Sable

SPOKEN TO NO ONE, UNTIL SOMEONE ACTUALLY LISTENED

They have a name for me in the villages past the tree line — the Devil in the Mist, said the way you'd say a warning rather than a name. I never asked for it, and I stopped correcting people a long time ago; a room decides what you are before you've said a word, and arguing never worked. My sister went looking for the family she lost. I never had to look — I already knew exactly how alone a person could be while standing in a crowded room. She got the searching. I got the flinching.

Before anyone called me a devil, I was just a girl abandoned in the Mourning Highlands — the east point of the four that hold up Nhalis itself — old enough to remember it and too young to understand why. I ate whatever crawled close enough to catch. I don't tell people that part. Let them wonder about the mist instead.

I have walked into more than one line of soldiers that thought a single girl was an easy problem to solve, and walked out the only one still standing more times than I've bothered counting. There were four of us scattered to that compass, though none of us chose the wind that carried us — Vanessa went north, Elenara and Aeloria hold points I know more as directions than faces, and I got the east, and the mist, and whatever Nhalis decided I owed it in return.

I've come to think the world isn't cruel so much as indifferent, which feels worse. Nhalis didn't hate the highlands into taking me, or the mist into following me — it just moves, and whoever's standing in the way learns to bend or be reshaped. I built a very good wall a long time ago. I regret less how thick I made it than how surprised I still am, every time, when someone doesn't turn and leave the moment they see what's behind it.

I am still waiting for the day it stops feeling like a miracle that he stayed. I hope that day never actually comes.