“Elara,” he whispered, kissing her temple. “You must go with Mother. Father and I will find you when it is safe. I love you, little sister.”
Those were the last words her brother ever said to her.
Along with her mother, Elara ran into the woods, disappearing into the dense foliage. They hid away from the towering men who ransacked their village, leaving blood and bodies in their wake.
Droves of mountainous men came, swarming their tiny village, cutting down any who stood in their path.
Edmund had confronted them, his sword against two massive, scarred men wielding large battle axes.
Elara eavesdropped as her father told her mother what had happened to Edmund. The story still haunted her. The warriors felled her brother with ease. Her father had been too late.
Tears tracked down his cheeks as he told Elara’s mother, stroking her hair as she sobbed.
How he avoided the warriors’ eyes, hefted Edmund’s limp body and carried him into the safety of the forest before finding his wife and daughter had been nothing short of a miracle.
Eventually, the attackers left.
They took nothing, but the fear they caused lingered for years.
The entire village worried they’d return.
Yet, they never did.
Sometimes she wondered if she’d dreamt it. The only thing that reminded Elara they had been real at all was the hole in her heart where the memory of her brother shone the brightest.
After that day, Elara’s vivid dreams turned incessant, sometimes causing a heat to pulse under her fingertips, sparking like a newly caught flame.
While she told her mother of the dreams, she kept the fire stoking in her fingers to herself.
Even now, nearing her nineteenth summer, Elara had never told anyone about the crackle of energy buzzing beneath her skin.
Sometimes, it flashed like lightning, crackling across her skin and vanishing in a wisp.
Other times, it merely hummed, beating like a distant drum.
None of it mattered.
It did nothing but remind her of the loss of her brother, renewing the grief now fresh and twisted with the loss of her mother. Her father suffered too, the loss of his son and now his wife weighing heavily on his shoulders.
Elara had to be strong. Her father needed her to be.
Only when she was alone did she allow herself to feel the full weight of her mother’s loss, muffling her cries with her pillows so her father wouldn’t hear.
Most nights, she fell asleep after her eyes were puffy and her cheeks were tear-stained.
The next morning, Elara awoke to an empty house, surprised when she looked outside to see her father tilling the fields. A tight smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. Too many emotions stirred in her belly.
She let him be, afraid she might spook him if she interfered.
Instead, Elara followed a deserted path through the woods, one she had taken with her mother many times.
A dewy mist floated around her feet, sunlight streaking through the thick canopy of leaves.
Birds chirped from their boughs, and Elara rubbed her arms, an unnerving cold crawling up her spine.
Pressure pulsed in her fingers. She brushed them over her linen dress, the material scratching the sensitive flesh.
The thicket thinned the further into the woods she descended, eventually opening up to a valley overflowing with wildflowers.
