"I..."

Just before dawn, the sky holds the densest black.

People say it’s so dark you can’t see your hand; what it really means is you can’t even lay hold of your simplest self—only fog and loneliness.

Inside the dark, dissolved by the dark, she couldn’t feel she existed.

Stand there long enough, and even the steadiest heart gets a hairline crack named self-doubt.

No wind, so tree shadows didn’t sway, so no leaf-to-leaf whisper.

The only rustle was Aerin crouching by a root, her clothes rasping the rough bark like moth wings against wood.

So tired, she thought, head bowed.

“Me?”

She startled at the sound of her own voice, escaping on its own—so hoarse it scraped.

It was a well running dry, and the wellman still yanked the rope, trying to wring out a few last drops.

Why think of that—her brief confusion flashed and went, drowned by a tide of fatigue.

Alone, in a silence that rang like ice, Aerin felt small things stirring inside her—right in the heart’s hollow, down where the soul is thick. Little claws flexed, eager to crawl out, to break skin and breathe night air.

She kept those things pinned in the body’s dimmest corners, tucked away with care, unseen by the World—not even by the closest ones, not even by Master Bai.

No one had ever seen them.

She broke her head and kept her face blank, hiding them in every nook no stranger could glimpse, because they were ugly, shameful, sickening—and yet impossible to throw away—little things.

They didn’t fit the role of the Hero King. They didn’t even match the face Aerin showed the world.

That wasn’t allowed. The “Hero King” mask had long since fallen. But the mask called “Aerin” could not be allowed to shatter.

So—

“So—” Aerin bit hard on her lip, hugged herself tight, eyes shut. A chill voice threaded through clenched teeth. “No. Don’t—”

Her hands balled. Nails bit pale flesh. Bright blood welled and dripped onto the black grass like red rain.

Her breath stumbled. Pain scrawled her face. “Don’t.”

“Don’t—say it.” The girl shook, fighting the surf that kept ramming out of the dark, all those whispers and hissed words.

They were what she had wanted to spit out in the past, in the now, in whatever future—more times than she could count.

Words of defeat, of despair, of pain, of cold, of collapse.

When her talent showed nothing. When her sword wouldn’t come free. In the arena while a sea of heads shook and sighed. When Master Bai beat her as if swatting dust. When she faced Old John’s corpse. When she drew her blade and killed seventeen Templar Knights. When she entered the Witchwood Forest. When she faced the Black-Iron Knight again. When Lustrous blew her like a sudden wind into this empty dark.

Too many times. Too many words.

Those grievance-heavy, anger-hot words were iron thorns, clumped and coiling up from her inner abyss. They crawled up her esophagus, reached her throat, rolled across her tongue, tapped her teeth—then, at the last instant, she ground them to shards, swallowed them back down. She gulped them with blood and sourness, sent them into her belly, buried them in the same abyss.

Once was fine. A year was fine. Even ten years was fine, she had thought. Maybe she could keep going like this—until the Demon King descended, until the World collapsed. Then it would all end. Then she could let go.

But in the end, she couldn’t outpace fate.

In just a few days—these days of the Demon King’s advent—Aerin had gone through too much.

Happiness and Misfortune both piled so high they felt ready to spill, ready to drown her.

To forge a piece of metal, you send it between blaze and frost, over and over—and to destroy it, the rule is the same.

To destroy a person, the rule is the same.

At last, in this place where she was wholly alone, Aerin heard it: crack, crack, crack.

A shell that seemed hard but was truly brittle, flowering with fractures.

It was the omen that “Aerin the Hero King” was about to break.

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