Severa squints at the sunlight breaking over the horizon as she peddles her bike down an empty street towards the river. She stops by the big tree that hugs a corner at the end of a street and hide her bike behind its trunk. She makes her way along the river bank until she sees a blond boy with an impatient pout waiting on a boulder nearly as big as he is. Owain's easy to find with his bright crown of hair already spiralling out of control, and when he spots her, he leaps from the rock, a wide grin stretching along his face as he darts towards her.

"What took you so long?" he says to her when she approaches.

"Hey! I took a big risk to sneak out to meet you!" she sniffs. "You can at least be nice to me."

"Sorry! I just want to show you something!" He takes her by the hand, gently despite his bouncing. "Come on!"

He takes her by the oak tree that fell in the river last year, which no one has been inclined to move. The trunk is wide enough that they can walk across it comfortably, save for the ominous creak the tree makes when they step onto it. Or the fact that it shifts slightly with the current.

Owain hesitates, his expression fearful before something determined comes into his eyes. He jumps onto the trunk, which lets out a loud crack and drifts a little in the river; Owain's nearly tumbles into the water as Severa screams, watching his feet scrabble on the slippery wood. He grabs onto a jutting branch as he falls, saving himself but scraping his palm in return.

"Ow." He pulls himself up and jumps over the end of the tree onto the opposite bank. "Be careful, Severa."

Severa rolls her eyes and quickly slips across the oak trunk, aware of the pressure of her steps. She makes it to Owain without incident and sees a splinter in his palm that has the boy tearing up. Huffing, she grabs the startled boy's hand and peers at the tiny sliver caught in the flesh at the base of his thumb. She reaches over and pinches it—remembering how her mother has done it for her last week—before gently pulling out the wood. "There! Now be more careful."

Owain examines his palm with awe. "You're amazing, Severa." He grabs her hand and pulls her into the woods ahead of them, not noticing the blush on her face from the compliment. "C'mon!"

"Wait!" She yanks her hand back. "What do you want to show me?"

"Something great for any warrior!" He spins around. "I told you at Lucina's party!"

Yesterday was Lucina's birthday, and her parents couldn't decide between dressing her as a princess or a hero. They ended up placing a tiara on her dark hair and a plastic blade by her side, calling her a princess hero, and Lucina plays the role well, swinging her sword with a flourish that makes the other children gape in awe.

Lucina's also so ridiculously sweet that she doesn't yell at Cynthia when the girl trips and accidentally smashes her face into the birthday girl's piece of cake. She moves to help up her embarrassed friend, wiping her face inexpertly with a tissue until Sumia comes into the room at the sound of her daughter's crying. The gentle woman thanks Lucina while leading the sniffling Cynthia into the bathroom to clean her up, and Severa glances at Lucina's now empty plate and her own uneaten piece. She tries to slice it in half as evenly as she can with her fork before dumping a portion onto Lucina's plate and huffing at the startled girl's look. "You're the birthday girl. You need cake."

Lucina's eyes soften. "Thank you." And she actually begins eating Severa's cake while the latter bats away Owain's and Inigo's teasing jibes.

Later when everyone is giving her gifts, Severa hands Lucina a card she spent the last week working on with giggling suggestions from her mother and her father's guiding hand in drawing the bubbles and words. Lucina takes such a long look at it that the parents are glancing at each other and the kids start whispering. Severa flushes from all the looks cast her way. She's about to say something when Lucina slowly places the card on the table and throws herself at a startled Severa, looping her arms around her friend's neck and whispering that she loved it in her ear. Her own mother teases Severa about the slight flush she wears for the rest of the day.

Owain leads her past the thick trunks of trees onto a route that's relatively flat and free of pebbles, chattering all the while. Outside the path, the trees rise around them, clustered between juts of stony fingers. Severa catches glimpses of him under the intermittent bursts of sunlight overhead, and he's handsome in a boyish way with his dreaming eyes and beautiful smile that reminds her of a day on the edge of slipping into night. She gazes at the frame of his shoulders, the line of his jaw that has yet to roughened out, and she imagines that if this was a fairy tale, he would be her prince and she—his princess. They'd ride horses by the day, and he'd spend the nights telling her how beautiful she was. He'd carry her when she was tired, and she would cook for him for when he came home, enchanting her with tales of his latest adventure across treacherous waters and devastating deserts until she's ignited with the desire to go with him. They'd travel worlds together and win wars in lands unheard of.

He squirms out of her grasp and darts into a clearing filled with purple and yellow flowers, lifting his arms to the sky. "We should call this place the Garden of the Can't Sleep Knights."

Or maybe not.

"Look!" He runs up to a pile of stones that sit in front of a cliff face and gestures to it in a spinning flourish. "Ta-da!"

Severa looks at the rubble—pieces about the size of her forearm put together in a haphazard bundle—before meeting Owain's gaze. "You told me to come here to show me rocks?"

