"You ever think about what it'd be like," I asked, "if we weren't marked?"
She tilted her head, considering. "You'd still be chasing cinnamon buns. And I'd still be following you into alleys I swore I wouldn't."
My laugh was louder than I meant. Strange. Alive.
"Admit it," I said. "You like the thrill."
She snorted and adjusted her cloak. "I like sleep. And common sense."
"Liar." I bumped her shoulder. "You've never had either."
"Not with you around," she muttered.
I grinned and poked her. "We're a terrible idea."
"We're your idea."
Serenya met my eye—and for once, let her wicked grin win.
I barked a laugh. She snorted. And just like that, we were gone—giggling like fools.
For a moment, we weren't rebels or marked. Just two girls in the heat, pretending we weren't hunted.
But pretending required forgetting. And Serenya had made damn sure I couldn't. She'd drilled the old temple prophecies into me until I could recite them half-asleep, half-starving, bleeding from the mouth. She'd been tasked with unraveling them before the priesthood sealed the archives—and she held onto them the way I held onto grudges.
We turned down a narrower street. The cobblestones here were older, uneven, weeds pushing through the gaps.
The version the temples taught went like this:
It began long ago—when the Veil, the membrane tethering our realm to reality, first thinned. It frayed as greed and malice rose—and one fae believed he could stop it.
A Master Fae thought he could drink in the world's pain—halt the Veil's unraveling by taking it into himself.
But sorrow is a hungry thing.
And the world feasted savagely.
When he drank too deeply of their suffering, it consumed him. His soul ruptured—scattering like glass shards. And the Veil tore with him.
Serenya and the priestesses who still had spines whispered that the Rupture didn't just break the world. It intensified and magnified duality itself.
The fracture didn't split the world.
It split us.
Our greatest enemy wasn't shadow. Or light.
It was the war between them.
Ever since, every fae-born child bore a mark—etched by the fracture itself. Luminar or Shadowmarked. Light or Dark. Blessed or cursed. Sovereignty or slavedom.
One mark decided everything. Where you slept. What you ate. Whether anyone would mourn you when you disappeared. But it was not destiny.
It was division weaponized.
And we were told to thank the blade that split us.
A gutter dripped somewhere above us. The alley smelled of wet stone and cook-fire grease. I stepped over a dead rat without looking down.
