The wind changed before dawn, bringing teeth.
Kaelen woke to ice rattling against glass like thrown gravel. The storm hadn't been due for another week—winter's final tantrum, the elders called it. But the sky had forgotten its own schedule, bruising black-purple in the space between one breath and the next.
Through his window, he watched snow spiral downward in patterns that hurt to follow. Not random—*purposeful*. Each flake traced runes in the air before settling, and the accumulating drifts formed shapes that shouldn't exist in nature.
Downstairs, Gerun's voice carried sharp with concern.
"Storm wasn't supposed to come 'til next week."
Kaelen pulled on his boots, the familiar weight of leather and wool feeling strange against skin that ran too warm. When he reached the kitchen, Gerun stood at the door with his quiver half-loaded, arrows scattered across the table like scattered bones.
"It came because I listened," Kaelen said quietly.
His mother's humming faltered—just for a moment—before resuming its threadbare melody. She stood at the stove, stirring porridge that had gone cold hours ago, the same circular motions over and over until the wooden spoon wore grooves in the pot.
"Storms don't listen to boys," she murmured without looking up.
Kaelen didn't argue. But through the frosted glass, the woods beckoned with patient certainty. Whatever lived beneath that ancient stump wasn't done with him yet.
*It's not the wind that howls. It's what rides inside it.*
---
By midday, the village had vanished.
Snow fell sideways now, erasing the world one landmark at a time. The well disappeared first, then the shrine, then the houses until only their chimney smoke marked where people huddled against the storm.
Kaelen stood at the threshold, wind cutting through his cloak like knives. His mother hummed behind him—nervous now, discordant—while Gerun paced the kitchen with predatory restlessness.
"Don't." Gerun's voice cut through the howling. "Whatever you're thinking, don't."
But the pull was too strong now. Not a voice but a *need*, deeper than hunger, more urgent than breathing. His feet moved without conscious direction, carrying him into the white.
"Kaelen!"
Gerun's shout vanished in the wind. Within three steps, the house became a memory. Within ten, the world narrowed to snow and the compass spinning wild in his chest.
He walked until his legs sank thigh-deep in drifts, until cold should have stopped his heart. But heat pulsed beneath his ribs, steady as a bellows, keeping the freeze at bay. Steam rose from his clothes in lazy spirals.
The trees parted around him like curtains. Beyond them lay the clearing—or what had been the clearing. Snow had buried the great stump, leaving only a pale mound that might have been natural. Might have been.
But the voice rose from beneath anyway.
*"Break. Burn. Become."*
Kaelen dropped to his knees in the snow.
---
Fire exploded through his spine.
Not heat this time—*agony*. Like molten metal poured down his throat and left to harden in his bones. His back arched, muscles seizing until he thought his ribs would crack.
The snow beneath him hissed into steam. He rolled onto his side, gasping, and watched his breath fog impossibly thick in the air. Each exhale carried sparks that should have died in the cold but instead danced upward like living things.
*"Too long sleeping. Too long buried."*
The words came from inside his skull, vibrating through his teeth until he tasted copper. His vision blurred, doubled, and suddenly he was seeing the clearing from above—a small figure convulsing in the snow while heat radiated outward in perfect circles.
His skin began to glow.
Not flame—*light*. Red-gold luminescence that leaked through his clothes like sunset through linen. Where it touched snow, steam billowed upward in columns that reached the canopy.
Above, a hawk circled. Kaelen watched it bank toward him, wings spread for landing, curious about the strange warmth below.
The light pulsed once.
The bird shrieked and plummeted, wings charred black, feathers scattered like burnt prayers. It hit the snow ten feet away with a sound like breaking sticks.
Kaelen tried to scream. His throat locked. Fire crawled up his arms beneath the skin, visible as golden veins that pulsed with each heartbeat. The pain built until it became something else—not agony but *transformation*.
*Change or die. There's no middle ground.*
His last conscious thought was watching the dead hawk steam in the snow, knowing he'd killed it without meaning to, without even trying.
Then darkness swallowed him whole.
---
"Not cursed. Just fever. Boys survive fevers."
His mother's voice drifted through the gray, broken by humming that had lost all pretense of melody. Kaelen tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt weighted with lead.
Cold pressed against his skin—snow packed into cloth and laid across his chest. But instead of cooling him, it melted instantly, water running between his ribs in warm rivulets.
"He's burning through everything I put on him," Edira whispered.
"He's not sick, Mother." Gerun's voice came from farther away, tight with something between awe and horror.
"Then what is he?"
Silence stretched between them like a held breath. Kaelen felt consciousness returning in slow waves, but kept his eyes closed, listening to the sound of his family fracturing around him.
"Look at his arms."
More silence. Then his mother's sharp intake of breath.
"Dear gods. What are those lines?"
Through slitted eyelids, Kaelen glimpsed golden threads running beneath his skin—not veins but something else, something that pulsed with its own light. They branched across his forearms like tree roots, fading as they approached his wrists but never quite disappearing.
"Magic," Gerun said flatly. "Real magic. The kind that doesn't ask permission."
His mother resumed humming, but the sound came out cracked now, desperate. Like she could sing him back to being merely human if she just found the right notes.
*Too late for that.*
---
Night came early, bringing silence and the taste of endings.
Kaelen sat up slowly, the world spinning around him like water down a drain. The fire still burned in the hearth, but its light seemed thin compared to the warmth radiating from his chest.
His family slept—mother in her chair, Gerun slumped against the wall with his bow across his knees. They'd stayed to watch over him, but exhaustion had claimed them both.
He padded to the washbasin on unsteady legs, steam rising from the water at his approach. In the dark surface, his reflection wavered like heat shimmer.
Then came still, and he saw what he'd become.
His eyes burned gold-amber now—not human brown but something fiercer, older. The color of flame at its heart, of coals on the verge of ignition. They held light even in darkness, casting his own face in subtle radiance.
He touched his chest where the fire lived. The skin was warm but not painful, and beneath it something vast and patient waited for his command. Power that would respond to his will, that had been sleeping in his blood since birth.
*I died out there. What got up wasn't just me.*
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it felt like truth finally spoken—like the ending of a lie he'd been living without knowing it.
Outside, the storm had passed, leaving the world wrapped in perfect snow. But something else moved in that whiteness, something drawn by the scent of change. It circled the village with predatory patience, testing boundaries, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Kaelen pressed his palm to the window. The glass fogged instantly around his fingers, but this time the heat-print didn't fade. It glowed softly in the darkness, marking the glass like a brand.
In the distance, carried on wind that tasted of copper and endings, something howled with a voice like breaking glass.
*It knows. Whatever's coming for us, it knows what I am now.*
He pulled his hand away, but the mark remained—five fingers outlined in light that would burn until dawn. A beacon in the darkness, calling to things that should have stayed buried.
Behind him, his family slept on, unaware that the boy they'd raised had died in the snow. What stood guard over them now was something else entirely—something marked in ash and crowned with fire.
Something that might not be strong enough to save them from what was coming.