Chapter Text
The sun over Kararagi set swiftly, as if afraid to linger in the Lower City for even a single extra minute.
Its last rays-thin, like wine diluted with water-smeared across the rickety rooftops, turning rust into a semblance of clotted blood, and vanished, leaving behind only the faint warmth seeping from the stone heated throughout the day.
The slums were left to the mercy of twilight: gray, sticky, saturated with the stench of rotten fish, sour rice, and acrid smoke from the fires where they burned all sorts of rubbish.
The air was thick, almost tangible-it enveloped you, clogged your nostrils, and settled on your tongue in a bitter film.
Anastasia sat, hugging her sharp knees right up to her chin, in the gap between the wall of a dye workshop and a rotten woodpile.
She was 11. Maybe 12. She didn't know exactly herself-there was no one to count the winters, no one to ask.
From the past, only her name remained, and even that was shortened, as if gnawed at the edges: she had once heard it from a girl’s mother, to whom she introduced herself as “Ana”-that’s how it sounded in Kararagian, short, catchy, businesslike.
People like her had no surname. Surnames were for those who owned shops, guilds, or at least a roof over their heads.
All she had was this nook, where the wind wouldn't immediately find its prey.
Today had been an outright failure.
In the morning, she managed to swipe a flatbread from a distracted greengrocer, but it came with a surprise-hidden inside was a fiery spice that burned her mouth as if she’d gulped boiling water.
Tears streamed down her face until noon, but Ana didn't allow herself to spit out the spoils: food was food, and the searing pain was just a temporary obstacle.
Later, the boys from Rust Fang’s gang, older, bolder, and with sticky fingers, took the copper penny she had found.
She didn't cry.
Crying in the street meant showing weakness, and the weak were devoured here faster than a stale crust.
But the loss of that penny gnawed at her with a physical nausea.
A warm copper disc, still holding the heat of her palm, could have turned into a bowl of hot stew.
Or a candle stub.
Or, on the most desperate nights, the right to sleep in the basement of old Mio, where it stank of mold and cats, but at least the icy wind didn’t cut through.
Now, the wind was howling with all its might.
It crept through the countless holes in her tattered dress, biting with sharp teeth, a reminder that the night would soon become unbearable.
Ana pressed her back harder against the rough boards, trying to preserve the crumbs of warmth still smoldering in her body.
Hunger twisted her stomach into a tight knot, but she had long since learned to ignore it-almost.
She just needed a distraction. To switch her thoughts to something greater than the pain. Something that belonged solely to her.
She lifted her head.
Above her, in the gap between the leaning roofs, they were lighting up one by one.
First, a timid one, like the first customer at the market, hesitant to approach the stall.
Then a second. A fifth. A tenth. And soon the whole sky-that narrow strip above the alley-was sown with silver dust.
The stars.
Ana froze.
Her breathing evened out on its own, hunger took a step back, conceding her this brief freedom.
In those minutes, she was not just a stray who tomorrow might be found in a gutter with blue lips. She
Was… someone. Someone who could look at the sky and want. Truly want.
Before, just last winter, she used to beg the stars for food. Or warm clothes. Or for the endless rain to finally stop turning the streets into a bog.
But they remained silent.
They were too distant, too cold, and too perfect to listen to the pleas of street filth.
So Ana stopped begging.
She began to want in a different way-deeper, angrier, as if sharpening her desire against a whetstone.
«I want to possess you.»
This thought wasn't born in her head-it rose from somewhere in her gut, from the very pit where hunger was now growling insistently.
To possess meant to have the right. And to have power.
So that no one would dare take it away, snatch it from her hands, crush it without a glance.
So that the copper penny would never fall into the dirty paws of Rust Fang, and the stars wouldn't hang so inaccessible, mocking her helplessness.
Slowly, almost solemnly, she stretched her hand upward, eclipsing a small constellation with her dirty palm-three dots resembling a crooked blade. Her fingers clenched into a fist, as if indeed trying to catch the elusive light.
«You will be mine,» she whispered, and this was no child's play.
The words rang out quietly but weightily, a promise you make only once.
«Every last one. I will gather you all, no matter how long it takes. I will buy everything. Even the sky.»
The stars twinkled in response, indifferent to her oath.
But somewhere on the very edge of her vision, right above the broken line of rooftops, one of them-a violet one, out of step with the general rhythm-suddenly flickered and vanished.
Ana blinked, not immediately realizing what had changed.
The star didn't disappear like a dying spark, slowly fading into the darkness.
It was as if something had eclipsed it. Something that wasn't there a second ago.
A silhouette: dark, angular, too sharp to be a chimney or a broken weather vane. And this silhouette… was moving.
A boy.
