Mara stared into the clay cup, her reflection distorting in the clear water that shouldn't be there.
Again.
It happened every damn morning.
Before bed, she would put the empty cup on her windowsill. She would double-check that it was dry. And without exception, each sunrise...
Full.
"Still at it?" Jarek leaned against her doorframe, his newly tattooed arms crossed. The dagger mark on his palm seemed to pulse as he nodded at the cup. "Maybe stop drinking mysterious magic water?"
Mara stirred the liquid.
"It's not just water."
Something glowed on the surface as though it was waiting for a cue.
A child with silver hair twisting light threads.
One huge thorn was carved into a door.
Her body floating in a void without stars.
As she gasped, the vision disappeared, and she splattered droplets on the floorboards.
Tiny flowers bloomed where they landed and quickly dried to ash.
Jarek's tattoo flared black.
"Okay. That's new."
…..
At midnight, Ethan was startled awake by his silver thread.
It was not a soft tug.
The drag of a fishing hook.
"Damn it—!" Before he could even put on his boots, the thread pulled him through his window, across the moonlit ruins, and directly into
The hand extended by a child.
The boy was no more than seven years old, and his eyes and silver hair were glowing faintly.
Ethan took a step back.
Pupils shaped like tiny hourglasses.
The boy chirped, "You're late," as though Ethan had forgotten a tea appointment instead of being magically abducted. "The others started weaving without you."
The air trickled behind him, and five more kids were sitting cross-legged in midair, their tiny fingers weaving intricate knots out of strands of sparkling light.
One girl looked up.
Her smile showed too many teeth.
"We're fixing time," she said so charmingly. "You broke it."
…..
Jarek's arm burned.
He tore off his shirt as the dagger-tattoo leaked inky black strands up his bicep, forming words in a language that itched inside his skull.
"The Ravenscroft remembers what the world forgets."
Someone knocked on his door.
Not a knock.
A scratching.
The woman standing there took his breath away, not because she was attractive but because she was not fully present.
Flickering between flesh and tree, bark-skin swirled with fireflies in hollow eyes.
She touched his sobbing tattoo with a thornless rose.
"The memories of your family are buried in your blood," she muttered. "Dig them up before the Thirsty King digs you."
The rose turned to dust.
So did his doorframe, where she'd touched it.
…..
Mara was haunted by what the threadcutters had said.
"It got messy when you died."
Desperation overcame caution as she gazed into the cup once more.
"Show me."
The water became as thick as blood.
After that, she remembered.
Dain's dagger slides between her ribs.
Ethan's scream as her body hit the stones.
The cup was catching her last breath.
She brought her fingers to her unmarked chest and gasped back to the present.
"But I didn't die," she whispered.
The clay cup across the room cracked slightly, allowing one drop of black liquid to spill out.
It formed a word on the table.
"YET."
…..
Ethan's silver thread took him farther into the ruins than anyone had gone in centuries.
Behind him, he could hear the children's voices.
"The first vessel is waking!"
"The threads are tangling!"
"Hurry, hurry!"
Then he saw it.
A door.
It was not stone or wood, but a living thorn twenty feet high, its surface pounding like a heartbeat. No handle. No keyhole. Only a faint outline through which something or someone could move.
The boy with the silver hair appeared next to him, his small hands pressed against the thorny door.
"It's yours to open," he said solemnly. "But once you do, you can't unsee what's inside."
Ethan extended his arm.
The thread on his wrist screamed.
And somewhere, in the dark between seconds, a thirteenth child laughed.