I woke up the next morning with the metallic taste still in my mouth.

  No, wait. It wasn't there anymore. I knew that. I'd brushed my teeth before bed with that disgusting concoction Mom made with herbs from the garden.

  "Mmm... What a horrible taste. Blood would've been better."

  But the memory of the night before was so vivid my tongue moved on its own. My inner lip throbbed hot and swollen. Every movement reignited the fme.

  White light from dawn filtered through the open window along with the summer morning humidity, and the room was silent.

  Wrinkled sheets, twisted around my ankles, were heavy and damp. I must've fought in my sleep, troubled from yesterday's fight.

  "I hate you." I lifted my head from the pillow.

  My words. My voice.

  "Today... today I'll show them. Yeah. I'll show them."

  My cheek throbbed swollen, warm to the touch. Each heartbeat reignited the burning under my skin. Pain reminded me it was the first time Mom and Dad had hit me since I was born, and that burned more than the sp.

  "Fine. Get ready and go downstairs. At the first word they say I'll be ready to fight. I'll sulk all day!"

  "You almost destroyed the kitchen yesterday. You broke the statue. You made us spend money. A hundred, no a thousand coins of every color!" they'd say. I mimicked their voices, a mix of both that didn't sound like either one.

  I sat up in bed. My legs dangled over the edge, feet not touching the floor.

  "I won't apologize. If they want to, they'll do it. I'll never forgive Dad for hitting me."

  Feet on the rough floor. Three steps to the bedroom door. Then the narrow and steep stairs. Each step creaked under the weight.

  First step: the oven fme coming out the door, coiled like a snake.

  Second step: "I hate you". My voice breaking.

  Third step: the taste of copper: warm, thick on my tongue. Filling my mouth up to my throat.

  Fourth step: silence after the sp. How nobody had moved. Nobody had spoken.

  My bare feet touched the cold wood. The house was awake.

  Mom is awake.

  Her voice filtered through the closed kitchen door. Her usual nameless song.

  My fingers gripped the cold handle.

  From the other side came the smell of burning from the night before.

  I breathed deeply.

  Okay. I'm ready.

  I opened the door. Of course it creaked. Everything in this house made noise when you didn't want it to.

  The smell that filled my nostrils was different from the burning I'd been thinking about.

  Sweet and delicate.

  "Good morning, sweetheart."

  Her voice was soft and gentle. Too gentle.

  Mirina smiled when she turned toward me, her golden hair catching reflections of the sun filtered through the window. Her eyes were tired, but kind.

  "I... g-good morning."

  My voice came out small, uncertain.

  She dried her hands on her apron and pointed to the chair next to her.

  "Sit down. I was waiting for you to have breakfast together."

  Scent of porridge and apple: sweet, warm, thick in the air. Familiar as always.

  "Mom... I..."

  My gaze fell on the oven door. It was there, in its pce. A bit dented and fixed as best as possible. On the white wall was a faded bck mark.

  "I'll get the porridge and be right there."

  "Mom, I wanted to say that..."

  "Here you go." Steam and sweet scent hit me when she poured the hot mush into the bowl in front of me.

  I sat on the chair. Yesterday's lump had returned to my throat. The kitchen looked fine, there were no signs of other damage beyond the oven door and maybe a small chip on the table where the cy cup had exploded.

  I grabbed the spoon and it was incredibly heavy.

  "I... I..."

  "I put apple pieces in like you like them." She sat down beside me. She brought a steaming spoonful close to her mouth, blew. The steam dissolved.

  "...yesterday..." Words wouldn't come out. Not from my mouth, but from my mind. I'd open my mouth, one or two words, but didn't know how to continue.

  "Look, I just wanted to..."

  "I'm sorry, Arek." She beat me to it.

  Sweet steam from the bowl rose between us as we looked at each other in a moment of silence.

  A soft smile on her pink lips, and a caress on my hair made me tremble for an instant.

  Not because I was afraid she'd hit me. Not that.

  But because I was happy she was stroking me and smiling at me.

  She continued, her voice soft. "We asked you to be careful and I didn't realize we'd made a mess of things. We just wanted to protect you, but instead we tried to change you."

  "No, it's me..."

  "No, Arek. It's not your fault. I'm your mom and I myself forgot that you're a child, my child, and you're special. I know all moms think their child is special, but you certainly are for me and for your father too."

  Her eyes became glossy. Was she about to cry?

  "We shouldn't have stopped you from being yourself. We just wanted to make sure nothing bad could happen."

  She breathed, and steam rising from the two bowls moved slightly.

  "You have a power we don't fully understand. And a mind... a mind that amazes us every day."

  She ran her tongue over her lip.

  "The truth is we didn't understand you. And when you don't understand something..."

  A small drop formed in the corner of her eye.

  "No, Mom, it was my fault. I know I'm different, I know I need to be careful. I said things I didn't really mean." My vision blurred.

  She pulled me up from the chair, making me sit on the table. Her arms trembled slightly from the effort.

  "I know, sweetheart. I know."

  She held me tight. Her scent of flour and... Mom... wrapped around me.

  And I...

  My chest melted and my shoulders colpsed. What had been tense since the day before, or maybe for an entire lifetime, finally loosened.

  I cried with that violent, silent sobbing that doesn't belong to children, but to those who've held back too much for too long.

  "I want Dad to know," I whispered against her apron. "I want to tell him that... that I don't hate him."

  "He knows, Arek. He knows."

