Chapter Text
Long before Nova’s birth, before Cityline’s towers gleamed with electric light, before the cobblestone streets carried the weight of a thousand hurried footsteps, there was only a clearing at the edge of the dark forest and a river that split the land in two. The clearing became a settlement. The forest, already old and knotted with secrets, belonged to those who called themselves the Elders of the Night—creatures who fed on what humans feared to lose most: their warmth, their breath, their life.
At first, there was no peace. Tales older than parchment spoke of raids at dusk, of villagers who disappeared on moonless nights, of trails of crimson leading back into the trees. Cityline’s founders learned quickly that steel and fire meant little in the face of beings who could move faster than an arrow and heal faster than a wound could open. But humans were clever. They built walls not of stone but of words and ritual. They sent emissaries to the deepest part of the forest with white banners sewn from wedding dresses and the names of their children inked in trembling hands.
The treaty that emerged was simple, brutal, and—by their standards—merciful. Each generation, the vampires of Forest-Edge would claim a single life, offered freely by the city. In return, the predators would keep to their shadowed realm, feeding elsewhere, never again spilling uncontrolled blood at the edge of the settlement. One sacrifice for a hundred spared. Over time, the custom hardened into ceremony. The chosen name was inked on heavy vellum. A diplomatic letter, sealed in black wax, was sent from Forest-Edge to Cityline each spring. A single body went north. No soldiers followed. And the city slept.
Centuries passed. The small settlement grew into a city of lamps and trams and gilt-framed windows. Children learned the story in schoolbooks, bright pictures softening the terror into legend. The old river was bridged, the clearing paved, and still the forest loomed beyond, spires and branches rising like black teeth against the horizon.
Nova had learned the story the same way every child did—in a cramped classroom with faded maps on the wall and a teacher who called the vampires “our ancient neighbors” as if they were just another village over the hills. Even then, she’d thought the lesson felt rehearsed, a gloss over a wound no one wanted to press.
Now, sitting cross-legged on a narrow iron bed in the attic dormitory of Saint Martha’s Orphanage, she wasn’t thinking about the treaty at all. She was thinking about tomorrow.
Tomorrow, she would be eighteen. Legally grown. Old enough to vote if she’d cared to register, old enough to drink in the underground clubs her friends whispered about. Old enough to be put out on the street with a duffel bag and a polite handshake from the matron.
She stared at the low, slanted ceiling above her bunk. The plaster was cracked in hairline veins, like a map of some place she didn’t know how to reach. Beside her, the only window was a round porthole cut into the wood. Through it she could see the faint orange halo of Town Square’s lamps and, beyond, the blacker silhouette of the forest. On windy nights the smell of pine crept in like a warning.
“Nova,” whispered a voice from the next bed. It was Jo, the youngest of the attic girls, barely fifteen and all elbows and dark curls. “You awake?”
Nova rolled onto her side. “What do you think?”
Jo’s face appeared in the dim glow of the streetlight. “You’re thinking about tomorrow.”
“Brilliant deduction.” Nova tried for a smirk but it felt heavy on her mouth.
“You could stay with the laundry mistress,” Jo offered. “She likes you.”
“She likes free labor.” Nova brushed a strand of hair from her face. “Besides, they don’t keep you past eighteen. That’s the rule. Everyone knows it.”
Silence stretched. Nova had never liked this part of the night—the moment after the whispers ended, when the dark pressed in like a weight and there was nothing left to distract her from the truth.
She had nowhere to go. No parents waiting with an address scribbled on an envelope. No distant cousin. The orphanage had been her whole world since she was six, since the accident that took her mother and father in a train derailment on the west line. The papers had called it a tragedy; Nova had called it the end.
For years she’d built herself into a wall: strong-willed, sharp-tongued, quick to fight if someone tried to pity her. She’d told herself she didn’t need anyone. But inside, under all the armor, she felt like a hollow house—rooms where echoes lived but no one stayed.
Tomorrow she would be an adult. Tomorrow she would walk out of Saint Martha’s with the clothes on her back and the money in her envelope. Tomorrow, she would still be a nobody.
“Hey,” Jo murmured. “Happy early birthday.”
Nova shut her eyes. “Thanks.”
She didn’t say: I don’t know who I am. She didn’t say: I don’t know why I’m still here. She just listened to the creak of the rafters and the faint hiss of wind sliding past the round window. Far below, a clock struck midnight. One more night until she was gone.
Beyond the city’s lamps, the forest waited, older than any of them, its spires of stone and branches rising like a cathedral no human had ever built. In its heart, someone else was turning eighteen. Someone whose life would never be small, whose future would always be more than survival.
But Nova didn’t know that yet.