Zayah was a vibrant city built around a massive tree in the middle of the Forbidden Forest. Long ago, people had strategically chosen this place because demons couldn’t reach it. The mysterious nature of the forest kept them wandering in circles, never able to escape. It was as if the forest itself refused to let those foreign entities freely roam and devastate humanity. Another important feature of this forest: the trees didn’t burn. They were as hard as rock, so you couldn’t cut the forest down quickly either. With limited resources and no way of destroying it, the demons eventually decided to leave the forest alone.

The giant tree stood at the center of the Zayah. At its base, a large castle wrapped around the trunk like a stone belt. People called the tree The Tree of Life and the castle The Last Hope. Massive surface roots arched over the city, dividing it into different quarters: the market square, where people bought what they needed and sold what they could; the suburbs, where most of the population lived; the dock district, built along the long river that wound through the woods like a long, shimmering snake; and the most famous part of the city, the guild quarter, where blacksmiths, tanners, jewelers, and famed hunters were based.

The population was as vibrant and varied as the city itself. Over the last thousand years, people from all sorts of places had found their way there and stayed. Safety, relatively rich reserves of food, a simple sense of community, or just the comfort of being around someone, were more than enough reasons to remain.

It was the place where Liz had to grow up.

Today wasn’t just a regular day. Today was Liz’s eighteenth birthday. She was excited because it meant that soon she would finally be able to become a hunter and begin her story as a world-saver. For the last seven years, people had reminded her about the prophecy at every opportunity, and they’d had many opportunities. She was really tired of it by now, but as Zywa said, people needed to cling to any hope they could if they wanted to survive.

Liz had gotten used to the new world she’d been brought into, though it had been seven years since she’d last seen her father at the temporary camp. While almost everyone who’d been there returned to Zayah, he and Shin were among the few who didn’t. No one told her where they had gone, and because she wasn’t a hunter, she didn’t have access to any information about where they were or what they were doing. Zywa wasn’t helpful either. She was one of those people who always followed the rules and couldn’t imagine doing something as careless as revealing classified information.

Zywa took Liz under her wing when they came to the city. They lived with Zywa’s mom and dad in their small zemlyanka. It took Liz a while to get used to the new home, especially because it was so different from her old place. It was an earth house, partially dug into the ground. The roof was covered with turf, providing excellent insulation that kept it cool in summer and warm in winter. Zywa’s parents were very kind and treated Liz like their own daughter. That was probably why Zywa had grown up so kind herself, Liz thought.

Liz wanted to find her father, so naturally she decided to become a hunter. Zywa explained everything she knew about the Source: how to use power and what fragments of history she still remembered. Liz had to learn how to fight, how to survive out there for long periods of time, how to navigate the world, and most importantly, how to kill a demon if she ever faced one.

But today was the day she had been waiting for, the day she could finally begin moving forward with her plan. Liz couldn’t sleep the night before, so she got up early in the morning, while everyone was still asleep, and cooked breakfast for the whole family. When her foster mother entered the kitchen, she was stunned by what she saw. Not only was the sleeping beauty up before she needed to be dragged out of bed by force, but she had also cooked breakfast for the first time in her life. Liz notoriously hated cooking. She thought she simply wasn’t made for it, so there was no point in even trying.

“What are you doing? It’s your birthday. I should be the one cooking for you.”

Liz just raised her hands in the air at the protesting woman, admitting defeat. She had done it because she felt she needed to repay her debt to this family, and this was the only way available to her right now.

Everything was ready now, and the only thing left was to wake everyone up and get them to the table. Mother took that responsibility upon herself. She knocked on Zywa’s door and gently asked her to get ready for breakfast. When she approached the bedroom to wake her husband, he opened the door before she could touch it and, tired from a long night of sleeping, slowly walked to the bathroom.

When they all came to the table, the food was already waiting for them. Yaichnitsa (fried eggs) with sausages and caramelized onions, along with sautéed broccoli and mushrooms, were steamed on the plates. There was also ovsyanka (oatmeal) with a generous knob of butter in the middle and raisins, and a bunch of buterbrods (open-faced sandwiches): white bread slathered with butter. When the samovar began to sing, blowing out steam, Liz jumped up to outrun her foster mother, but she was too late. The experienced woman was already pouring herbal tea into four chashkas (cups), pleased to have outsmarted the cocky kid.

The food wasn’t good, even for a first-time cook. The eggs were burned, with pieces of shell in every bite, and the ovsyanka wasn’t fully cooked. They were lucky she hadn’t somehow ruined the buterbrods too. But how could you really mess those up? And, boy, everything was over-salted. They all pretended to enjoy it like seasoned actors, but when they finished eating, they quickly started drinking hot tea to wash the copious amount of salt from their tongues. Now their tongues were burned, and they couldn’t taste anything anymore.