“Need help?”
She raised an eyebrow. “To burn the food? No thanks.”
“Hey!”
With a quiet laugh, she handed me the chopping board, and we fell into an easy rhythm—cooking, chatting, and laughing.
Our flat was small; two bedrooms, all wood, walls thin enough to hear each other sneeze. The kitchen opened into the living room, and the whole place smelled of cinnamon candles and cumin. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t quiet. But it was home.
I didn’t have a dad. Not that I remembered, anyway. Twenty-three years, and not even a photo to pretend with. Mother never talked about him—like,ever. And honestly, I didn’t push. Some doors were better left closed.
Nimorran.
Nimorran.
The name echoed in my blood and bloomed inside my chest. Not only did it make my veins jittery, it made my bones feel wired. Like some part of me had been waiting my whole life to go back to a place I’d never been.
While everyone else picked safe final year research topics that could be gathered from the internet—even though the aim was to findnew things or bring old, forgotten history to light—I chose the kind that made even my mother raise an eyebrow.
History wasn’t just facts and artefacts.
It was hunger.
A question that grew teeth when left unanswered.
And Nimorran?
It was the one place I wanted to bring to light for my thesis. A scar on the land with a story blurred by time, stitched shut by superstition. But I wanted to tear those stitches open. I wanted to dig my hands into the dirt of the past and feel what was buried.
That was why I was going to Nimorran. And the train to that town was leaving tonight. The only one until next month.
They said the moon’s wrath fell there fourteen hundred years ago—right into the ground, leaving behind a big Crater that no bird dared fly over. The Crater was roped off as a “historical site,” but no one really went there.
It was where I’d be spending the next twenty-eight days. Studying it and living in it.
It was like killing two birds with one stone. Getting truth, facts and answers to the questions I wanted, and completing my thesis:
Crater Sites and Celestial Myths: A Geological Re-examination of the Nimorran Cataclysm
I smiled. Yeah. Bit of a mouthful. But it was mine. And I would dig through it.
My smile dropped.
...I could also be digging my grave as well.
CHAPTER TWO
SANORA
Once, I used to think my mother hated me.
Like, the full-on, blood-boiling, “you were an accident” and “I want you out of my house” kind of hate. I’d convinced myself of that for most of my childhood, and really, she didn’t do much to prove me wrong. She didn’t even care because she knew I was going through a phase.
But some hours ago, she grumbled and swore the entire way from our house to the train station, dragging my box of crap behind her like it had personally insulted her. And it made me realise I was an idiot for viewing her the way I did as a kid.
She didn’t say she loved me, even though I told her three times. I even made her a heart with my hands. What did I get in return? A hard smack on the back and a gritted, “Get out of my sight.” Meanwhile, her eyes were shining like she’d accidentally cut an onion the size of her sadness.
It wasn’t me leaving that pissed her off and got her worrying, it was where I was heading.
