Chapter 1: Graves and Growls
The air in the ruins tasted like forgotten things. Damp earth, the sweet-rot scent of crushed night-blooming flowers, and underneath it all, the sharp, clean tang of oxidized metal. Sophia ran her fingertips along a fractured flagstone, the marble cool and gritty beneath her skin. Vines, thick as her wrist, had pried the stones apart, as if the earth itself was patiently digesting the corpse of the Shattered Fae Court.
She knelt, the worn knees of her baggy sage-green cargo pants pressing into the soil. Here, at the base of a half-toppled archway carved with spirals that hurt to look at directly, the hum of old magic was strongest. It vibrated in her molars, a fading radio signal from a station that went off the air centuries before she was born.
Her eyes fell to the back of her left hand. The simple ‘07’ stood out against her skin, the ink seemingly fresher than the day it appeared when she was a child. No memory accompanied it, only the unwavering certainty that it was a remnant, a piece of a page torn from the book of her lineage. She pressed the hand flat against the cold marble, as if she could download the past through her skin.
A shadow, long and severe, fell across the stone, blotting out the bruised purple of the twilight sky.
“Stop digging up dead shit, alien brat.”
The voice was all gravel and gunpowder. She didn’t need to look up to see the scowl. She could feel it, like a change in barometric pressure.
“It’s not dead,” she said softly, tracing the ‘07 with her other thumb. “It’s sleeping. And I’m not digging. I’m listening.”
Katsuki Bakugou loomed over her, a monument of barely-leashed impatience. His crossed arms bulged against the seams of his black, long-sleeved tactical shirt. The fading light caught the ash-blond spikes of his hair, turning them into a jagged crown. “Sounds like a fancy way to mope. Get up. Camp’s a klick east, and Kirishima’s burning the damn stew again.”
“Eijirou adds spirit. It’s chef’s choice,” Sophia countered, a grin tugging at her lips. She finally tilted her head back to look at him. His crimson eyes were fixed on her, not on the ruins. That was always the way. He saw her, a potential problem to be managed, not the history weeping from the stones. “I just need a minute. The resonance here… it’s like a tune I know I’ve heard but can’t name.”
“The only resonance is you about to attract every scavenger and low-life spirit in five miles with your nostalgic vibes.” He uncrossed his arms and his hand shot out, closing around her bicep. His grip was firm, calloused, meant to haul her to her feet. It wasn’t gentle, but it also wasn’t harsh enough to bruise. He knew his own strength.“Up. Now. Unless you want me to drag you back to camp kicking and screaming again.”
She let him pull her up, her boots scraping on the rubble. “You enjoyed that way too much.”
“Had to test a new grip. You were adequate.” He released her arm but didn’t step back, his presence a physical wall between her and the archway. His nose wrinkled. “This place reeks of failure and old magic. Bad combo.”
“It’s my failure. My old magic,” she said, the playful tone seeping out of her voice. She hugged herself, the oversized fabric of her auburn-orange hoodie swallowing her frame. “This was a place of verdicts. The Arch of One-Thousand Judgments. They’d bring disputing parties here, and the stones would… amplify the truth. Or so the fragment says.”
Bakugou’s eyes flickered to the arch, then back to her. “And what truth are you trying to amplify, huh? That you’re a seven-hundred-year-old kid who needs to eat her dinner before it’s charcoal?”
She met his gaze, her dark brown eyes serious for once. “Why I can’t remember. What the ‘07’ means. Who my people were before they were shattered.” She held up her hand. “This is a verdict, too. On me. I just don’t know the crime.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. He hated this kind of talk. Intangible enemies, battles fought in memory instead of in the field. He preferred problems he could punch.“Tch. Your ‘crime’ was being stupid enough to get caught in a Fae light-trap five years ago. My ‘crime’ was pulling your chubby ass out of it. Now we’re both stuck with the consequences. That’s the only verdict that matters.”
It was the closest he ever got to acknowledging their bond. I saved you, so you’re my responsibility. A barbaric, princely logic she’d grown to understand was his version of care.
The wind shifted, slithering through the ruins with a low moan. It carried a new scent to them—a dry, papery, vaguely sweet smell, like decaying lilies and parchment.
Bakugou went still. Not rigid, but perfectly, predatorily still. His head turned a fraction, his eyes scanning the deepening shadows between the crumbling pillars. The casual irritation vanished from his posture, replaced by a lethal, coiled readiness.
“Tell me you smell that,” he growled, his voice dropping to a thread.
Sophia inhaled, the Fae part of her senses stretching. The metallic note beneath the new scent wasn’t rust. It was fresher. “Not spirit. Not scavenger.”
“No,” Bakugou said, a feral smile touching his lips. It wasn’t friendly. “Hunter.”
He moved before she could blink. One second he was beside her, the next he was shoving her backwards, behind the relative cover of the massive archway footing.“Stay. Down. Don’t make a sound. Don’t even breathe your bubbly damn breath.”
She crumpled behind the stone, her heart hammering against her ribs. Through a crack in the masonry, she watched him. He stood in the open, a blatant challenge. He cracked his neck, then his knuckles, the pops unnaturally loud in the silent ruins.
“Alright, you parchment-scented freaks!” he shouted, his voice echoing off the stones. “You’re screwing up my dinner time! Come out and get exploded so I can get back to my idiot boyfriend and his burnt stew!”
For three heartbeats, nothing. Then, from the dark mouth of a collapsed hallway, they emerged. Three figures, tall and willowy, moving with a silent, jointless grace. Their skin was the color of old vellum, and their faces were elongated, blank canvasses save for two deep, dark pits for eyes and a slender slit for a mouth. They wore robes the grey of tomb dust. Each held a long, thin blade that looked carved from bone.
“Recordkeepers,” Sophia whispered, the word escaping her in a terrified breath.Not hunters.Worse. Archivists of flesh. They didn’t kill.They collected. They preserved things that interested them.
One of them pointed a bone-blade directly at Bakugou. Its slit-mouth opened, and a sound like pages rapidly flipping filled the air.
“Catalog this, you walking library,” Bakugou snarled.
He didn’t wait for them to move. He exploded towards the nearest one, literally, the blast from his palms propelling him forward in a burst of searing light and concussive noise. The world dissolved into motion and fury.
Sophia pressed her forehead against the cold stone, the ‘07’ on her hand tingling fiercely. The truth of the ruins wasn’t in the past. It was here, now, in the violent present. And Bakugou, for all his grumbling about dead things, was fighting to keep her very much alive. She curled her fingers into a fist, the tattoos on her wrists and chest feeling suddenly like armor, like quiet, waiting power. The wind carried the smell of explosives and decaying paper, and the ancient Court of Judgments held its breath.