Sometime before all of this, Mavine had been walking home from school.
The stranger was standing in front of the house when she arrived. Black suit, grey hair, brown eyes. An apathetic smile that did not quite reach anything behind it.
"Wanna see a trick, baby girl?"
He did not wait for her answer. The light came immediately, white and total, and for a second Mavine could not see anything at all. When her vision returned her parents were standing exactly where they had been but something had gone out of them. Their eyes were open and empty.
"Ma! Pa!"
She grabbed her mother's hand, pulled at her father's sleeve, called their names until her throat hurt. Neither of them moved. Neither of them blinked.
The stranger's voice came from behind her.
"The word of this should never get out of here. Kill your parents before the promised time comes."
Then he was gone. No footsteps, no door, simply gone, and Mavine stood alone between her motionless parents in the afternoon light with those words sitting in her chest like something swallowed wrong.
Her parents came back to themselves later that evening. They remembered nothing. They made dinner and asked about her day and everything was ordinary in a way that made the earlier hours feel like something she had imagined.
But the white light came back. Not every night, but often enough. Sometimes her parents would be fine when it passed. Other times they would go slack and empty the way they had that first afternoon, standing wherever they happened to be like furniture.
By morning they would remember nothing.
The animals began changing too. She watched it happen gradually and then all at once, mutations appearing overnight, extra limbs, wrong proportions, behaviors that belonged to nothing she had a name for.
Her parents noticed the animals but explained them away as yai beasts. They did not connect it to the light. They did not remember enough to connect anything to anything.
Mavine connected everything.
Then one day she heard the voice from the well. Low and clear and coming from somewhere below the waterline.
*Don't dare.*
She was not sure afterward whether she had leaned too far over the rim out of curiosity or whether her foot had simply slipped. Either way she went in.
The water was everywhere around her and then the crystal was everywhere too, attaching to her the moment she was close enough, drawn to her like a magnet finds iron, and then she was not drowning anymore, she was seeing.
Her parents inside boiling water. The sound of it. Their voices going ragged and then raw and then something worse than raw. The image came in pieces across days and weeks, fragments of a future assembling themselves slowly into something she could almost hold in full. A god descending. Offerings prepared. The promised time arriving exactly as promised.
Her parents were among the offerings.
The boiling water was not a metaphor.
The stranger's voice ran through it all like a thread pulled tight.
*Kill your parents before the promised time comes.*
The crystal made her understand what she could not have understood on her own.
An eternity of that suffering against the clean fact of a death she could give them now, while they still did not know what was coming. While they could still be spared it.
Mavine had understood. She had understood for a long time.
And every day in between she carried it alone.
She woke up with it and went to school with it and came home to parents who smiled at her over dinner without knowing what she knew.
She did her homework and brushed her teeth and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling and wished, with the particular desperation that belongs only to children bearing adult weight, that she could simply forget.
That the crystal had never found her. That the well had never spoken. That the stranger with the apathetic smile had walked past their house and chosen someone else's life to ruin.
She wished it was all fake. She wished it so hard and so often that the wishing itself became exhausting.
She wished someone would come and save her.
Her prayer was answered halfway.
They were in the parking lot after the surgery, her parents moving slowly, her mother still tender around the midsection, when Mavine noticed the stranger following them.
She turned and looked and her whole body went tight with a fear that had become very familiar over the past months.
"Who are you? Did you have something to do with us?"
The woman's eyes went to her parents first, then back to Mavine.
"Are they your parents?"
Something about the way she asked it, calm and assessing, made Mavine's mind go immediately to the grey haired man and the trick and the white light. Different person, same feeling.
She smiled and lied and looked for the fastest way to put distance between this woman and her family.
Then the woman took out a crystal and crushed it in her palm without ceremony and said,
"I am only helping myself."
And Mavine forgot.
Not everything. The edges remained, minor things, impressions without context, the vague sense that something was wrong with the farm, that the nights were sometimes strange.
But the weight of it, the full crushing knowledge of what the crystal had shown her and what the stranger had asked of her and what was coming for her parents, that lifted.
Gone between one breath and the next.
The days that followed were the best days of her life. Genuinely, completely, without reservation. She did not know why she felt so light and she did not question it.
She just lived inside it while it lasted, a child again for a little while, unburdened and ordinary and safe.
She had no idea she had Zelaine to thank for it.
She had no idea it was going to end.
Zelaine had woven herself into the fabric of the household so completely that it felt like she had always been there. The family set a place for her at the table without thinking about it.
Mavine called her unni and meant it, leaning into her warmth the way younger children lean into older siblings they have decided to trust entirely.
They shared the same bed. They ate the same meals. Zelaine lived inside the lie she had constructed and Mavine lived inside it too, happily, without knowing it was a lie at all.
