The bird had no eyes.
It swung gently from a noose of twine, suspended from the crooked branch of a dead ash tree in the middle of the village square. No one claimed to have seen it put there, but everyone knew what it meant.
Someone had opened the gate again.
Marlen watched the bird sway in the morning wind, his fingers tightening around the handle of the empty water bucket. The world was unusually quiet for dawn—no carts, no dogs barking, no gossip spilling from windows.
He should have gone back inside.
But instead, he took a slow step toward the ash tree. Its bark was flaking, peeling like burned skin. The bird's feathers were slick with some kind of black sap, and something glinted beneath its belly—a piece of copper wire, twisted into a shape he didn't recognize.
Something old. Something *forbidden*.
He'd seen symbols like that once, in the book his uncle had buried beneath the floorboards after the war. The one with the name scratched off the spine and pages that burned cold when you touched them.
He had only been seven. But even now, the memory pulsed behind his ribs like a second heart.
A voice scraped behind him.
"You shouldn't be out here, boy."
Marlen turned slowly. It was Elder Hessa, her face a lattice of wrinkles and soot, eyes sharper than any of the knives in the butcher's stall.
"I only came for water," he said.
She nodded once. "Then you'll take it and go. That bird was not meant for you."
He glanced at the swinging thing again. "Was it meant for someone?"
Hessa's gaze drifted past him, toward the hills where the sky was beginning to crack with gold. "Not someone," she said. "*Something.*"
Then she pressed a rusted iron key into his palm and leaned close.
"They'll come through the sky first," she whispered. "When it shatters like glass. Don't look up."
And just like that, she walked away.