POV: The Scourge

They watched her from the hollow places, those torn seams in the world where breath turned to fog and trees forgot how to grow. The girl walked in the wrong skin, a flame smoldering beneath the frost.

Her presence cracked the silence like a shattering mirror, her blood humming with a Knowing that should have died long ago, swallowed by the last eclipse. Yet she lived. She breathed. And most dangerously, she burned.

She was not meant to burn.

From root to rot, the Scourge ...