Note: This piece was used to flesh out the backstory of a character I created for role-playing purposes. It is similar in tone and style to the high fantasy novel I am currently working on. I am unagented at this time.

Tierney wasn’t sure how she made it back to Fieldswept.

Somehow, her feet followed the route as the world darkened around her. Or one of them did. The other limped, as if speared through by jagged glass. Memory kept skipping, losing moments. The sky was above her, and then the ground was at her face, and she tasted dirt, and then she was leaning against a tree, bark sturdy. Pain. It lanced through the arch of her foot and up her leg. She couldn’t tell if it was consistent or came in flares. Her blotted moments of consciousness would not connect.

She kept grasping for arms that weren’t there.

Maybe she wasn’t conscious. She was asleep. Reen was in her arms. Hugh and Fili and Brend were around her family table, and they’d have breakfast.

Yet this pain. It glowed in her foot, hot and bright. And the pain in her chest. A clawed-out opening, widening, widening, like splitting skin.

It was so dark. Suddenly, here was her front door. Sounds came from her like she wasn’t making them—gasps, ragged cries. Tierney fumbled with the latch and fell inside, as if her home had hands to pull her, and she let them.

“Tierney! My love, what’s wrong?”

“What happened? Are you hurt?”

How were her parents here? Had they waited up for her? No, she’d been gone for days. Maybe she’d been loud—she’d woken them?

Tierney couldn’t piece anything together. Fragments of sensory information trickled through her fingers, lost.

Somehow, she was on the floor, still in her chain mail, hugging her mother’s arm. Hot tears ran down her cheeks and pooled beneath her, wetting her ear. Words fell out as sobs.

“Should we send a search party?” Father was asking. “Are they trapped?”

Tierney wanted to say yes. She hadn’t been able to get back into that room. Had she made it out herself? Had someone—that thing—brought her there? She couldn’t trust her memory after she’d passed out.

But only after she’d passed out. Everything before was so vivid. She’d never dreamed so lucidly.

“My love.” Mother’s hands cupped her jaw. She was blurry. “I just need you to get one thing out. Tell us where they are. So we can save them.”

That’s why the urgency. Mother and Father wouldn’t fathom the worst-case scenario.

“Point to a map,” Father was saying. “Or—”

“They’re gone,” Tierney managed.

Quiet. Mother: “Gods spare us.”

“Clïoná, she might not mean—maybe they’re—”

“I watched all of them die.”

The pain in her foot and chest pushed into her every crevice. Her skin burned.

Mother was crying. Or Father. Or both. One of them helped Tierney to her feet. She gasped in agony.

“Are you hurt?” Mother stooped toward Tierney’s foot. “Let me—”

“No.” In a burst of fear, Tierney hobbled into her bedroom and shut the door.

They couldn’t see it. No one could. People would have questions. They’d make her relive tonight, ask why her and why hadn’t she moved faster—

Why she hadn’t—why hadn’t she—?

“Tierney,” Mother said, muffled by the door. “You need to be patched up.”

“I’ll do it myself.”

“But—”

“Love, let her,” came Dad’s voice, thick with misery. “She said no.”

Garbled arguing on the other side. Tierney focused on removing her armor, one piece at a time. The components became a sawtooth heap. Crash of metal, crash of metal.

Tierney scrambled through her drawers for the bandages she knew were there, because of when Reen had cut her arm on the splintered wood, and she’d come through the window and Tierney had wrapped it around her. Made it tight, tied it off, and kissed her until it didn’t hurt anymore.

There. She took off her sock and wrapped it around, made it tight, tied it off. No one kissed her.

Tierney crawled into bed. She was still crying. How were there so many tears left in her? Had that not always been her name? Tier?

She didn’t want to be misery packed into a person.

This was a dream.

Tierney went to sleep in the hope that it would wake her.

#

The morning was too quiet.

The first thing Tierney did was unwrap the bandage. If it wasn’t there, all was well. Reen and Hugh and Brend and Fili were safe.

A ball formed in her throat as the bandages fell away. Her chest hitched with suspense.

Dark blue against pale skin. The marking.

A cry tore out of her. She collapsed back onto her pillow.

Reen was dead. Fili was dead. Brend was dead. Hugh was dead.

All of them.

That emptiness in her chest widened into something gaping and monstrous, and she began to understand. This would be the rest of her life.