“Corva.”

Her voice shook when she tested the name, standing in front of a dirty bathroom mirror. It was the first time she’d ever said it out loud. Her new name. As children in Fareburne, they never received names. The elders told them this was because they had to earn it. To earn their place in the bairro. The name was to be their rite into adulthood. The more Corva thought back on it, though, the more she believed that was just a glossy coating. Children are weak. They die easily. It’s easier to manage the loss when you haven’t taken the time to name it.

But Corva suddenly had a name. A gift from Avó. Her name.

She’d actually never known Avó’s real name. The old woman was always just “Avó” to her. How much more could Corva have learned from her, learned about her? Corva could feel the rims of her eyelids start to ache. She’d been crying all day and now was out of tears. All she had left were bloodshot eyes and a cavern of loss deep in her chest.

Corva was still in the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. She couldn’t remember if she’d brushed her teeth. She’d been running all through the prior evening and into most of the next day. She’d found this abandoned outpost about an hour prior and couldn’t bring herself to keep going. She had to stop. Had to grieve.

The bathroom was not functional in the least, but it’d been abandoned long enough that the smell was no worse than the rest of the place. She stood at the sink below the mirror, mostly out of habit. Some semblance of normalcy. Normalcy that she’d never know again.

The assault—the massacre—had happened so fast. The township had survived many raids before. The Umbrati. The Karui. Nomadic gangs. Neighboring villages, jealous of Fareburne’s growth. This, however. This was like nothing the town had experienced before. Systematic. Complete. Scores of people had fallen over dead before anyone even heard the first drone.

The Shadowfold.

They attacked from a distance using their cursed magical atrocities. The Touch was their tool of choice. A bastardization of Death’s Mark, a technique from the last of the Four, mutated and refined by people into a weapon even more ruthless and efficient. Corva shuddered just thinking about it. The Touch could be used remotely, channeled through vid to the intended target. The only reason anyone in Fareburne knew anything about it was because the Shadowfold posted footage of an attack on the satmesh. Images of those horrors were their way of recruiting more soulmancers to their cult.

The children of Fareburne were shown those vids as something the Fareburne council called an “Emergency Preparedness Protocol.” It was absolutely worthless. Horrifying as the vids were, nothing could’ve prepared them for what happened. On the vid, it never seemed like much. A drone would show up and a person would collapse, dead. Sometimes, their heads would snap back, like they’d been hit in the face by an invisible bat. Even when the Shadowfold’s field mages came in to finish off anyone they missed, it hadn’t seemed like much on the vid. Their movements weren’t large or showy. They were slight and specific. Just two fingers placed on a person or live vid of that person.

Corva never saw any of them when they came to Fareburne, though. She stayed under cover. Dodged the sounds of drones. Avoided reflective surfaces like the mirror she was in front of in this abandoned bathroom. She ran. She kept out of view. Even as the cluster of mages came through the North Gate, she lowered her head and ran. The mage’s black cloaks were mere flashes in her periphery. She never really saw any of them. But she hated them all.

Unfortunately, the hatred didn’t last. It was overshadowed by her feeling of isolation. Of loneliness. Corva had nothing. No one. She had a toothbrush and a name. The hastily stuffed backpack didn’t even register in her mind. She might’ve still been wearing it. She’d been on autopilot for about thirty-six hours, in a hyper-aware dream state where her only focus was on running and hiding. That automatic mode was wearing off and reality was crashing in.

She looked at herself in the grimy, cracked mirror, but all she could see were the faces of her family. Her friends. Her Avó.

“Corva.”

Her vision turned watery. As it turned out, she still had tears to give.