Page 14 of The First Scar
A snap broke across the plaza.
They started with the children. Of course they did. Two guards yanked the smallest from his mother, who screamed once before a third guard shoved her to her knees.
His mother lunged for him anyway. An Enforcer snatched her by the hair and wrenched her back. But she kept fighting, clawing for her son desperately.
That was it.
Itwoke up. Not the Luminar mark. Not anything I'd ever allowed myself to reach for.
The thing under the amulet. Cold. Rising fast—vertebra by vertebra up my spine, spreading through my ribs like frost on glass.
The Auraseer's head whipped toward me.
Stop. Pull it back. Subtle!
But I could feel the boy's panic. The mother's scream still vibrated in the air. The smaller children's terror, formless and huge, pressed against the inside of my chest. Anditwas thrashing wildly to be released at full force.
Do not tame me. Release me.
Thin black filaments bled from my other Mark, like drifting ash—released through my eyes, my chest, the corners of my mouth—indigo-dark and hungry, reaching for every living thing in the square. The amulet at my neck went hot. Then ice. Then shattered.
The lady nearest me stumbled backward. An Enforcer's hand shot to his hilt. A child who'd been screaming went silent.
The Auraseer collapsed. Hands clawing at his own throat like I'd ripped his essence out of him.
Shadowmark.
My Shadowmark—the Griefweaver—tore open. The filaments multiplied, hundreds of dark threads drifting outward, and everywhere they touched theypulled. The crowd’s fear, their shame, their grief—all of it streaming back along those threads and into me.
And giving me a death sentence in the process.
Because then my Luminar Mark answered.
Light burst out with my shadows. Both marks blazing together shamelessly.
The Enforcers stopped moving.
The crowd stopped whispering.
A priest's censer slipped from his fingers and hit the cobblestones. The clatter echoed across absolute silence.
Because they didn't have a script for this.
Shadowmark, they knew. Shadowmark had a name, a sentence. But this—light and dark burning through the same skin, spirals of black threaded with veins of silver, both marks alive and screaming in a body that should have been torn apart by the contradiction—
This only had one name. Abomination.
Both marks reverberated under my collarbone—singing together in harmony.
For one breathless moment, the entire plaza watched me burn.
A dual-marked.
The only dual-marked.
The silence held. Held. Held.
I hit the stone, knees first, hard. Pain shot up through my kneecaps and my palms slapped the flagstones, gritty and sun-warm. The world tilted. Sound came back muffled, like hearing through water. Then it shattered like glass.