Owain looks wounded, as if it's her fault that she can't see the interest in a mess of stones taller than they are. "No, you have to see what it can be!"

An avalanche of rocks?

Owain grabs at a speckled piece half the size of his head and yanks it out before Severa can shout in alarm. The cascade of miniature boulders never comes, and the blond boy stands there triumphantly with the stupid stone still held overhead. "See! It's a passage!" He hurls it aside and quickly begins to tear out other rocks until a hole that they can barely squeeze through starts to form. "Come on."

He pushes himself through the dark crevice and after a few seconds of hesitation, Severa joins him. She's caught between two rock shelves that forces the girl to turn sideways to avoid scraping herself on them as she passes through. There's space at her feet though—enough that a grown adult can crawl through, but Severa is not going to go on her hands and knees through a dirty floor.

She walk into a cavern large enough to fit their class of 20 students. Stalagmites jut up from the sandy bottom like the thin teeth of an ancient beast while a pool of water floods the ground between them. A single hole in the ceiling of the cavern allows sunlight to illuminate the water, the entrance where Severa and Owain stand, and little else.

The excited boy gestures wildly to the cavern beyond them. "Isn't it cool?"

"A cave," Severa says, flatly. That's it. She's going home.

"Not just any cave! A cave for heroes!" He grins at her, the excitement palpable in his eyes. "We'll be legends! I'll be king and you the queen, and we can storm the heavens together! Or I'll be a terrifying protector to a lord of the land, sending enemies running with my sword and words of magic!" He looks at her. He pauses. "And you can protect the princesses! Severa the Scary who can stop armies with her glare and wrestles bulls and—"

Wrestle bulls? What kind of weirdo comes up with an idea like that?

"—and we'll save worlds from bad guys and evil, and then we'll disappear like the mysteries we are!" With a whirl, he leaps to her, grinning so widely that Severa thinks his smile cracked his face. "What do you think of that?"

"It sounds dumb," Severa snorts, but she's intrigued by the idea. "Wait, why is my name Severa the Scary?"

Owain doesn't answer, because he darts into a dark part of the cavern, hidden by a single stalagmite by the edge of the water. "Check this out! I found out that these rocks can hide treasure!"

Severa follows him and sees Owain removing a thin slab of rock that reveals a hole the size of their science textbook. He gabs on, excitedly. "We can hide gems and gold and loot in here."

Severa is confused. "Wait, are we pirates, or are we warriors?"

"Yes!" Owain replaces the slab and jumps up. "This is going to be so cool! Having secret meetings here and forming our own knight group. We'll call ourselves the Mystletainn Might."

They are calling themselves no such thing. "I don't want this! Why are you showing me this anyway?"

His smile falters. "I'm showing you this, because you told me you wanted to be an adventurer too." His shoulders drop, and he looks smaller, scared. "Or did I get it wrong?"

Ugh...Owain's annoying, but Severa doesn't really want to be the one who breaks the boy's spirit. "I don't know. Can we get out of here first?"

"Oh, yeah. Sure." He leads them out through the tight passageway and back into the clearing, replacing the rocks in the passageway with a reverence. "So, umm...what do you think?" He looks at her with hopeful eyes.

Severa's not sure when crawling through a bunch of rocks is ever going to be cool. "I need to go home. Can you take me out of here?'

Owain's face falls, and Severa hates that she's the cause of it. "Yeah. Come here." He takes her hand again, and he trudges towards the river, head down and pace sluggish. He moves as if someone told him his puppy died.

Severa can't take it anymore. "Ugh. Fine! It's awesome, Owain. We'll be great warriors."

He lifts his head, staring at her before his grin pops back onto his face. "Yeah! We will! We'll be the coolest! And we won't invite Inigo!" he scowls. "He spends too much time dancing with his mom anyway!"

Severa thinks of Mrs. Montoya with her shy smiles and the way she weaves across the dance floor with a rhythm and ease that makes any spectator believe that each song she dances to was born for her. "She's really pretty."

Owain sticks his tongue out. "Ew!"

Severa snaps, "You're ew!"

Something catches Severa's eye, and she pulls away from Owain to peer at something dark in a tangle of bushes full of red berries and thorns. She approaches it slowly, recognizing the object as a ragged piece of cloth caught in the brambles, hardly large enough to cover her palm. The more curious thing is what looks like the thick end of a tome hastily shoved under the bush's thorns. "Someone left a book!"

"A book?" Owain appears beside her and his eyes light up when he spots the strange object. "It's a mystery!"

"Don't touch it!" Severa snaps as the blond boy retreats from the bush with a pout. "Let me get it out." She doesn't want to touch the brambles, so she picks up a thick stick from a nearby trail and pokes at the thick book, sliding it out of the bush in spurts.

