Old Blood

They came for the old woman on a Tuesday.

Kael watched from behind the tannery wall as the Remembrancers — the Province's memory police, tasked with ensuring the past stayed dead — dragged her from her home by her silver hair. She was eighty if she was a day, but she fought like a cornered animal, clawing and spitting and screaming in a language that made the soldiers flinch.

It was the old language. The forbidden tongue. Zatamari.

Kael didn't understand the words. But something inside him did.

The syllables hit his bones like tuning forks, resonating at frequencies he didn't know he could feel. His hands gripped the wall until his knuckles whitened. His vision blurred, then sharpened to an impossible clarity.

For one terrible, beautiful second, he could see everything — not the street as it was, but as it had been. Marble where there was mud. Gardens where there were gutters. And above it all, a palace that touched the clouds, its towers carved from living crystal that sang when the wind passed through.

Then the old woman stopped screaming, and the vision collapsed.

Kael sank to his knees, breathing hard, tasting copper on his tongue. The tanner's apprentice found him there an hour later and assumed he'd fainted from the heat.