. "So I can protect everyone. Like my father does."
"Protect everyone from what?" Zayd asked.
Cassian opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out. There was no war, no open enemy, no danger he could name and point to. The village had been peaceful for as long as he’d been alive.
"I don’t know yet," he admitted finally. "But when something happens, I refuse to be the one standing around useless."
Zayd’s grin widened, easy and sure of itself. "You worry too much."
"And you don’t worry nearly enough"
Aurelia laughed short, soft, gone almost as soon as it started and Cassian lost the rest of his sentence completely. He looked away fast, heat crawling up the back of his neck.
Zayd caught it instantly. "Are you staring at Aurelia again?"
"I was not!"
"Staring at me?" Aurelia blinked, genuinely confused.
"No! I wasn’t staring at anyone!"
Zayd started laughing outright now. "Just admit it."
"Why would I admit something that isn’t true?"
"Because it’s funny watching you deny it."
"It is not funny."
"You two are strange," Aurelia said, smiling despite herself, and for one second Cassian’s heart beat harder than it had any right to over something so small.
"Anyway," Zayd said, straightening up, the grin fading into something more urgent, "we didn’t spend the last hour looking for you just to watch you turn red."
"Then why did you come looking?"
Zayd sighed like the answer should have been obvious. "You seriously forgot?"
"Forgot what?"
"The Hunter Selection," Aurelia said.
Cassian stared at her. "...Today?"
"Today. In about five minutes, if we’re lucky," Zayd said. "We’ve been searching for you for an hour."
"Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner?!"
"We tried. You weren’t anywhere we looked turns out that’s because you were off in the trees again. Now we’re going to be late if we stand here arguing about it."
Cassian’s eyes went wide. The Hunter Selection the one day of the year he could stand in front of the whole village and actually prove what six months in the forest had bought him. In front of the elders. In front of his father. He clenched his jaw.
"Then let’s not waste any more of it."
He broke into a run, weaving between carts and startled villagers without slowing. Aurelia called after him. Zayd muttered something under his breath and followed at a pace that suggested he could have caught up whenever he liked.
Cassian rounded a corner too fast.
BAM.
He crashed straight into someone solid and hit the packed dirt hard enough to knock the wind clean out of him.
"Watch where you’re going, kid."
"Ugh sorry," Cassian managed, looking up.
He’d never seen the man before. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dark-skinned, black-haired, a face set in a permanent, humorless line. The stranger’s eyes dropped to him with a cold, measuring look that made the hair on the back of Cassian’s neck rise before he’d even scrambled to his feet. There was no time to think about it. He was already moving again, already halfway to forgetting the man entirely by the time he reached the square.
Zayd and Aurelia were waiting near the wooden platform when he arrived, breathless.
"Where were you?" Zayd asked.
"Took a shortcut. Ran into someone."
Zayd gave him a flat look. "You know I could’ve carried the three of us on sand the whole way, right?"
Cassian froze. "...You could’ve?"
"Yes."
"Didn’t think of that."
"Clearly not."
Aurelia’s laugh rang out again and then a deep bell tolled through the village, cutting every conversation off at once.
DONG.
Every head in the square turned toward the wooden platform. An old man climbed up onto it and raised one hand for quiet, his voice carrying easily over the gathered crowd.
"Eleven years old," he called. "That is the minimum age required to take the Hunter Selection this year."
Cassian looked around. Children had gathered from every corner of the village most of them clustered near eleven and twelve, a few older, taller, already standing like they belonged here more than the rest. Some looked thrilled. Most looked like they were doing everything they could not to be sick.
"Those who pass today’s Selection will be granted their Hunter’s license."
Cassian kept his eyes on the platform. He wasn’t chasing the title. He wanted the proof proof that would finally reach his father, proof that he could stand between this village and whatever might someday come for it.
"Candidates. Step forward."
Zayd went first, no hesitation in him at all. Aurelia followed, quieter, her hands folded tight in front of her. Cassian looked at them both for one long breath, then stepped up beside them.
While the square filled with nervous chatter and the low hum of a crowd bracing itself, far away, deep in the forest, two figures stood beneath the trees where no sunlight reached. The air between them sat tight as a drawn wire.
Azhur stood with his arms crossed, facing a tall, broad-shouldered man with dark skin and black hair, his face set in the same humorless line he would wear again in a few hours, when a boy running late for the Selection knocked straight into him in the square and never once thought to look twice.
"When will they arrive?" the dark-skinned man asked.
"Soon," Azhur said, eyes turned toward the distant rooftops of the village. "Before the Selection ends."
"You’re certain they’re coming."
"I’m certain."
"And Moros?"
"He’ll be handled."
"Then it’s settled." The dark-skinned man’s gaze drifted toward the rising smoke of cooking fires, toward the sound of a bell still fading on the wind. "This village and every soul living in it will be gone by nightfall."