Her small fists clenched until her knails drew blood, and she could taste copper in her mouth. "What does that even mean?"
But she already knew. Deep in her bones, in the part of her that somewhat remembered her mother's screams and her father's absence, she knew she was either thrown away or cast out.
The Seer's smile didn't reach her eyes—couldn't reach them, for they had seen too much suffering, too much death, to ever truly smile again. "The kind that breaks you into so many pieces, you'll forget what wholeness ever felt like. The kind that leaves you begging for death but never grants you the mercy of it."
That night, alone in the seer's hut with only the sound of wind through the bones hanging from the rafters, she cried until her tears ran dry.
Her sobs echoed off the walls like the cries of a wounded animal, and when she finally fell asleep, her dreams were filled with red eyes and the sound of her family's dying screams.