"Hurry up, Severa! I want to look at it!" Owain bobs up and down, irritating Severa so much that she jabs at him with her stick. "You already found an adventure! You're incredible!" Owain grins at her. "When we're grown up, I'll marry you."

Severa wrinkles her nose. "What if I don't want to marry you?"

"Uh...you can marry Morgan!"

"Ew!"

"Or Lucina!" he adds, hastily. "We'll be family anyway!"

The book finally slips out with a final jab from Severa, its leathery, faded cover visible in the morning light. On its front is a closed eye with lines drawn through it, like it's weeping, connecting to a dragon with six wings. On the edges of the book are clamps and steel bindings as if the person who placed them there hoped to seal it shut. There's something off about the colour of the strips of leather that covers the front like it's too close to the colour of her own skin, and Severa stares at the tome, feeling an urge to shove it back into the bush.

"We gotta open it, Severa! It's our destiny to be heroes!" He grins. "Evil will shake at our names, and we'll cleave our foes in two."

Severa frowns, "What does cleave mean?"

"Err..." Owain turns to the book. "We should check this out!" He begins to unfasten the bindings on the book and flips open to the a page that crinkles in the sunlight, faded and slightly yellow. Lines of letters appear on the pages in a swirling style like they've been drawn with ink, but Severa doesn't recognize the language and trying to sound out the words makes her feel like she's twisting her tongue. Owain's not faring much better if the crease between his brows and the constipated expression on his face is any indication. He flips through the pages impatiently, flipping past lengthy lists, diagrams, maps, and charts of lands neither of them can identify. He gets to the middle of the book where a detailed sketch of six eyes connected by weeping lines twist together into a singular point. The illustrations behind that page are disturbing.

Owain quickly goes through page after page, his face whitening with each new picture while Severa suppresses an urge to throw up, closing her eyes after glimpsing at an image of priests stretching out a screaming girl. But he can't seem to stop turning the pages, and Severa feels compelled to watch him, stuck to the spot as if frozen in time as he goes through image after image until he reaches the last page where six large eyes are drawn in matted red lines against a sea of black as if the artist had thrown the contents of their inkwell onto the book. They stare at the two children, and in a second that lasts a lifetime, Severa swears that the eyes crinkle as if whoever they belonged to are pleased at what they saw. She sees them blink.

Severa screams and slams the book shut. Owain falls backwards onto his butt, heaving and looking as sick as that time he got the flu last year. And beside the thorny bush, Severa swears she hears someone whispering in a low, unrecognizable language between the panting of her and Owain's breaths.

Owain gets up first, shaking. "That's enough of being heroes for today."

Severa pushes herself to her feet. "What do we do with that? We should leave it." Or burn it. Burn it with a lot of fire.

"No, we should take it to our parents. There's something wrong with it."

Owain shares a glance with Severa, and she knows that he's right. She says, "You pick it up, then."

"Uh...my dad always said, 'Ladies first'." He yelps when she slugs him in the arm. "Okay! I'll do it!" Puffing out his chest, he stares down at the book as if trying to intimidate it. "I'm going to be a legend one day, so I need to be brave." He redoes the bindings and the clamps back onto the book, and holds it up triumphantly for a few moments before a sick expression slips onto his face, and he goes paler than Severa's father does that time he catches her climbing on the roof.

"Owain, what's the matter?" The next question dies on her lips as he drops the tome with a thud, smoke rising from the red-lined marks burning on his palms in the shape of an eye. "Owain!"

Severa bolts to him as the shaking boy stares straight ahead. He retches, bent double from the force, his sickness splashing onto the ground and onto Severa's shoes. She doesn't stop running to him as his knees buckle and his eyes roll into his head. "Are you okay?"

She grabs him as he collapses into her, nearly staggering her to the ground. "Owain!"

Owain's still for a long moment before he coughs and opens his eyes, a strange milky sheen that Severa shrieks at before he blinks it away and his normal green eyes look up at her. He stares as if he hadn't expected to wake up.

"You're okay."

Owain grimaces, struggling to get up. "We need to move it. It's evil, and we can't leave it here."

What? "How could a book be evil?"

He looks at his hands, the bright lines of red searing and bubbling his flesh. "How could a book do this?"

Point taken.

Severa reaches for the tome, and Owain slaps her hands out of the way, shocking her. "Don't touch it!" He holds out his palms to her. The smell of burning flesh reminds her of cooked pork and makes her want to retch. "It'll hurt you too!"

Severa stares at him, noticing the strain in his face and the terror in his eyes, as if the book would hunt and kill him itself. She hesitates for a long moment before pulling off of her jacket that her mom bought her last month and wraps it around the book. Even with the separation of cloth, she feels the book's whispers and pleas to let it mark her as its own, to burn her with the same brands it left on Owain. She holds it as far away from her body as possible.

