Her eyes were red and swollen, her face streaked with soot and tears. Around us, the world we once knew lay in ruins. Blood splattered the snow like ink. Smoke curled upward from the pyres where our daughters’ bodies had burned. The longhouse—our home, the heart of our lives—was nothing but broken timber and shadow.
“I know you’re hurting,” she said softly. “So am I. But we can’t survive this if we stay. Mathias… he says he can help. I want to believe him.”
My thoughts churned, a storm of rage, loss, and disbelief. I had no answers—only pain.
“Yes, yes,” Mathias said, stepping forward, his dark hair catching the light of the dying fires. “I’m building a sanctuary. A school for others like you. Those born of darkness lost and wandering without answers. We’ll guide them. Peace. Purpose.”
He met my eyes.
“Wouldn’t you have given anything for that when you awoke?”
The memory struck me like a hammer to the chest—adrift in a cold, endless sea, stripped of memory, consumed by fear. I hadn’tknown who I was or what I needed—only that the hunger was unbearable, and I was wrong.
“Of course, I wanted a mentor,” I said hoarsely. “Of course I did.”
Mathias stepped closer. “Then let me be that for you. For both of you. Come with me. There’s still time to reclaim something from all this ruin.”
Zara placed her hand over mine, her fingers ice-cold. “Please, Balthazar. For me. For them. For whatever future we might still have.”
I looked around once more—at the snow-drenched grave of my family, the smoldering fragments of what we’d built together. My heart clenched. My soul mangled.
But the fire of vengeance had dulled into something heavier—grief, unbearable and endless.
And maybe… a fragile shard of hope.
I let them convince me.
And without a backward glance, I stepped through time—into 1130 A.D. London.
Leaving behind everything I was.
And everything I had lost.
Part of me welcomed the distraction, the structure of something new—a veil to mask the agony of losing my children. But another part of me, buried beneath the surface, screamed in quiet betrayal. I couldn’t silence the plaguing feeling that Mathias had something to do with their deaths. His arrival had been too convenient—on the eve of their slaughter, cloaked in promises and wisdom. If he knew so much, why had he come too late?
Still, I had no choice.
I needed answers.
And Mathias claimed to have them.
Years passed beneath his tutelage—slow, colorless years that bled together. Each day dragged into the next like a curse. Zara and I trained his soldiers—dark, broken beings like ourselves, taught to obey, to destroy, to survive. Side by side, we fought, taught, and endured.
But inside me, nothing had healed.
My heart was still splintered, shattered into a thousand jaggedfragments that pierced deeper with every memory. A part of me longed for the rhythm and warmth of my old life with Zara. Another part burned—hungry and feral—for vengeance.
The rage festered.
I turned it on them—Mathias and Zara—and accused them of betrayal. I saw how he watched her and how she softened in his presence. I let that vision rot me from the inside until all I could see was their deception.
He was with her. Behind my back. Said nothing. Lied to my face.
And then one day… I found them.
But not tangled in a bed of lies.
Worse.
