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moonlight.
    When she returned, she brushed his dark hair back from his eyes and kissed his forehead before heading out, taking the path north for the wall.
    Kole never slept without dreaming. But tonight’s dream was not in the rain-choked passes, as all the others were. Tonight’s was a dream of beginnings.

K arin had told Kole of dreams and their power.
    There were dreamers in far-off lands, over mountains and spanning snow-covered fields that held their visions of sleep in higher esteem than the trials of day-to-day living. There were dreamers now passed on that had lived in shimmering jewels in the deepest deserts where now there were only red wastes. To them, a day was merely a dream’s portent. And there were others beside, in the crenellated walls of rain-soaked keeps that felt any vision of the mind was wrought with illusion and deceit, its only outcome desire or despair.
    The Emberfolk held their dreams private, and Kole was no different.
    Now, he dreamed of the first time his blood had caught fire. He was eleven, and though he acted much the same then as he did now, he carried himself with the wobbling uncertainty of a child freshly bereft of his mother. For his people, it was a rare thing grown commonplace, and about to grow more so.
    He remembered searing pain, as if he was boiling from the inside out.
    Now he saw Ninyeva come to take him, Linn chasing after them while Iyana cried in the back garden. He saw his father wipe the tears from her eyes and sing songs of growing. Kole sat down beside her and listened, trying his best to ignore the wails of his younger self as he was carried away, his father flinching all the while.
    “Just as the seed blossoms into the shoot,” Karin was saying as he ran Iyana’s pale fingers along the green stem, “so a child grows into a little girl.” He pushed her nose like a button, drawing a giggle through the curtain of tears. “And just as all young women flower, so too do the Embers that give our people their name, and their pride.”
    And their power.
    Iyana had that uncertain look children get when they’re being led. Karin saw it, so he led her on a walk along the cobbled garden path. She skipped over the sprouting moss between the stones and Kole followed after.
    “This is a proud moment for Last Lake, for all the Emberfolk,” Karin said, inflecting his voice with a sense of awe and wonder, though Kole could see he already bore the deep creases he would come to know so well. “Once his body accepts the change, Kole will be the first Ember to awake in half a decade, since Taei Kane did before him. And he won’t be the last.”
    Just third to last.
    “The Dark Months are coming, and we need our Embers to help protect us.”
    “But the monsters don’t come here,” Iyana said, looking suddenly afraid. “The White Crest protects us.”
    “We do not know where the White Crest has been these last few years,” he said, smiling to reassure her. “But the Emberfolk are strong. We can look after ourselves.”
    They said more, but Kole lost track of the exchange. He felt himself being pulled along, his attention turning and aiming him toward the shore. He stepped tentatively out onto the water and walked across its surface, standing beneath the creaking timbers of the Long Hall.
    He walked further out and looked up into the sky. Clouds circled overhead, darkening the water, which grew violent around him. Kole felt his heart quicken. He spun, looking past the houses and up the hill, past the wall and over the trees. A darkness deeper than black polluted the clouds there. It rushed and scattered like smoke in the wind. It was a wall of night, a portal into the World Apart.
    Anger swelled, mixing with the fear. The surf churned and boiled beneath his feet, steam rising in a torrent as his muscles bunched. The drums rolled and the braziers lit the gloom with a sick glow.
    Kole leapt, leaving a jet of steaming water in his wake, his passing creating a crater on the