The orphanage had no name.
Lucc supposed it didn't need one. Children didn't choose to come here, and no one asked where they'd been before leaving. It sat at the eastern edge of Greyhollow, a town that had grown around the refugee camps decades ago and never quite decided to become anything more. The building itself was stone, low and functional, with narrow windows that let in light but not hope.
He was scrubbing the floor when the ash began to fall.
It came through the window cracks first, fine as flour, grey-white and oddly warm. Lucc paused, the brush still in his hand, watching the particles drift through the afternoon sun. They didn't fall like snow. They fell like something remembering how to fall.
"Lucc." Matron Heller's voice carried the particular edge she reserved for when he'd stopped working. "The floor won't clean itself."
"Yes, Matron." He dipped the brush back into the bucket, but he couldn't stop watching the ash. It was settling on the windowsill, on the stone floor he'd just cleaned, on his forearms where his sleeves were rolled back.
It didn't burn, but it didn't feel inert either.
"Is it from the Ashlands?" Mira asked from the doorway. She was seven, small even for her age, with a persistent cough that the Matron said would pass when spring came. Spring had come and gone twice since then.
"Probably." Lucc kept his voice level. "Wind must've shifted."
"But the Ashlands are three weeks' ride away. Master Kael said so."
Lucc glanced toward the courtyard where Kael was splitting wood. The older man's movements were economical, practiced, each swing of the axe ending precisely where it needed to. He'd been a soldier once, before the injury that left him with a limp and a position at an orphanage no one wanted to fund properly.
Kael had also been something else, but he never spoke about it, and Lucc had learned not to ask.
"Wind can carry things a long way," Lucc said.
Mira coughed into her sleeve, then studied the ash on her hand with the intensity children reserved for things adults pretended weren't important. "It feels weird."
"Don't touch it."
"I already did."
"Then wash your hands."
She left, still examining her palm, and Lucc returned to scrubbing. The ash kept falling. By the time he finished the hallway, there was a visible layer on the windowsills, and he could taste it in the air—not unpleasant exactly, but present. Insistent.
The others noticed at dinner.
Sixteen children sat at two long tables in what the Matron called the dining hall and everyone else called the room with tables. The meal was barley stew, same as always, with bread that was only slightly stale. Lucc had learned to be grateful for bread that was only slightly anything.
"It's in the stew," said Ren, who was twelve and complained about everything with the dedication of someone who'd made it their purpose. "I can feel it on my tongue."
"Then don't eat it," offered Tam, fourteen, pragmatic to the point of cruelty.
"I'm going to eat it. I'm just saying there's ash in it."
"There's ash in everything," Lucc said quietly. "It'll pass."
But he wasn't sure it would.
The orphanage had rhythms. Wake before dawn, chores, lessons when the traveling teacher remembered to come, more chores, sleep. The rhythms had kept Lucc alive for the eight years since the fire that killed his parents, had given him something to press against when the memories came too sharp.
The ash was disrupting the rhythm.
That night, lying on his cot in the dormitory, Lucc listened to the breathing of the other boys and watched the ash continue its slow accumulation on the windowsill. Moonlight turned it silver. It looked almost beautiful.
He thought about the Ashlands.
Everyone knew the story, the way everyone knew the sun rose and water was wet. Fifty years ago, a wielder of the Book of Wrath had lost control. The accounts varied on whether it had been intentional or accidental, whether the wielder had been trying to stop an invasion or start one. The result was the same: an entire region transformed into a wound that wouldn't heal. Cities reduced to shadows. Mountains cracked like eggs. Reality itself bent around the spaces where the worst of it had happened.
The Ashlands whispered, people said. They remembered what had been done to them.
Lucc had never been there. He never wanted to go.
But lying in the dark, tasting ash on his tongue, he felt something like recognition. Like a word he'd known once and forgotten, trying to remember itself through his bones.
He closed his eyes. Tried to sleep.
The dream came instead.
He was standing in a library that had no walls.
