Mother has killed me. 

I’m almost sure of it. 

Blood drips down from my abdomen and onto the floor, coating the black marble with quite a mess. I open my mouth to speak, but all I manage is a croak. My fingers tremble at my sides, and a cough splatters more blood onto the already soiled marble. 

Mother tsks, and waves her hand at Barth The Henchman. “Take it away.” Her cold and uncaring red eyes don’t even look at me as I struggle to stay upright. Her silver hair is wrapped in intricate braids that weave around her crown and feed into one larger braid cascading all the way down to her knees. The twisting golden branches that make up the crown stand tall against the backdrop of her crimson throne. 

With a single Command, she calls her dagger back to her, and it wrenches out of my gut. 

Finally, I fall. 

“But—Miss—Your daughter—”

“I no longer have a daughter. Didn’t you hear?” Mother flicks her hand again, and the order is clear. Barth knows better than to refuse it. 

Barth—once my friend—scurries to my fading, broken body and shuffles me so I'm flung over his shoulder. My frame is slight, emaciated from days in the dungeon, my hands and feet shackled together with magic suppressing iron. He says nothing as he drags me out of my mother’s presence, and back through the castle.

The world is starting to fade, but my consciousness hangs on. 

The trip through the familiar halls of my childhood is filled with black gaps and holes. One moment, I’m in the throne room, awaiting Mother’s punishment—the next I’m passing my old bed chamber, and then down swirling stone steps, and then to the servants quarters, and finally, the medical chamber. 

I think Barth is the one who set me on the table. I’ve switched from my usual silks and corsets to rags during my stay in the deep depths of the castle, and the old, threadbare cotton is not enough to stop the bleeding. It sticks to the wound uncomfortably, but I make no move to fix it. 

“Princess! Princess, hey, stay with me! It’s okay—it’s okay—” Barth switches between mumbling and shouting, occasionally slapping my cheek to keep me conscious. I’m not sure who he’s trying to reassure—me, or himself—but he and I both know my situation is dire. 

I’m going to die a slow, bleeding death. Courtesy of my mother. 

Barth presses clean rags against the wound in my gut, trying to stifle the bleeding, but the white is quickly corrupted by the crimson leaking out. His face screws up as blood gushes over his hands, but he doesn’t stop. His wrinkles crease deep with his worry, and I choke as I try to speak. 

“We—both know—this is the end, for me.” My own voice sounds foreign to me, rough with my dying breaths. 

Barth drops the pressure on the wound, frantically undoing the shackles with the keys around his belt. “No! This isn’t—this can’t be it!” The shackles tumble to the floor, a metallic clank echoing in their wake, but all I can do is laugh. 

“I’m no healer, Barth. My specialty is—curses. You know that.” I cough up more blood, turning my head to spit it out on the floor. My breathing is ragged, punctured, and slowing. 

Tears well up in Barth’s eyes. He cradles my cheek with his hand—the closest thing to a fatherly touch I’ve ever had. My body convulses again in pain, and a tear drops onto my cheek. “What will you do?” He asks.

“I’ll return,” I croak in response, a soft, black mist gathering around my body. Blood pools around the table, dripping onto the floor, and I fight to keep my eyes open. “I’ll return, and I’ll kill every last one of them.” 

That’s the last thing I remember before everything goes dark. 

***

The next thing I see is—light. It’s so cliche, but I run for it. It answers me with a burst of vibrant color, and the muffled sounds of screams mixed with a baby’s cries. Everything is blurry, shapes and colors that make almost no sense as my body is quickly passed around a faded room. 

Did Barth get the healers? Did he risk his life for mine? Mother would surely have his head, if this was true. 

No, my body is too light—too foreign—to have been saved. Something is wrapped around me—it’s soft, fluffy. A blanket. The screams have died down, and all I can hear are muffled voices and coos of excitement. Finally, I blink enough times to get a bearing on my surroundings. 

I’m in a cottage. It looks like it belongs to one of the outskirt villages, based on the style of the wood. There is a woman coated in sweat, her hair sticking to her forehead, laying on a bed with her hand tightly clasped around a man who is fighting to get a better look at me. The room is barren other than the ratty bed, a cracked wooden nightstand, a wardrobe, and an old desk that looks almost ready to give. Sprawled out on it are the tools of a medicinalist. 

The baby’s cries have died down, and it finally hits me. They are my cries. 

I’m settled into the arms of an old man with kinky, curly hair, dark skin, and wild brown eyes. He has goggles strapped on his head, and he’s wearing robes. The medicinalist. He smiles at me, and I can’t respond. I can’t get my mouth to form any words—it’s too new, too foreign to me. 

He passes me to the woman, and she bites back sobs as she looks at me with nothing but—adoration. A look she surely wouldn’t be giving me if she knew who I was. Which means I don’t look like myself. 

I am something new. 

“Congratulations,” the medicinalist says to the woman. “A healthy baby boy.” 

What?

“What will we name him?” The man asks, shoving a large finger into my personal space to coo at me and tickle my cheek. 

“Isn’t it obvious? Given the day?” The woman laughs, and it’s tired and ragged but happy. They’re happy to see me. Happy to have me in their presence. It’s a feeling so foreign to me, I don’t know what to do with it. 

She bounces me in her arms as she speaks a name that feels like a dream, and suddenly, my new life takes flight. 

Equinox.