At the mention of Shadowick, the blue flame jumped. For a moment, the image sharpened enough that I could see a stone path and the dark line of trees beyond it.
My stomach turned.
“He keeps coming back,” the first voice said, quieter now. “Stands there at the edge like he thinks the Ward might change its mind.”
I heard laughter, followed by a soft sound, coming through the flame, and for a single second, the image sharpened again.
A boy.
Not a man.
It wasn’t the Gideon I knew with his sharp arrogance and his dark, dangerous confidence. It wasn’t the Gideon with his taunting smile and his eyes that always looked like they were calculating the fastest way to make someone hurt.
This was a boy with too-long limbs and dark hair falling into his eyes. He stood just beyond the line where the trees thickened, half in shadow, half in the weak spill of Stonewick’s streetlights.
He wasn’t crossing any lines.
He wasn’t challenging.
He was… waiting.
He was listening.
My chest tightened so sharply it stole my breath because this wasn’t the first time I’d seen something like this happen to him when he was a boy in visions.
But as I watched Gideon as a boy, I knew what I was witnessing was loneliness, raw and unarmored.
The boy’s shoulders were hunched as if he’d been told one too many times that he didn’t belong anywhere, and he was trying anyway, stubborn as an ache.
“He shouldn’t be here,” the second voice said, harsher. “If he’s from there, he’s touched. Marked. You know what that means.”
The first voice made a sound that might have been a sigh. “He’s a child.”
“A child becomes a weapon if you let it,” the second voice snapped. “That place makes weapons. He’s not even ours to worry about.”
Not even ours.
I wanted to argue with them, absurdly, as if the flame could hear me across time and alter the outcome. I wanted to tell them that Gideon had become a weapon anyway—that their fear hadn’t prevented it. If anything, fear had sharpened him. Rejection had given him an edge. Neglect had taught him how to survive without tenderness.
But I wasn’t sure I could blame them, either. Shadowick wasn’t a place you spoke about in fairytales, especially in this town. Shadowick was the place you warned children about in half-whispered stories.
But still…
The boy in the flame took a step forward and looked longingly toward the village.
It was almost as if he wanted proof that warmth existed somewhere, but then I saw a flicker of something more run through his gaze as if something he’d lost had been hidden in Stonewick.
It didn’t make sense, but it was what I saw.
“I saw him yesterday,” the first voice continued, softer now. “He left something at the boundary.”
The second voice scoffed. “A curse, no doubt.”
“No,” the first voice said, and there was something like reluctant compassion in the tone. “It was… a little carving.”
The blue flame flickered, and the image shifted. The boy was closer now, his face turned up as if he could see something through the trees.
His eyes were dark, yes, but not cold. Not yet.