Owain bolts ahead back to the clearing as if there's something chasing him, and Severa darts behind him, arms aching from the weight in her hands. She reaches him just as he finishes tearing the last of the stones from the cliff and slips into the passageway without looking back. Severa squeezes through after him, the narrow space between the rock shelves forces her to keep the book close to her stomach, the skin along her arms feeling as if it's trying to crawl away from the tome in her hands. The heat she feels from its steel bindings—if it was trying to sear its mark into her hands too—makes her want to pitch it into the river and never talk about it again.

When she reaches the cavern, Owain emerges from the shadows on her left, and waves her to him, the red-hot markings on his palms looking like there are more lines to it than the last time she saw it, like the brand is creeping down his wrists. "The hole," he croaks.

Severa hurls the book into the pit along with her jacket, and as she throws it, she swears that the eye on the front cover opens as Owain slides the slab back on top. He winces as his hands struggle to grip the rock. When she steps near him, she hears something like whispers on the wind, a low rumble that has something gripping her heart in a painful, icy squeeze. She shoots backwards as Owain gets up, his eyes drained and his eyes looking like they've aged a lifetime in the minutes between touching the book and burying it. He clenches his hands, and the whispering stops though his skin has gone grey and he looks like he's dying.

Severa grabs his arm and guides him out, going slowly when he stumbles over stones and sticks that he leaped over half an hour before. They make it out into the sunlight in the clearing, and yet, something makes the hair on Severa's nape stand on end. "We should go home."

Owain nods as he begins to replace the rocks and Severa stoops down to help him when he struggles to lift some of them, sweat streaming down his shaking face. They finish quickly, and Owain guides them out of the forest with Severa holding him up. When they reach the floating trunk in the river, Severa goes first, grabbing onto his hand when he stumbles and slips across the bark. He smiles weakly at her as she calls him an idiot in a worried tone and manages to get the both of them onto solid ground.

They don't say anything to each other, merely staring back at the other side of the river until Owain kicks at a clump of dirt in front of him, his hands tucked deep into his pocket. He looks deeply ill, like he might drop dead on his feet if he tried to walk home alone.

"I'll go get your mom." Severa volunteers.

"No! I wasn't supposed to sneak out!" Owain's eyes are wide. He looks more fearful of his mother's wrath than whatever happened to him from the book. "I'm fine, Severa. I'll see you later."

She stamps her foot. "No, you're not. You look like you could throw up any moment. We're getting your mom."

"No!"

"Yes!"

"No!"

"Yes! Stop being so stubborn, Owain!" It's like it ran in his genes or something. "At least, let me walk you home!"

Owain shakes his head and shuffles his feet. "I just need some sleep. I'll see you at school." He turns and walks away towards his house, and Severa huffs, running after him. She would have smacked him if he didn't look like he would keel over from the blow.

He glances at her, surprised. "I said I was fine!"

"Don't be dumb! I just left my bike near your house," she sniffs. A second later, she glances at him sidelong to see if he's okay. His jaw is set, and his eyes look grim. She hopes his mother doesn't get too mad at him when she finds out what they did.

Owain and her part ways at the giant oak tree that marks the turn into his street from the riverbank. He refuses to let her come with him for whatever reason, and Severa's anxious about how high the sun has risen since she left earlier.

"Severa, you'll get in trouble if you stay out too long."

Owain's right. She needs to get back and hop into bed before her mother notices she's gone.

Glancing down the street and spotting a patrol car lumbering down the paved road, she asks, "Are you going to be okay, Owain?"

He sways slightly on his feet before puffing up his chest and thumping himself. "Never better! It takes more than that to take Owain Dark, king of demons, down!" When Severa doesn't respond, he deflates. "I'll be okay. My house is five minutes away."

"Okay." She wants to walk him home, but her mom would flip her bed if she went to Severa's room and found out that she was missing. "Bye, Owain."

She pushes off of her bike and starts peddling down the street leading to her house. It's only at the end of the block that she glances back to see Owain waving at her until he became a pinpoint in the distance before he disappears. She makes it to her home, leaning her bike against the back of the house before scaling the tree that sits close to her bedroom window. A branch from the tree is almost at the same level as her window sill, and Severa slowly walks across its length until she reaches the end just before her open window. She slips through and jumps into her big bed as she hears her mother's footsteps coming up the stairs.

Severa feigns sleep as her mother opens the door, crossing her room and laying a warm hand on her head. "Severa, wake up. We're going on a trip to Valm with Daddy today to visit his friend."

She groans. She's forgotten about that. Cordelia gets her up and dressed, frowning when she can't find Severa's jacket. When they reach the bottom of the stairs that lead to the door, Libra picks her up and carries her out in his arms as they make their way to the car and out of Ylissetol.

When Severa returns from Valm, she learns that Owain never made it home.