The void collapsed.
Joshua's knees struck dirt, hard enough to jar his teeth. But the legs weren't his—too short, too thin, trembling with exhaustion.
No. This isn't my memory.
Ten-year-old hands came into focus. Pale skin, tiny black claws forming at the fingertips, blood dried under the nails from climbing over rocks. He could feel everything through this borrowed body. Ribs that ached from injuries that came from traveling monster infested lands. The specific emptiness of a stomach that hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. Feet raw from walking on stones.
"Demon!"
The shout made this small body flinch. A human man blocked the barn doorway, pitchfork aimed at Lysandra's—his—chest. The kind of terror on the man's face that made people do stupid, violent things.
This is how it starts, Joshua felt through their shared consciousness. Always.
"Marcus, stop!" A woman shoved past the man, flour still white on her apron. She looked at child-Lysandra the way Joshua remembered his mother looking at him.
Before everything went wrong, Joshua thought bitterly.
"She's hurt. Look at her."
The pitchfork dropped an inch. "Helena, that's a demon child—"
"That's a child." Helena was already walking forward. Joshua felt Lysandra's muscles tense to run. "Sweetheart, we're not going to hurt you. You're bleeding."
Through Lysandra's memories, Joshua understood the confusion of that moment. Humans attacked demons. Or they ran. They didn't kneel in barn dirt and hold out empty hands.
"My name is Helena," the woman said, voice carefully gentle. "This is my husband, Marcus. Can you tell us your name?"
Young Lysandra's mouth worked silently. Joshua felt her desperate mental scramble—lie, run, fight, hide—before something in Helena's expression made her whisper, "L-Lysa."
Not my full name. But… it should be okay right?
The memory lurched forward. Joshua found himself in a small kitchen, looking up at Helena through Lysandra's eyes. The woman was heating water, adding herbs that smelled like mint and something sweeter.
"This might sting," Helena warned, cleaning a deep cut on Lysandra's arm.
It did sting. But Helena sang while she worked—a soft melody about spring rivers and returning birds. Her hands stayed gentle even when young Lysandra's claws accidentally scratched her wrist.
"Sorry!" Lysandra jerked back.
"It's alright." Helena didn't even pause. "My grandmother used to say that healing hurts sometimes. But that's how you know it's working."
The memory blurred together. Two weeks later Marcus was teaching Lysandra to carve while rain hammered the roof.
"See the grain?" His massive hands guided her small ones. "You work with the wood, not against it. Like this."
The knife slipped. Her claw caught his thumb, drawing blood.
Young Lysandra froze, waiting for the blow. The anger.
Marcus just chuckled. "Well, now we've both bled on it." He wrapped his thumb in a cloth and continued guiding her hands. "Try again. Smaller movements."
By the end of the day, she'd carved a lopsided bird. Marcus put it on the mantle like it was art.
"My first carving was a potato," he said. "Or maybe a rock. Hard to tell. Yours actually looks like something."
Another shift. Three weeks in. Sara braiding Lysandra's hair by the fire, working around her small horns with practiced ease.
"How did you learn to do this?" Lysandra asked.
"I used to braid flowers for the summer festival." Sara's fingers were patient. "But hair is easier. Flowers can bend if you're not careful."
"A lot of things can go wrong if you aren't gentle," Lysandra muttered looking at her claws.
Sara's hands paused. Then she tugged Lysandra back until the younger girl's head rested against her chest.
"Not everything," Sara said. "Some things just get stronger. Like bread dough. The more you work it, the better it becomes."
"I'm not bread."
"No," Sara agreed, resuming the braid. "You're much more interesting than bread."
The memory jumped. A month in. Lysandra sick with fever—her demon constitution fighting some human illness. Helena sitting beside her bed for two straight days.
"You don't have to stay," young Lysandra mumbled, half-delirious. "I'll be fine."
"Mothers stay," Helena said simply, cooling Lysandra's forehead with a damp cloth. "That's what we do."
"You're not my mother."
"No," Helena agreed. "But you're here, and you're sick, and you need someone. I wouldn't be able to look my husband in the eyes if I were a woman who could ignore a sick child."
Lysandra's fever broke that night. She woke to find Helena asleep in the chair, still holding her hand.
Another memory…Marcus coming home from the market, grim-faced. Sara and Lysandra playing cards at the table.
"There was talk in town," he said quietly to Helena. "About demons. They are checking houses."
"We could hide her," Sara said immediately.
"I should go," young Lysandra interrupted, already standing. "You've been kind, but—"
Helena crossed the room and pulled Lysandra into a fierce hug. The first real hug the child had ever received.
"You're not going anywhere," Helena said firmly. "We don't abandon family."
"I'm not family. I'm just some demon who—"
"You're Lysa," Marcus said, his voice brooking no argument. "You help Helena prepare food every morning. You carved half the wooden animals on that shelf. Sara reads to you every night even though you pretend you're too old for stories."
"You're ours," Sara added, joining the hug. "That's just how it is now."
Joshua felt young Lysandra break down completely, sobbing into Helena's shoulder. Not the calculated tears of demon court. Real, ugly crying.
"I don't understand," Lysandra gasped between sobs. "Why would you—I'm not—I have horns and claws and—"
"And you apologize every time you accidentally break something," Helena murmured. "You share your food even when you're hungry. You spend time with the animals when you think no one is around."
"You're just a girl," Marcus said, his big hand gently rubbing on her head.
Three months of this—Being loved without condition or expectation in a place where her horns nor status mattered.