Then one morning the white flash came again.
It pulled Mavine out of sleep and she was at the window before she was fully awake, blinking at the farm below, and then the memories came.
Not gradually. All at once, like a dam giving way.
Everything the crystal had shown her. Everything the stranger had said.
The boiling water and her parents' voices and the promised time and the weight she had carried alone for so long before Zelaine had taken it from her without asking and without explaining and without any intention of giving anything back.
She stood at the window and understood what had been done to her family. What was still being done.
The warmth she had felt, the sister she had believed in, the ordinary blissful days, all of it staged. All of it yai.
She could see Zelaine near the well from where she stood.
The stranger's voice came back clean and clear as the first day.
'Kill your parents before the promised time comes.'
She had known this moment would return. She had tried to prepare herself for it, had spent the blissful days she did not know were borrowed steeling something quiet and terrible inside her chest.
She had begun pulling away from her parents in small ways, tiny distances, because she knew that when the time came she could not afford to waver.
Tonight when the light flashed she was ready.
She slipped under the bed before Zelaine could reach for her, pressed herself flat against the floor, and held her breath. She watched Zelaine's feet move across the room.
Watched her parents get bound to the bed frame in yai strands. Watched Zelaine leave.
She waited until the Zelaine jump off thr window.
Then she crawled out.
Her hands were shaking before she even reached the knife. Small hands, a seven year old's hands, wrapped around the handle of something that weighed more than she did in every way that mattered.
She stood over the bed and looked at her parents and trembled.
She did not let herself waver, though.
It was mercy.
She did what she did.
Now Zelaine had bound her to the bed too, another strand among the others, and Mavine sat with her hands still and her eyes fixed on nothing, the knife somewhere on the floor behind her, the sheets dark and wet, and the stranger's voice finally, finally quiet.
"You are not possessed, are you."
Zelaine looked at the girl, at the stillness of her, at the vacancy behind her eyes that was not the same vacancy as her parents had worn.
This was something else entirely. Something that had come from the inside out.
She could not read it. Psychopathy, mental illness, trauma beyond what a seven year old mind should be capable of surviving.
None of the categories fit cleanly and she was not sure any of them mattered right now.
Mavine said nothing.
Zelaine exhaled slowly and reached into her pocket. She turned the specific crystal over in her fingers for a moment before crouching down to the girl's level.
"This will hurt like hell," she said quietly. "But it is nothing compared to what you are feeling right now."
She pressed the crystal into Mavine's wrist.
The memories came through in fragments and then in waves. Zelaine held still and let them move through her.
The white light, the first time and every time after. The well and the water and the crystal finding the girl like it had been looking for her specifically.
The future laid out in pieces, the boiling water, her parents' voices, the god descending, the offerings prepared.
And the grey haired man standing in front of the house with his apathetic smile.
Zelaine's entire body went cold.
Then hot.
"Nongban."
The name came out as a hiss between her teeth, quiet and precise and absolutely venomous.
The grey haired man. The apathetic smile.
The staging of it all, the light, the command planted in a seven year old child, the casual catastrophic cruelty of using Mavine as an instrument and walking away without looking back.
Nongban, the same man behind the Ansep lab explosion. The reason she had come to Ellejort in the first place.
She stood up slowly.
'I am going to kill you.'
Not a vow. Not an emotion. Simply a fact she was now in possession of, as clear and certain as anything she had ever known.
Zelaine stayed silent for a moment, turning words over and finding none of them adequate.
Mavine broke it first.
"I won't tell anyone anything about you." Her voice was steady in the way that things are steady when everything behind them has already been spent. "Please leave."
She meant it. That was the thing that made it land the way it did.
"Thank you for the last few days. For letting me truly live as a daughter of them."
Her cheeks were wet, her vision blurred, but the words came out clear and whole and completely genuine. The blissful days she had not known were borrowed. The warmth she had not known was constructed. She was thanking Zelaine for a lie and meaning every word of it.
Zelaine stood up.
She looked at the girl for a moment and then began moving around the room, gathering her things with the efficient quietness of someone who had packed up and disappeared from places before.
Ten minutes and she was done. She came back to where Mavine sat bound to the bed and looked down at her.
"You gave yourself to fate so easily." She said it without judgment, simply as an observation. "So what will you do now."
Mavine had no answer. She had not thought past this moment. This moment had been the entire horizon for so long that nothing existed beyond it.
"I don't believe someone who killed her parents over a vision of the future will stay quiet about me," Zelaine said. "So you have two choices."
Mavine's blurry eyes came up to meet hers.
"You can die here. I will make it swift." Zelaine held her gaze without flinching. "Or you come with me. You just have to nod along with whatever I do."
Mavine's lips quivered.
The room was silent around them both.
"What do you want to do."