Prologue

  Lies of Flesh

  "A bruise should fade.

  It should rise, bloom in its swollen violence, then retreat. Its memory is lost in healing.

  That is its purpose."

  Laughter crashes against the tavern's walls, spilling over wooden tables where men and women lean too close, voices slurred with drink and drawl. A hand slams down in jest. A coin slides across the counter, a glass returns.

  A flute hums low in a damp corner, jumping to the flick of a bard's fingers, padding the silence between words. A melody meant to fill.

  A sharp gray drags through the contour of the air—silent, stark. The breath it finds does not return.

  The bard’s fingers falter, a single note dwindling too long; quiet unmet in the wake of their slack listener. A chair shifts, wood scuffing stone, but none turn to look.

  The music resumes, the hum of voice swells, drowning the cold in something desperate, something loud.

  Every gesture, every flap of the lip serves to mask the truth of what they mean. Who they are.

  They drink, they touch, they laugh, eyes prudently weighed—words settling just above the surface. One does not stray too close, for a tender dark awaits.

  Among eaten song and gnawed mirth, she sits.

  She turns her right hand over, eyeing its skin as if something other than bone lay beneath. It still feels that way.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  It is marked—written in the ink of brittle red, dry now but still speaking.

  Scripts of pain too numerous to bear reading.

  Her gaze, shaded in a mire-green, snakes along a scaled memory.

  The chair wobbles beneath her, one leg splintered where it meets the ground. Her weight shifts, pressing the fracture deeper into the wood. Her foot drags across the floor, slick where the stones should be dry.

  Such things are fleeting. Remnants of why we hurt. Reminders of how we heal.

  Some marks still raise where the blade ran shallow. Others sink where the knife buried deep. A wrist hardened by an old fracture, set poorly, healed worse.

  Her fingers curl. Her gaze falls differently.

  "This one lingers."

  The tavern stills.

  Voices wane to a hush, laughter thinning, notes no longer following its curve. She feels it then.

  Her eye shifts. Not to the body. Not to the blood.

  To the man at the table nearest her, fingers curled too carefully around his glass.

  To the woman by the hearth, eyes flicking once toward the fallen before lowering again, lips parting just enough to sip her mead.

  To the bard, who's flute lay buried still in the pucker of their lips.

  Not all wounds belong to the wounded.

  Not all pain is so kind.

  Though it does not mark our skin, cannot tender our limbs—we wear it so.

  In the words caught between our teeth.

  In the desire buried beneath our eyes.

  Her fingers ease over its grip, blood warming her palm.

  Dry ink wetted again.

  "In the truth—pried free."