Sarafina POV
I didn't sleep.
Not really.
My apartment felt too silent after the stranger, Alistair left. His name kept replaying in my skull like a word I wasn't supposed to hear. A glitch in a language I didn't speak.
Alistair.
Even thinking it made something shift under my skin, like the faintest hum of recognition. Wrong. Impossible. I'd never met him. I would have remembered someone like that.
By morning, paranoia was welded to my spine.
And the mark on my wrist was still there, looking exactly like it hadn't existed yesterday.
A small, pale sigil. Almost shaped like a crescent interrupted by a diagonal slash. It glowed faintly when I touched it, and went dark when I pulled away.
Normal twenty-five-year-old women do not wake up with glowing marks after being murdered by shadow-men.
Normal women do not get murdered by shadow-men, period.
At least the coffee machine worked. I clung to that victory.
I sat on my couch with my laptop open, a blanket around my shoulders, and typed into the search bar:
crescent slash symbol meaning wrist sigil crescent glowing
cult marks wrists astronomy symbols, am I hallucinating marks on skin
Google stared at me with the digital equivalent of a shrug.
After thirty minutes of garbage results, I dug deeper. Occult blogs. Fringe myth forums. Sites that looked like they were designed in 1999 and never updated except by someone's fever-dream insomnia.
Still nothing.
But it bothered me. The mark didn't feel random.
It felt… personal.
I finally took a picture of my wrist, hiding the faint shimmer by reducing the exposure and posted it anonymously to a forum dedicated to "arcane symbol identification."
A stupid idea. But stupid ideas seemed to be all I had left.
User4827: Anyone know this symbol? Found it on my wrist after a blackout. Just want to know if it's cultural, medical, or fake.
I refreshed the page three times. Nothing.
I refreshed it a fourth time…
A new reply blinked into place.
No username. No profile picture.
Just: Anonymous.
The message was six words long.
"You should not have survived it."
My lungs forgot their job. My fingers curled against the couch cushion.
I waited for more. A follow-up. An explanation.
Nothing came.
I clicked the username, if you could call it that. It wasn't a real account. No creation date. No message history. Like the person had appeared just to drop that line and vanish again.
"You should not have survived it."
Survived what?
The mark? The attack? The night I died?
My pulse hammered as I typed shakily;
User4827: Survived what? What does it mean?
The moment I hit send, the original reply disappeared.
Deleted.
The profile name changed to: [Unavailable].
I refreshed again.
The entire thread was gone.
My post, the reply, deleted so cleanly it was like none of it ever existed.
A cold prickling crawled up my spine.
Someone was watching.
Someone who had known the moment I posted that picture.
Someone who didn't want me asking questions.
I slammed the laptop shut, breath uneven. The room suddenly felt too small, the air too thin. I pushed off the couch and paced to the window.
Outside, Valeries City looked normal.
Or maybe it only pretended to.
Lights shimmered across the skyline, glass towers catching the morning sun in sharp silver angles. Cars moved. People walked. The world spun on its axis like nothing had changed.
But I had changed.
That night kept hitting me in flashes, the man in the streetlight halo, the cold blade against my skin, the word "sacrifice," the burn in my blood, and the stranger who knew too much.
Alistair.
I rubbed the mark on my wrist, hoping it would fade, smudge, peel off like a sticker.
It did nothing.
Before I could spiral deeper, my phone buzzed on the counter.
Cassian.
Of course.
He had a talent for showing up exactly when my life fell apart, always carrying concern in his voice and secrets behind his eyes.
"Hey," I answered, trying to sound normal.
"You didn't answer my texts," he said gently. "Are you okay?"
No.
Absolutely not. But telling him that would require explaining everything.
"Just… tired," I lied. "Rough night."
There was a pause on the line, Cassian's version of a frown.
"Want to meet for coffee? I'm already near your place."
Already near.
Of course he was.
I glanced at my wrist again. At the laptop still humming suspiciously.
At the window where the world pretended it made sense.
"Yeah," I whispered. "I think I need to get out of the house."
"Good," he replied, voice softening. "I'll be downstairs."
When the call ended, I exhaled shakily.
But one thought clung to me like a burr: If someone online knew the mark meant I shouldn't have survived…
Then maybe I really hadn't.
Maybe this world, the one where I got a second chance, wasn't the one I left behind.
And maybe, just maybe…
Someone out there was waiting for me to realize it.