Page 13 of The First Scar
Chapter 5
AMARIA
We burst into the light.
Sun hit the stone, dust curling in the air like breath held too long.
And then I saw them.
The plaza in front of the shelter was smaller than the Square of Names—hemmed in by a crumbling temple wall on one side, market stalls on the other, a dry fountain clogged with debris at its center. And it was full—but not loud. No shouting. Just bodiespacked shoulder to shoulder, eyes everywhere except where it hurt to look. The heat off the stones rose through my boots. The sour tang of too many people with nowhere to go filled my nose.
The enforcers had formed a semi-circle perimeter, blades visible. Robes creased, boots planted like they weren’t planning to move unless someone bled first. Their helms reflected the light like warning flares.
Behind them sat the containment-wagon, its door hanging open. Inside—three children, two elders, and one young male protecting his arm like it’d already been snapped. Spellbars buzzed faintly across the metal, flickering just enough to remind everyone what crossing them would cost. Someone had carved a ward into the side of the cart. Old. Faded. Didn't matter. Nothing could cleanse what this was.
The rest stood in a line.
Parents. Teenagers. A child gripping her father’s sleeve so hard his hand went white. All of them shadowmarked. All of them waiting their turn—queuing for their own erasure, just the way the Crown had taught them.
At the front—bound in spellwire, faces set—stood the Rhain family.
The boy was there. Rhain's son. Already processed—collar ripped wide, mark on display like a piece of evidence. His parents flanked him as if standing closer might undo what was coming. It wouldn't. No blood yet, but the boy’s eyes were blown wide, the pupils swallowing the iris as he stared through the dirt.
Then air shifted—dense, electric. A male moved through the line of enforcers like a storm that had stepped into skin.
The Crownforged.
My breath caught. I felt him before I registered his face. A pressure just beyond the skin. He didn’t look at me, not yet. His gaze was fixed on the family, unreadable below the helm.
A priest’s voice rang out, smooth and damning.
“Illegal concealment of a soulmark. Aiding false classification. Balm smuggling.”
Someone in the crowd gasped and it drew my gaze toward the temple wall, where a figure stood too still to be just another onlooker. He was cloaked in gray with his arms crossed and his head bowed, but his eyes were edged, tracking everything. A mark gleamed at his collar: three intersecting lines inside a broken circle. The Uncrowned. So the rebels were watching too.
Same side didn't mean same fight. I didn't know him, and sharing an enemy with someone didn't make them safe. He had the look of a male who watches a fire not to stop it—but to learn how it spreads.
An Auraseer Enforcer stepped to the front of the line. Hands weaving the air like it had strings only he could see. Emotional fishing. The Crown's favorite party trick—a fae paid to feel your fear and call it evidence. Afraid meant guilty. Guilty meant gone. I wanted to stab him in the eye but I just huffed in annoyance.
I could feel him searching.
He moved from face to face, head tilted, fingers twitching.
"He'll flag every one of them," I whispered to Serenya. "Unless they feel nothing."
Her eyes snapped to mine. She already knew where I was going.
“If I used my other… abilities,” I said, throat constricting, “I could draw it into me. All of it. The fear. The panic. Make them seem clean.”
“No,” she argued.
“He wouldn’t sense their panic. Just calm. Maybe even joy. It’d completely throw him.”
“Maybe, if you’d been practicing, you could do it subtly. As is, you cannot Amaria.”
“They’ll cage the boy. You saw the sigils on that cart. Those are for transport, not holding. They’re moving them tonight.”
“And if you try to draw fear from a dozen people at once? In public? Surrounded by enforcers?” Her voice went taut. “You could tear yourself open. You could reveal everything. Amaria—”