  "But I want to tell him myself."

  She stroked my hair in silence, letting the st shocks of crying exhaust themselves against her shoulder.

  We stayed like that, suspended in that kitchen that still bore the marks of my explosion. A cloud passed in front of the sun, casting a shadow. The scent of the porridge changed and we didn’t move.

  Then, with the same gentleness with which she'd lifted me, she made me climb down from the table. Her fingers lingered a moment on my cheeks, drying the wet traces with the edge of her apron.

  "When he comes back, you'll tell him," she finally promised, and her tone left no doubt.

  I went back to sit in my pce, feeling emptied, as if along with the tears the weight crushing my lungs had also slipped away. The world seemed to have regained its natural colors, less blinding, calmer.

  We finished breakfast together.

  Porridge was cold by now, but it didn't matter.

  She told a story I'd never heard.

  "The first time you spoke," she said, and a smile lit up her face.

  "Really?" I ughed despite everything. "What did I say?"

  "'I want to learn magic.'"

  She shook her head, but the smile remained.

  "You were eight months old, Arek. Eight months."

  The smile faded slightly.

  "Maybe we should've worried even then."

  Words were light. Almost a joke.

  But underneath there was something else.

  "Have I always scared you?"

  She looked at me for a long moment.

  "Yes," she said, honestly. "But you also filled us with wonder."

  Then I got up and helped clean.

  I dried the dishes, and she put them away.

  Simple, domestic gestures. Reassuring quotidianity.

  The wet cloth was cold between my fingers. Heavy with water. The bowl slipped, I caught it before it fell.

  "Careful," she said, but she was smiling.

  A vibration in my arms—not pain, but tension. Like strings of an instrument pulled too tight, ready to break or py.

  This is good. This is how it should be.

  "When is Dad coming back?"

  I asked it casually. While drying another pte.

  But a tightness inside me when I said it, like I already knew I wouldn't like the answer. Like my body had already sensed the danger before my mind understood it.

  "I want to apologize to him. Tell him that..."

  Her hands stopped.

  The wet cloth dripped onto the floor this time.

  Then a pause, long, too long.

  "He left early this morning."

  She didn't look at me.

  "For that job he mentioned?"

  "Yes."

  Her voice was strange. Like when she lied about hidden cookies.

  "Where did he go?"

  "To the Singing Hills. He accepted a job in those parts."

  She turned toward the sink. Back to me.

  "When is he coming back?"

  The silence was even longer than before.

  "Mom?"

  "In a few days, sweetheart."

  But her voice trembled. And a tightness inside me, impossible to expin, when she said the name Singing Hills. Like my body already knew what my mind didn't want to believe.

  But the way she said it…

  It seemed like she didn't really believe it, like she was trying to convince herself.

  "It should be the day after tomorrow. Or at most in three days."

  But her voice trembled.

  I turned around and my eyes fell on the wall behind the stove. The soot stain was still there. From the night before.

  It seemed bigger. Darker.

  Like it had spread during the night.

  But maybe it was just in my head.

  The taste in my mouth returned.

  Metallic. Warm.

  Blood.

  My hands tingled.

  Not like before, when magic exploded. Different.

  Just different.

  Colder. Deeper.

  Like something under my skin was trying to get out.

  What's happening?

  A fsh. Very brief. Less than a heartbeat, but longer than a nightmare.

  ~ * ~

  The kitchen vanished. In its pce, the cold.

  A forest. Dense darkness between trunks so tall they seemed like pilrs of a cursed cathedral.

  The air no longer smelled of flour; it was humid, acidic, charged with the sweetish smell of rot and disturbed earth.

  And the moon. Enormous, silver, like always when it didn't turn red.

  It occupied half the sky, so close it seemed ready to crush me. Its light dripped between the branches in livid fiments, creating shadows that wouldn't stay still.

  Someone was running.

  I heard that breath: bored, a wheeze scratching the throat. Feet slipping on roots slimy as snakes.

  He fell. My hands—no, his—sank into frigid mud. The pain in his ankle was an electric shock that climbed to his brain. He got up, but the movement was broken, limping.

  He kept running. Slower and slower. The forest was swallowing him.

  And behind him... the silence of darkness was moving. Faster, he didn't breathe.

  Dad?

  The chill was real. Not in the kitchen, but inside. Like a vision showing me what was about to happen, or what had already happened. The boundary between the two blurred, leaving me only terror.

  Heart, not mine, HIS, hammered against his ribs with a violence that took my breath away.

  It wasn't a child's worry; it was the blind terror of prey feeling the predator's breath on its neck.

  ~ * ~

  My fingers clenched on the edge of the table until they turned white. Wood creaked.

  The smell of porridge returned. But the cold... the cold had remained inside me.

  The kitchen came back. Mom was looking at me worried.

  Nausea. Sudden. Violent.

  Not again. Not yet. Something's wrong!

  I didn't know what.

  But I felt it.

  Like a weight pressing against my chest.

  Like when you know something bad is about to happen.

  And you can't stop it.

  "Arek? Is everything okay?"

  I didn't answer. I looked out the window. The road was empty.

  I tried to get up. My legs didn't respond.

  I took a step, but the world swayed and I had to grab the table.

  I'll save you! I don't know how. But I will save you Dad!

  Dad was out there. Somewhere. On the Singing Hills, where I couldn't reach.

  And something inside me, what my body knew but my mind didn't, told me he was in danger, and that I could no longer save him.