The fire had come exactly one week after her mother's soul had departed in a scream. It was not the holy flame the priests droned on about, the kind that supposedly cleansed the spirit. No, it was a hungry, secular fire. A fire meant to erase.
They called it purification, a too grand word used to justify burning a woman's life down to the floorboards to ensure no unnatural taint remained in the soil of Viremont Hollow — The village she used to live in that was far, far away from here.
Luenna remembered the cold wind whipping her hair into her eyes as she stood on the hill, her small fingers hooked into the earth. She had clenched her fists so hard her nails carved bloody crescents into her palms, watching the only home she had ever known collapse into a skeleton of glowing ribs and falling embers.
It had been so quiet before the madness. Just her and her mother in a cottage that smelled of dried lavender and rising bread. Her mother had been a creature of soft whispers and careful movements. Someone who always so careful to hide the way she could make a wilted flower stand tall with a touch.
In the end, the caution had not mattered. The world had a way of sniffing out magic even when it was wrapped in kindness. Because in the end? They called her a witch anyway.
In the days that followed, the villagers' cruelty wore the mask of pity.
Poor girl, they whispered over their fences.
Unknowing child.
They spoke of her as if she was a stained garment that could be purified, as if the church could simply rinse the memory of her mother's burning eyes out of her head and return her to them, pristine and hollow.
But Luenna had already begun to harden. She remembered the stone church on the outskirts of the village. It was a cold, damp place that felt less like a sanctuary and more like a tomb. They sat her in the center of an empty pew like small island of cursed blood in a sea of judgment.
The other children clustered at the back, their whispers hissing like snakes through the rafters.
Witch's brat.
Tainted skin.
Luenna did not bow her head. She did not cry. She stared at the altar with a gaze so flat and defiant it made the priests' prayers falter. She was already dead to them, so she decided she would be a ghost they could not exorcise.
That was where the shadow of Hollis first fell across her.
He was not a savior then. He was just a man with dust-covered boots and a traveling wagon full of trinkets. He had stopped at the heavy oak doors of the church, his silhouette framed by the fading sunlight. He had stood there for a long time, watching the way a six-year-old girl held her spine like a soldier's pike, refusing to break under the weight of an entire village's hate.
Years later, when the wine was low and the night was long, he would tell her he did not know why he had stepped inside. He had just seen something in the way she sat there, too still, too stubborn, like a small spark of iron in a world of straw.
It had reminded him of a daughter whose toys were still tucked neatly in a chest at home, gathering dust because she had not lived long enough to break them.
When the village elders spoke of the Purification Rites, which Luenna knew meant a cold cell and a shaved head, Hollis had simply stepped forward. His voice had not been loud, but it had the weight of a man who had seen enough of the world to no longer fear its superstitions.
"No," he had said. When they snarled at him, demanding to know what right a wandering merchant had to a witch's seed, he had looked past them, his eyes fixed on Luenna.
"The toys in my house have been waiting a long time for someone to play with them. It seems a waste to let them sit in the dark."
Luenna had not understood the grief behind his words then. She had not understood that he was rescuing himself as much as he was rescuing her. But now, as she sat on the worn sofa, watching the same man carefully heat water with hands that had never once turned her away, she understood something simpler.
He had become the only place in the world that still felt warm. And that was why the words, no matter how heavy, always found their way to him.
Luenna's fingers curled tighter around the damp cloth in her hands, though she could not remember when she had started holding it. The water in the basin had gone lukewarm, but she still stared into it as if it might show her something other than her own reflection.
"I…" Her voice broke before she could shape the rest of the word. She swallowed hard, trying again. "I was walking home."
Hollis did not interrupt. He simply waited, like he always did when she forgot how to continue.
Her gaze dropped to the basin, but the water blurred anyway, as if it refused to stay still for her. "There were men," she said quietly. "Three of them."
A pause. Her throat tightened, resisting every next word. "They tried to rob me—"
She stopped. Her fingers curled inward, nails pressing into her palm hard enough to hurt. The pain helped a little, but still not enough to quell the fear she was feeling inside.
"I fought back," she continued, voice thinner now. "And then…"
For a moment, she looked younger than she was. Small in the same way she had been in the church, sitting too straight, trying not to fall apart in front of people who had already decided what she was.
"…and then they were gone."
Silence settled.
Hollis did not move, but something in his expression changed. Not of the story itself, but of her. Of that same trembling stillness he had once seen in a stone church full of judgment and whispered prayers.
Luenna forced herself to look up at him. Her eyes were not sharp like they usually were. They were shaken, uncertain in a way she hated.
"I didn't do it," she said quickly, shaking her head, as if defending herself against an accusation no one had spoken. "I swear I didn't."
Hollis did not look away. Instead, he leaned forward, the wood of his chair groaning under the shift of his weight. And there he saw the brunette hair he had once helped her comb free of burs and trail-dust, now matted with the slick, black filth of the Low District.
He saw those hazel eyes, usually sharp with the amber light of survival and a wit that could cut stone, now dilated and swimming with a haunted, fractured light. They were the eyes of a creature that had seen the sun go out and was still waiting for the dark to stop.
She looked fragile in the dim light, her skin pale beneath the smears of soot, a stark contrast to the rough, dark wool of her clothes. To anyone else, she was just another expendable maid of the Underworld.
To Hollis, she had never been that.
She was an iron spark. A child who refused to break even when everything around her did. And even now, grown into a woman of quiet strength and stubborn will, she still looked like something he had promised himself he would never let the world take twice.
It was just that tonight, the iron was bent.
"I know you didn't," he whispered, his voice like dry parchment. He reached out, his gnarled, shaky hand covering her own on the sofa, feeling the vibration in her bones.
"Luenna, my child… look at me," he commanded softly.
She did, her hazel eyes searching his face for the judgment she had grown up expecting from the world. But she found only an ocean of worry.
"You've lived a long time with the shadow of what happened in Viremont Hollow," Hollis said, his gaze unwavering. "You think every bad thing that happens is a ghost coming back to claim you. But you are not anyone's sin, and you are not a murderer."
He paused, his eyes narrowing as he took in the strange, metallic scent clinging to her hair, clearly a smell that was not mud, and certainly was not the copper tang of human blood. It was something colder. Something that smelled like the silver spires he had only ever seen from a distance.
"If they are gone," he asked, his voice dropping to a cautious, barely-audible breath, "then who took them, Luenna? Because no human man in the Lower District leaves a mess that makes a girl like you look this haunted."
At that, Luenna's gaze drifted toward the locked door, her heart giving a slow, heavy thud against her ribs. The warmth of the room suddenly felt like a thin veil draped over the freezing truth of the alleyway. She could still feel the phantom pressure of that polished boot against her jaw, forcing her to look into the abyss.
"It wasn't a man, Hollis," she whispered, her eyes wide and glassy with the reflection of the guttering hearth. "It was a Spire-Lord."