She talked for a long time. I gave her my last bowl of rabbit stew and my blanket, and she sat across from my small fire and talked, and I listened.

  The short version: the world was in trouble.

  The longer version involved a lot more detail that I did not enjoy.

  Lyra had studied at the Valdris Arcane College — the most prestigious magical institution in three kingdoms — until eight months ago, when it was destroyed. Not by enemies. Not by war.

  By something waking up.

  She called it Seraphine. Said the name carefully, like it tasted wrong.

  "She was human once," Lyra said, poking at the fire with a stick. "Four hundred years ago. A mage who sought immortality through — through a process that went very badly wrong. She consumed herself getting there. What's left isn't really a person anymore. It's hunger. Pure, ancient, tireless hunger."

  "Hunger for what?"

  "Everything. Life. Light. She doesn't burn things — she stills them. Turns them to ash. Plants, animals, people." She paused. "The ash keeps the shape of what it was. That's the worst part. You can still see them."

  I had a very bad feeling in my stomach.

  "She was bound," Lyra continued. "Four hundred years ago, at the end of a war called the War of Cinders. A mage gave their life containing her in the ruins of a city called Ash-Mordhen. Sealed her behind a barrier of compressed time." She stirred the fire. "The barrier had been decaying for decades. Everyone at Valdris knew it. They spent thirty years trying to figure out how to reinforce it."

  "And then eight months ago it failed," I said.

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  "It failed," she confirmed. "The College was in the way of her first expansion. Most of the senior scholars were killed before they even knew it was happening." Her voice was steady and her hand was not. "I survived because I was in the archive basement with three feet of stone over my head."

  She didn't tell me what it had looked like. I didn't ask. Her expression was doing it for her.

  "She's growing," Lyra said. "Expanding outward from Ash-Mordhen. The Obsidian Court — a group of humans who think she'll reward them for helping her — have been doing her work ahead of her. Burning supply routes. Destroying protective wards. Weakening everything in her path." She looked at me steadily. "At her current rate, she reaches full power in under a year. And once she does, she won't be stoppable."

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  She reached into her coat and produced a battered notebook covered in tiny handwriting. "Because I found something in the archive. Historical records, multiple of them, referencing a class of mage so rare that most scholars thought they were extinct." She met my eyes. "They're called Ashborn. And one of them is the only thing that can stop her."

  I looked at my wrist.

  I already knew what she was going to say. I could feel it coming the way you feel a storm before you see it.

  "The Ashborn don't generate power," Lyra said carefully. "They absorb it. They take destructive force in, hold it, transmute it. An Ashborn could drain Seraphine enough to re-bind her — not destroy her, she might not be destroyable — but contain her again." She tapped the notebook. "And every Ashborn in every historical record I found bore a mark exactly like the one on your wrist."

  The fire crackled between us. I stared at it.

  "I burned a granary," I said. "I'm not a hero. I'm a disaster."

  "You were fourteen, untrained, and no one had told you what you were," she said. "That's not a disaster. That's a tragedy, and there's a difference." She closed the notebook. "I'm not asking you to be a hero right now. I'm asking you to walk with me to a town called Cresswick, where a soldier named Dren Ashfall is waiting. He knows Seraphine. He survived her last expansion." She paused. "After that, what happens is your choice."

  Just to Cresswick. That was all she was asking.

  I looked at the Greywood. Three years of silence and rabbits and small fires and telling myself this was fine, this was what I deserved, this was the only safe arrangement for everyone involved.

  Then I looked back at her.

  "I know the back path through the forest," I said. "Avoids the main road entirely." I started kicking dirt over my fire. "I'll take you to Cresswick. After that, we'll see."

  Lyra Voss picked up her stew and finally started eating.

  "That," she said, "works for me."