Ashen Chains

Pella has spent fourteen years learning to disappear.

An indentured servant at a dying inn on the edge of the Wastes, she has survived by staying small, staying quiet, and asking for nothing. But the Blight is creeping north, a corruption that twists animals, poisons wells, and turns ancient trees into something wrong, and the wards protecting Grenn’s Hollow are crumbling faster than anyone will admit.

Then a russet fox appears in the cellar where she sleeps.

It is no ordinary animal. Its eyes hold a patience older than the village, older than the failing ward-stones at the forest’s edge, and when Pella reaches out to touch it, something wakes inside her chest. A warmth she has always carried but never understood. Light moves through her fingers. The corruption recoils. And deep beneath the earth, the broken thread of a dying ward pulses like a wound only she can feel.

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