He was standing on the very ridge of the roof, where an old abandoned warehouse dropped off into the alley, and was looking down-or rather, his gaze was first fixed on something in the emptiness before him, on some invisible horror.
And then he slowly, as if coming out of a trance, lowered his head. Right at her.
Their eyes met, and Ana felt a strange, prickling jab in her chest.
Not fear… no, she had seen far scarier things in the slums.
More like vexation mixed with a sharp, almost possessive curiosity.
He dared to stand between her and her property. Between her and the stolen star.
She already wanted to tell him off-right now, sharply, demandingly, the way they spoke in the slums: «Hey, you! You blocked my light.»
The words almost flew off her lips, bitter and angry.
But before she could spit them out, the boy staggered.
Clumsily, unnaturally, like a marionette with half its strings cut at once.
His body lurched forward, his legs buckled, and he plummeted down into the thick darkness of the alley.
A dull thud of a heavy body hitting the ground.
A cloud of dust kicked up, dancing in the moonlight. And silence… dense, viscous, broken only by the distant barking of dogs.
Ana froze for a couple of heartbeats, waiting to see if anyone would follow-guards, owners, other vagrants.
But the alley was empty. Then she slowly, soundlessly like a cat, rose to her feet and stepped toward the spot where the figure had stood.
Her heart beat steadily, without fuss. She wasn't afraid of dead people.
After all, they didn't steal pennies, laugh behind your back, or demand tribute.
And if he was still alive… well, perhaps his pockets held something that would make this evening a little less hungry.
She wasn't cruel, rather practical. The way the street had raised her.
She approached and stopped, tilting her head to the side.
The boy was lying on his side, his arm twisted unnaturally, but he was breathing-rapidly, intermittently, like a hunted animal.
His clothes were foreign, outlandish, strange to the point of goosebumps: black, with stiff, unfamiliarly cut folds, and on his feet, some sort of white boxes instead of normal shoes.
His face was smeared with dust and something dark-either dirt or dried blood-but even in the meager light it was clear: he was not from the Lower City. And most likely, not from the Upper City either.
He wasn't from Kararagi at all. She hadn't encountered faces like his, even among traveling merchants.
«An outsider to the core,» thought Ana.
She crouched down, tilting her head slightly to her shoulder.
Inside her, slowly, like yeast in warm water, a strange, unfamiliar feeling was rising-a mixture of excitement, anticipation, and something lingering that she couldn't yet name.
He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
No one was looking for him, no one called out to him, no guards were chasing him.
He belonged to no one.
«That means,» she thought, and a chill of pure delight ran down her spine, «he can become mine.»
The thought was new, sharp as a freshly honed knife.
Ana tasted it, rolled it around in her mind like a rare coin, and unexpectedly for herself, smiled-for the first time in many days.
The boy groaned, his eyelids trembled, slightly revealing his eyes.
For a split second, she managed to catch their color: dark, almost black, with dilated pupils where the animal terror of what he had seen moments before the fall had not yet faded.
«You,» Ana said quietly, and her voice, devoid of any sympathy, sounded surprisingly level.
«You blocked this lady's stars.»
The boy flinched at the sound of her voice.
He tried to focus his gaze and stared at her-small, disheveled, with a face sharpened by hunger and eyes far too adult.
He couldn't find an answer: whether from the pain, the shock, or because he didn't understand the words.
And she already reached out her hand. Not to help him up-unfortunately, she was far too weak and small for that-but to touch his shoulder with the tips of her fingers.
A light, almost weightless touch. Like a seal. Like a signature on an invisible contract.
«Since you're here,» she continued, in the same tone that, years later, she would use to negotiate with guilds and councilors,
«you will do as I say. And I won't let you die. Deal?»
He didn't understand. Of course, he didn't understand.
The meaning of her words was drowning in the roaring in his ears, in the aching pain all over his body, in the ringing emptiness left by the transfer.
But the intonation-calm, authoritative, leaving no room for argument-reached its target.
The boy's lips trembled, he tried to force something out, but managed only a weak nod.
Because in his eyes, that emptiness still lingered, an emptiness that needed to be filled with something.
And Anastasia, the future Bloody Maiden of Kararagi, received for the first time something that cannot be bought with copper, bartered, or stolen.
Someone else's fate.
She straightened up, still looking down at this strange boy with the foreign face and ridiculous white shoes.
Somewhere deep inside, beneath the layers of hunger and fatigue, something warm stirred, something she wasn't ready to give a name to yet.
Perhaps it was triumph. Or perhaps the first, timid sprout of an attachment she would never allow herself to name out loud.
But that would come later.
Right now, she had a practical problem to solve: where to hide this strange, ownerless treasure before others found it.