Chapter 5 The dead rise

~MARA~

Mama's lips parted, an open, rambling breath whistling through her teeth. For one terrifying second, my heart soared. 

‘She's alive.’

Then I looked into her eyes.

The warmth was gone. Whatever had been my mother was no longer behind them.

Her head jerked upright, her neck snapping into position with a sickening crack. She stood up, her movements stiff, robotic, dragged by an invisible thread tied directly to the center of my chest.

I scrambled backward across the blood-slick floorboards, my chest breathing hard. 

"Mama?"

She didn't answer. She simply turned toward the broken front door and walked out onto the porch.

I forced myself up on shaking legs and followed her.

Outside, Bellmere was bathed in an unnatural, suffocating silence. The wind had stopped. The smoke from the burning torches hung motionless in the air.

Throughout the village square, bodies were pushing themselves up from the dirt. Old Thomas, who had sold fresh bread every morning. Young Caleb, who had waved at me through the shop window just hours ago. The three soldiers killed by Mama's vines.

More bodies than I could count.

When I took a step forward, the entire army took a step forward.

When I froze, they froze.

My breath caught in my throat. I hadn't told them to move. I hadn't told them to stop. Whatever connected me to them, I couldn't see it, but I could feel it….something cold, something buried deep inside me.

And it was listening.

---

The three surviving Crown soldiers backed out of our cottage yard, their drawn swords shaking violently in their hands.

"Goddess above..." one of them whimpered, dropping his blade onto the cobblestones.

"She's awakened," another soldier whispered, his eyes wide with horror as he stared at the silver-eyed corpses standing between him and his horse.

The commander grabbed the soldier's arm, his face pale. "Don't say that word."

"But, Commander…."

"RUN!"

The commander didn't wait. He turned and fled toward the northern road, his surviving men scrambling after him like frightened dogs. They abandoned their horses, their weapons, and their dead.

I ignored them. My entire world had narrowed to the figure standing at the edge of the porch.

"Mama?" My voice broke, tears burning hot against my cold cheeks.

I walked down the wooden steps, my boots heavy on the earth. The corpses surrounding the cottage parted silently, clearing a path for me.

Mama stood near the garden bench where my purple flower still bloomed.

I stopped a foot away from her. The smell of blood and earth hung deep on her skin. The dark stain of blood covered her apron, but she didn't bleed anymore. Her heart wasn't beating.

"Mama, please," I sobbed, reaching out a trembling hand. "Please come back."

I touched her cold shoulder.

The moment my skin met hers, a shockwave of cold energy rippled outward from my fingertips. The corpses dropped to their knees. All of them. At once. Their heads lowered toward the dirt.

Mama's body didn't kneel.

Slowly, awkwardly, her right arm lifted. Her cold, stiff fingers reached out, brushing against my cheek just as they had when she was dying.

Her jaw unhinged slightly. Her gray lips moved, forcing air through a dead throat.

"Don't..." she rasped, the voice thin, dry, and hollow as falling leaves.

I leaned closer, sobbing uncontrollably. "Don't what? Mama, tell me!"

Mama's milky eyes locked onto mine.

"Don't... let them... wake you," she whispered.

The invisible thread holding her upright snapped. Mama's body went lifeless, collapsing into the dirt at my feet like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

"No!"

The scream tore from the bottom of my lungs, raw, bloody, and full of an agonizing grief that broke what was left of my sanity.

My control was broken with it.

The wave of rage and sorrow inside me exploded outward, flooding through the dark magic connecting me to the dead.

The corpses on the ground snapped their heads up. Their milky, silver-ringed eyes flashed.

My rage made them move faster.

Somewhere beyond the square, men screamed. I covered my ears, pressing my forehead against the cold earth. 

"Stop!" I sobbed. "Stop! Leave them!"

But the dead didn't stop. They followed the only thing left inside me.

Rage.

I dropped my head, pulling my hands against my chest, trying desperately to drag the dark thread back inside myself.

Slowly, painfully, the surge quieted. Down the lane, the screams faded into a terrible, deep silence. I sat in the dirt, covered in my mother's blood, surrounded by the quiet dead of the village I had grown up in.

I hadn't wanted any of this. I hadn't wanted to hurt anyone. I just wanted my mother back.

And I couldn't even have that.

---

Hoo-oo-oo-nnn.

A horn echoed from the northern ridge. Deep, brassy, and long….a war horn of the royal capital.

Reinforcements.

I looked down at Mama's still face, then around at the hollow, broken village of Bellmere.

My home was burned. My mother was gone. The life I had known for twenty-one years had been reduced to ashes in a single night.

There was no going back. There was no hiding beneath headscarves, no sweeping the floor of the healer's shop, no pretending to be a normal girl sorting herbs.

The Crown knew I existed. And they would burn every valley in the kingdom to put me in a cage. Footsteps crunched on the stone at the entrance of the village road.

A massive warhorse stepped out from the shadows of the northern treeline.

Its coat was pitch-black, its tack trimmed in dark iron and shone silver. It walked with a slow, deliberate rhythm, utterly unbothered by the stench of blood and rot hanging in the air.

Straddling the horse sat a man clad in heavy, black military armor. A long, dark cloak draped over his broad shoulders, pinned at the collar by a silver symbol.

He didn't carry a drawn sword. He didn't scream orders.

He brought his horse to a halt at the edge of the square, his sharp, dark eyes sweeping over the quiet bodies standing in the dirt.

Then, slowly, his gaze shifted.

He looked past the dead, past the broken cottages, until his eyes locked directly onto mine.

He didn't look afraid. He didn't look surprised either.

He simply studied me. His gaze moved from my silver eyes to the blood on my hands, then to the body beside me. His expression didn't change.

That frightened me more than the soldiers had. Because he wasn't looking at a monster. He was looking at a problem he already knew how to solve.

The man dismounted.

His boots touched the blood-soaked ground. He walked toward me, the dark cloak snapping against his armor.

I didn't know his name yet.

I only knew one thing.

He wasn't afraid of me.