The rain in Dayton, Washington, never quite fell straight. It came in sideways, driven by a wind that tasted of cedar rot and distant sawmills, the kind of wind that knew every secret the town had ever tried to bury under clear-cuts and cheap beer.
Riley Voss stood under the buzzing neon of Ink & Antler, finishing the last line of a raven on a logger’s forearm. The bird’s wings spread across scarred muscle like it was trying to claw its way off the skin. She wiped excess ink with a paper towel and studied the work. Perfect. Too perfect. The raven’s eye glinted wet and alive, and for a heartbeat she swore it blinked.
“Jesus, Voss,” the logger muttered, staring at his arm. “Feels like it’s breathing.”
“It’ll settle,” she lied. They always said that. They always lied.
She snapped off her black nitrile gloves, dropped them in the biohazard bin, and turned away before he could ask the question people always asked when her needle kissed skin: Why does it feel like you just stole something from me?
Outside, the rain thickened. The shop’s front window reflected her back at herself: snow-white hair plastered to her skull, rose-pink eyes hidden behind wraparound shades even at midnight, skin so pale the neon looked bruised against it. Albino, they all said. Freaky. Fragile. None of them ever noticed the iron ring in her septum never tarnished, or that the obsidian shard at her throat was cracked clean through and still bled faint starlight when no one was looking.
She killed the lights, locked the door, and stepped into the downpour.
Main Street was empty except for the river of water running curb to curb and the occasional pickup rumbling past with chains on its tires. Riley pulled her hood up and started the six-block walk to the trailer she’d grown up in, boots splashing through reflections of dying streetlamps. The air smelled wrong tonight, metallic under the wet pine, like someone had left a battery out in the rain.
Halfway down Fourth, the wind stopped.
Just stopped.
No dying gust, no rattle of wet leaves. Nothing. The rain kept falling, but each drop hung in the air a fraction longer than physics allowed, trembling like it had forgotten which way was down.
Riley’s pulse kicked. She knew this feeling. It was the same hush that had fallen the night she was sixteen and tried to tattoo a binding circle over her own heart to shut the dreams up. The scar still ached under her hoodie, a thin white line that glowed whenever the moon was cruel.
She reached for the iron ring in her nose (old habit, grounding). Her fingers brushed cold metal, and the world exhaled.
Hooves.
Not the clop of a horse on asphalt. These were iron-shod thunder, striking sparks that hung in the rain like blue fireflies. They came from everywhere and nowhere, echoing inside her teeth.
Riley spun.
Main Street was gone.
In its place stretched a road of black glass under a sky the color of fresh bruises. Trees made of antler and starlight lined the way, their branches dripping red fruit that screamed when it hit the ground. And riding down that impossible road came the Wild Hunt.
They were beautiful in the way a guillotine is beautiful.
Riders on steeds woven from storm clouds and old nightmares. Armor of mirror and bone. Eyes like dying galaxies. At their head galloped a stag the size of a semi-truck, antlers hung with frozen screams. Its rider was cloaked in living shadow that bled ravens.
Riley’s knees buckled. Not fear (recognition).
She had seen that stag in dreams since she could walk. Had felt its breath on her face every time the eclipse dreams came: the ones where a tree bled upward into a sky of mouths and something inside her chest answered back with a note too pure to be language.
The lead rider raised a horn carved from a human thigh bone and blew a single note.
Every drop of rain turned to blood mid-fall.
Riley screamed. Couldn’t help it. The sound tore out of her like a blade, and where it passed the blood-rain flashed to white fire and evaporated. The riders flinched (actually flinched), horses rearing, shadows unraveling at the edges.
The stag lowered its head and looked straight at her with eyes the exact bruised pink of her own.
The rider lifted their helm.
Queen Unisa, High Sovereign of the Eight Fallen Kingdoms, looked twenty-nine years older than the last photograph Riley had burned when she was twelve. Same bone-white hair. Same rose eyes ringed in exhausted gold. Same mouth that had kissed a human artisan once and shattered two worlds for it.
“Riley,” the Queen said, and her voice was every lullaby Riley had never been sung. “It’s time.”
Behind her, the other riders parted. Something walked forward on legs that bent wrong.
It wore her father’s face.
Alexander Jones (flannel shirt, sawdust in his beard, kind eyes that had taught her how to hold a tattoo machine before she could spell her own name) smiled the way he used to when she brought home a perfect report card. Then the smile split too wide, and black thorns poured out like spilled ink.
The thing wearing her father opened its mouth and spoke with seven billion stolen voices:
“Hello, little apocalypse. We’ve been waiting behind your ribs.”
Riley’s knees hit the glass road. The obsidian shard at her throat cracked the rest of the way with a sound like a glacier calving. Light (pure, blinding, the color of a heart remembering how to beat) poured out of the break and wrapped around her like armor.
The Queen’s face twisted (grief, pride, terror all at once).
“Run,” she whispered. “Seven days, Riley. Seven days until the eclipse finishes what I started. Find the shard I traded. Bring it home. Or the Corruption wears us both.”
The stag bellowed. The blood-rain reversed, falling upward into a sky now full of teeth.
Riley ran.
She ran and the black glass road shattered under her boots, becoming Main Street again, becoming rain and neon and the smell of wet asphalt. She ran until her lungs burned with cedar smoke and starlight. Ran until she slammed into the door of the trailer she hadn’t entered sober in three years.
The porch light was on.
Inside, something waited that wore her father’s skin and smiled with too many teeth.
Riley pressed her bleeding palm to the doorframe. The raven tattoo on her arm opened its wings and screamed a single, perfect note (the first true note the Clarion Heart had ever been allowed to sing).
Every window in the trailer exploded outward in a hurricane of white fire.
And somewhere, impossibly far away yet close enough to taste, the crucified Ash of Nine Moons shuddered on its chains and wept a single tear of pure, living light.
Seven days.
The eclipse was coming.
And the girl with winter in her hair and apocalypse in her chest had finally come home to a war that had started the moment she drew first breath.
and then Add to home screen.