Books stretched in every direction, arranged on shelves that curved up into darkness. But it was the book in front of him that mattered, the one sitting on a pedestal of stone that looked like it had been carved from a single piece of the world's foundation.
The book was bound in leather the color of old blood, its cover marked with symbols that hurt to look at directly. It had no title, but Lucc knew its name the way he knew his own heartbeat.
Wrath.
"You shouldn't be here," he said to the book, or to himself, or to the dream.
The book opened.
Not by wind, not by hand. It simply decided to be open, and the pages turned themselves, faster and faster, and Lucc saw things written there in a language he couldn't read but understood anyway. He saw cities burning. He saw mountains bowing. He saw a figure standing in the center of devastation, arms outstretched, and couldn't tell if they were surrendering or conducting.
The pages stopped.
On the final visible page, there was a single sentence in clear, plain script:
What will you do when they make you choose?
Lucc reached for the book—to close it, to push it away, he wasn't sure—and his hand passed through it like smoke. The library collapsed inward, folding around him, and he was falling through layers of something that wasn't quite space, and somewhere in the falling he heard a voice that wasn't quite sound:
"Soon."
He woke to Kael's hand on his shoulder.
"Easy." The older man's voice was low, meant not to wake the others. "You were talking in your sleep."
Lucc sat up slowly, his heart still racing. Dawn light was just starting to grey the windows. The ash had stopped falling sometime in the night, but it had left a film over everything, like the world had been sketched in charcoal.
"What did I say?" Lucc asked.
Kael studied him with eyes that had seen too much and decided to keep watching anyway. "You said 'not yet.'" He paused. "Want to tell me what you were dreaming about?"
Lucc looked at his hands. They were shaking, just slightly. "I don't remember."
It was a lie. Kael knew it was a lie. But he nodded and stood, his bad leg making him favor the right side. "Get dressed. Matron wants the ash cleared before breakfast."
"Kael—" Lucc stopped, unsure what question he was trying to ask.
The older man waited.
"The ash. It means something, doesn't it?"
Kael was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of experience choosing its words carefully. "The Ashlands have been stable for fifty years. The fact that they're reaching this far now..." He shook his head. "It means something's changed. Or something's waking up."
"What do we do?"
"We clear the ash," Kael said. "We keep the children safe. And we pay attention."
He left Lucc sitting there in the grey dawn, surrounded by sleeping boys who didn't know yet that the world had shifted during the night.
Lucc dressed quietly and went outside to find the courtyard transformed. The ash had settled everywhere, turning the orphanage grounds into a monochrome painting. His footprints were the first marks in it, and something about that felt significant in a way he couldn't articulate.
He was sweeping the front steps when he found it.
Half-buried in the ash, pressed against the foundation stones like it had been waiting: a book.
Not large, perhaps the size of his hand, bound in leather that was somehow more present than the world around it. The cover was unmarked except for a single symbol burned deep into the grain—a circle broken by a downward slash.
Lucc knew he shouldn't touch it. Every survival instinct he'd developed in eight years of orphanage life was screaming at him to walk away, to get Kael, to tell the Matron.
He picked it up anyway.
The moment his fingers touched the leather, the world went silent. Not quiet—silent. As if sound itself had decided to hold its breath. The ash stopped drifting. The wind stopped moving. Even his heartbeat seemed to pause between one moment and the next.
The book was warm.
No, not warm. It was the exact temperature of his hand, as if it had always been part of him and was only now remembering how to be separate.
Don't open it, he thought.
But the book had other ideas.
The cover lifted itself, and Lucc saw the first page, blank except for three words written in a hand that looked ancient and immediate at once:
You are chosen.
The world rushed back in—sound, motion, breath—and with it came a sensation like lightning deciding to live inside his chest. Not pain, exactly. More like the recognition of a capacity he hadn't known he possessed, a door opening onto a room full of fire and the fire saying welcome home.
"No," Lucc whispered.
The book didn't respond. It didn't need to.
Because somewhere in the distance, maybe in the Ashlands, maybe in the space between one heartbeat and the next, something had heard him refuse.
And it had begun to move.