The rain had not stopped for three days.

  Raine sat there in the mud, his fingers numb as he traced the jagged mark burned into his wrist. It hadn’t been there yesterday. Now, the inky black sigil pulsed with an unnatural heat, the lines shifting as though alive beneath his skin.

  “A curse,” Elder Yora had whispered when she saw it. Then she had turned her back on him.

  A sentence, unspoken yet absolute.

  Outcast.

  Raine clenched his jaw as the weight of it settled in his chest. The village had already been wary of him—his mother’s foreign blood, and his fathers...

  No one spoke of his father.

  This was just the final push.

  “Leave before dawn,” the village head had said. “If you’re still here when the sun rises, we will not be kind.”

  No trial. No explanation. Just exile.

  Now, kneeling at the edge of the forest, he could feel the unseen boundary that had once kept the monsters out, the one that would no longer protect him. The moment he crossed it, he was no longer one of them.

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  He took a deep breath. He had no choice.

  The trees swallowed him whole.

  The deeper he went, the quieter the world became.

  At first, it was only the absence of birdsong. Then the wind itself seemed to stop. Even his own footsteps felt muted. The silence pressed against his ears, thick and unnatural.

  He felt as though he was being watched.

  Raine gripped the small hunting knife at his belt—a pitiful weapon against whatever lurked beyond the trees. His muscles tensed as he stepped forward. Once. Twice.

  The ground beneath him shifted.

  He let out an instinctive scream, but too late—roots lashed out from the earth, wrapping around his ankles and dragging him down. The air rushed from his lungs as he hit the ground hard, mud filling his mouth. The roots tightened.

  A hollow voice echoed from the shadows.

  “Another one marked. You should not have come here.”

  Raine struggled, but the roots only constricted, forcing him still as a figure emerged from the darkness. A man—no, not a man. His skin was cracked like old stone, his eyes a hollow silver. He wore no armor, no cloak, yet the air around him felt heavy, as if the world itself bowed in his presence.

  “You do not recognize the mark on your skin,” the figure mused, tilting his head. “And yet it brought you here. How curious.”

  Raine could barely breathe. His limbs trembled with effort, but it was useless. The roots did not loosen.

  The figure crouched beside him, his silver eyes studying the shifting mark on Raine’s wrist. A slow, satisfied breath.

  “Perhaps you are worth saving.”

  The figure stood there, studying Raine for a second. Then, with a flick of his fingers, the roots released.

  Raine gasped, coughing mud from his lungs as he scrambled back. His knife was gone. His hands were empty.

  The silver-eyed man smiled. “If you wish to live, you will listen carefully. Your exile was not a punishment.” He leaned closer, his voice a whisper of stone and wind.

  “It was the beginning of your awakening.”

  Raine’s mark burned.

  The world shifted around him.