Thornridge.

  Even now, the name still feels warm in my chest.

  It sat between two long hills where the pine trees grew thick and tall, their shadows stretching over the wheat fields whenever the sun began to fall. A narrow stream ran beside the vilge, cold and clear enough that you could see the small silver fish swimming through its stones.

  It wasn’t a pce kings would ever notice.

  And that was exactly why it had been perfect.

  I was born there on a quiet spring morning, or so my mother used to say. My father liked to tell the story differently. According to him, the moment I arrived, I screamed loud enough to scare the chickens and wake half the vilge.

  My sister always ughed when he told that story.

  She was already old enough to walk and talk by the time I came into the world — old enough to look down at the small red-faced baby I had been and decre with great seriousness that she would be the one to protect me.

  Of course, the years didn’t quite go the way she pnned.

  She stood a full head taller than me when we were young, and she liked to remind me of it whenever I tried to follow her and her friends into pces I wasn’t supposed to go. But even then, I remember trailing behind her like a stubborn shadow.

  And if anyone else tried to bother me, she would gre at them like an angry hawk until they backed away.

  Looking back now, I think I admired her more than anyone in the world.

  One of my earliest memories is of her dragging me toward the stream behind our house.

  I must have been four… maybe younger.

  The water was cold enough to make my toes hurt, and I remember compining loudly the entire time.

  She ignored me.

  “Fish don’t come to noisy children,” she said, crouching beside the water with a stick in her hand.

  “I don’t want fish,” I muttered.

  She turned and flicked water at my face.

  “Then you’re still going to help.”

  By the end of the afternoon, we had caught nothing at all.

  But she still walked home proudly carrying the empty bucket like we had conquered the ocean.

  Another memory always comes back to me when I think of those days.

  The wheat fields.

  During the summer, the wind would move through them like waves across a golden sea. My father used to walk those fields every evening, checking the crops while the sun dipped low behind the hills.

  Sometimes he would let me follow.

  I would run ahead, arms stretched wide, pretending the tall wheat stalks were some great forest I had to fight through.

  When I fell — which happened often — he would simply ugh and pull me back to my feet.

  “Stand again,” he would say.

  “Falling isn’t the end of a journey, boy. Staying down is.”

  At the time, I thought it was just something fathers said.

  Now I know better.

  Life has a cruel sense of humor when it comes to lessons like that.

  But Thornridge wasn’t only fields and pine trees.

  It was people.

  Farmers who worked harder than anyone I’ve ever known.

  Bcksmiths who could hammer steel from sunrise to sunset.

  Old men who sat outside the tavern pretending to argue about crops while secretly feeding scraps to every stray dog that wandered through the vilge.

  It was small.

  Quiet.

  Ordinary.

  And for a long time, it was everything.

  I was eight the first time I met Aerin.

  The memory is still as clear as the stream behind my childhood home.

  She was sitting beside the well in the center of the vilge, carefully tying a piece of cloth around a bird’s injured wing.

  I remember stopping a few steps away just to watch.

  Most children would have poked it or tried to chase it away.

  But she handled the small creature like it was made of gss.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” she said without looking up.

  I blinked.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You’re staring,” she replied.

  “That counts.”

  When she finally looked up, her eyes were brighter than the sky above the fields.

  “You’re Vael, right?”

  I nodded slowly.

  “And you’re Aerin.”

  Everyone in Thornridge knew her.

  Not because she was loud.

  But because she was kind in a way that made people remember.

  She lived in a small house near the edge of the vilge with her mother.

  No father.

  No brothers.

  Just the two of them.

  Her mother worked longer hours than anyone else in Thornridge, taking whatever work the vilge could offer.

  Yet somehow Aerin still managed to smile more than anyone I had ever met.

  “What happened to the bird?” I asked.

  “It flew into the mill wall,” she said.

  “Birds can be stupid sometimes.”

  She finished tying the cloth and gently pced the bird on the edge of the well.

  “Now we wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For it to remember how to fly.”

  I frowned.

  “That’s not how wings work.”

  Aerin tilted her head.

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  “But sometimes creatures just need a little patience.”

  The bird stayed there for several moments.

  Then, with a sudden burst of movement, it fpped its wings and lifted into the air.

  I stared.

  Aerin smiled like she had expected nothing less.

  That was the day she started teaching me things.

  Not lessons from books.

  But habits.

  To greet people before speaking.

  To help carry water when someone’s arms were full.

  To leave food near the forest edge during winter so the smaller animals wouldn’t starve.

  At the time, I didn’t realize it.

  But many of the things people ter praised about me…

  had been the things she taught me first.

  And if I’m honest—

  I think that was the day my heart decided something long before I was old enough to understand it.

  Back then, Thornridge still felt like a pce where time moved slowly.

  Where the wind carried the scent of wheat and pine.

  Where ughter echoed through the fields at sunset.

  A pce where the world had not yet reached us.

  A pce where a boy named Vael believed that nothing could ever truly go wrong.

  I was wrong, of course.

  But at eight years old…

  I hadn’t learned that yet.