Three months of being Lysa. Just Lysa.
The memory lurched to that final morning. The floor vibrating under marching feet. Marcus going white.
"Demon soldiers. Helena, take the girls to the root cellar—"
The door didn't splinter. It simply ceased.
One moment there was solid oak. The next, fragments of wood hung suspended in air, rotating slowly as if time had forgotten them. Through the empty frame stepped something that made young Lysandra's demon instincts scream.
White robes that didn't quite touch the ground. The fabric moved oddly, shifting against winds that didn't exist. Where a face should be, shadow writhed beneath a hood.
"Found you at last, little princess."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Marcus dropped his pitchfork, hands shaking as his human mind tried to process what stood before him.
The… Overseer? Joshua thought, his mind frantic.
"Harboring the enemy?" The words tasted of dust and old graves. "How... brave."
"She's a child!" Helena stepped forward. Through Lysandra's body, Joshua felt terror spike. No, don't defend me, they'll—
"She is Lysandra Nightweave." Reality bent slightly around the Overseer as he spoke her true name. The wooden carvings fell from the shelves crashing on to the floor. "Daughter of the Demon King. Your... 'child'... is royalty playing house."
The room changed, the very air becoming dangerous.
"You're... a princess?" Sara's voice came out small. "Lysa?"
Young Lysandra couldn't speak. Joshua felt her throat close completely, watching her "family" process this revelation.
"Oh, sweet girl," Helena breathed, and there was no anger in it. Just sorrow. "You must have been so frightened."
Marcus's mind worked faster than the others. Joshua could see it through Lysandra's eyes—the way he calculated distances, exits, chances.
"The back door," he said quietly. "Sara, take your mother and—"
"Going somewhere?"
Marcus's leg snapped without anyone touching him. He screamed, collapsing as the bone jutted through skin.
"MARCUS!" Helena screamed.
"I despise when mortals make me work." The Overseer hadn't moved, but suddenly he was beside Marcus, those pale fingers emerging from his sleeves like something birthed from nightmares. "You housed demon royalty. In wartime. The sentence is death."
"Please," Marcus gasped, trying to drag himself backward with his arms. "My family didn't know—"
"Ignorance and innocence are not the same thing." The Overseer's fingers brushed Marcus's forehead.
Marcus's eyes rolled back. Blood poured from his nose, his ears. He made a single, choked sound before going still.
"NO!" Helena grabbed both girls, hauling them toward the back door. "Run! Both of you, RUN!"
They almost made it.
The back door exploded inward from the Overseer's will. He stood there now, having moved without crossing the space between.
"Did you think you could run from something that exists partially outside your reality?" His presence made the air itself feel sick. "How wonderfully naive."
Helena shoved Sara toward the window, then pushed Lysandra the other direction. "Go! Both of you, GO!"
Sara scrambled up, her dress catching on the broken glass. She was halfway through when a terrible sound filled the room—like reality tearing.
Helena was lifted six inches off the ground, gasping, clawing at nothing around her throat.
"Mother!" Sara screamed from the window.
"Watch carefully, little princess," the Overseer said to Lysandra. "This is what happens to those who forget their place in the natural order."
Helena's body contorted. There was a crack, then another. She dropped to the floor, her neck bent at an impossible angle, eyes still open, still looking at her daughters.
"MOTHER!" Sara tried to climb back through the window, but demon soldiers had surrounded the house now, grabbing her.
Young Lysandra's magic erupted—weak, desperate, primal. It caught the soldiers off guard just enough for Sara to break free and tumble outside.
"Find the human girl," the Overseer commanded, and his voice made the demon soldiers themselves tremble. "I dislike loose ends."
Through the broken glass, Sara's terrified face appeared one more time. Tears ran down her cheeks as she looked at her dead parents, then at Lysandra. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Turning without ever forming a proper sentence Sara ran into the treeline.
The demon soldiers gave chase, but Sara knew these woods. Had played in them her whole life. Joshua felt through Lysandra's memory the sound of feet crashing through underbrush, growing distant.
She made it. She got away. And she'll hate me forever.
The Overseer drifted closer to young Lysandra.
"Your pet human escaped. But we have her scent now. Her fear. She can run to the ends of the earth, and we will find her." Pale fingers touched Lysandra's chin, tilting her head up. His touch burned cold. "You caused this, princess. Their kindness made them weak. Your presence made them targets. Remember that."
He looked around the room at Marcus's twisted form, at Helena's broken body, and toward the blood soaking into floors where a family had eaten breakfast that morning.
"This is what love between our demons and humans bring. Death. Always death."
Joshua felt it through Lysandra's body. Her heart, her soul, her emotion switched off completely.
But underneath that nothing, buried so deep young Lysandra didn't even know it was there, was a single thought:
Sara lived. Sara made it out. She'll live to hate me.
A golden archway appeared in the collapsing memory—warm, inviting, showing another version where Lysandra warned them earlier, where they all escaped together, where no one died on kitchen floors.
Joshua felt Lysandra's entire soul reaching for that lie.
But she turned away.
"They loved me even knowing what I was," she whispered to the door. "But they aren't alive anymore. Honoring them isn't by choosing the lie. It's by continuing to push forward. To take revenge—"
The memory shattered.
But instead of the familiar void, Joshua felt himself pulled deeper, Lysandra's consciousness recoiling violently, trying to block him.
No, her mental voice cracked with something beyond fear. Not this one. You can't see this one. Please, Joshua, please—
The trial didn't care.
The second memory was already forming.
Four years later, the Trial whispered.