Selene
Araveth

Garnath took her family in a single night, and a single night was all it needed. She hid where her mother told her to hide, in the dark that smelled of flour and lavender, and she kept her promise, and she listened to everything. By the time the fire reached the house, the grief had already drained out of her. The girl who crawled into the alley did not feel the cold. She has not felt much since.

The city raised what was left. Hunger first, then theft, then the blade. The Guild taught her the rest, patience, precision, the difference between a killing and a contract. Now she moves through Garnath like a rumor, relic daggers at her hip and her mother’s wooden star against her ribs, and she tells herself the star means nothing.

It means everything. It is the only thing she never learned to put down.

Seventeen years later, the past she buried at the docks is clawing its way back up, and the two people she has left, the one who has followed her for fourteen years and the child who reminds her too much of herself, are standing directly in its path.