The cold crept in through the thin walls of the farmhouse, but that wasn’t what had jolted me from my sleep. I sat bolt upright in bed, heart hammering against my ribs, a nameless dread crawling up my spine like ivy on stone. Something was wrong—deeply, fundamentally wrong. The night pressed in around me, quieter than it should have been, devoid of the usual chittering of nocturnal creatures. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath, waiting.
Sliding my feet into my worn boots, I wrapped my mother’s old tartan shawl around my shoulders and crept past my parents’ room. Their rhythmic breathing offered a small comfort amid the growing unease that propelled me toward the door. The wooden floorboards, normally so eager to creak and announce my movements, remained silent beneath my feet, as if they too sensed something amiss in the night.
The farmyard beyond the door was bathed in an eerie stillness. The chickens, who should have stirred at my approach, remained motionless in their coop. The goats stood frozen in their pen, not a single bleat or rustle breaking the unnatural quiet. Most disturbing of all was the way they were positioned—each animal, from the smallest hen to our ancient plow horse, stood facing east, toward the city as if heeding some silent call I couldn’t hear.
Following their gaze, my eyes swept across the dark fields to where the city lights usually twinkled like earthbound stars. Instead, what I saw made my breath catch in my throat. A column of blue flame, impossibly tall and unnaturally straight, rose from the center of the city. It wasn’t the wild, hungry red-orange of normal fire, but a cold, electric blue that seemed to pulse with an intelligence of its own. Against the night sky, it looked like a tear in the fabric of the world, a glimpse into somewhere else, somewhere that shouldn’t touch our reality.
Fear flooded through my veins, turning my blood to ice. I had heard tales from my grandmother—stories of the old days, of magic and creatures and doors between worlds that were never meant to be opened. This pillar of blue flame, reaching toward the heavens like a beacon or a warning, resonated with those stories in a way that made my stomach clench. Whatever was happening in the city, whatever had silenced the animals and disturbed my sleep, was something beyond my understanding—and instinctively, I knew it threatened everything I held dear.
I stumbled back into the house, my heart pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer. I burst into my parents’ bedroom, words tumbling out in a frantic stream—blue fire, animals frozen, city lights gone. My mother, still half-asleep, reached for my hands with practiced gentleness, murmuring the same soothing rhymes that had calmed childhood nightmares. My father’s deep voice rumbled about bad dreams and overactive imaginations, but when the familiar remedies failed to slow my racing pulse or stem my desperate pleas, a shadow of concern crossed his weathered face.
“Please,” I begged, pulling at my father’s sleeve with trembling fingers, tears streaming down my cheeks. “You have to see. You have to see before it’s too late.” Something in my voice—a raw certainty they’d never heard before—silenced their reassurances. My mother wrapped a thick woolen blanket around her nightgown, exchanging worried glances with my husband as they followed me through the silent house, more concerned now about my state of mind than whatever I thought I’d seen.
The night air bit at our skin as we stepped into the farmyard, my father’s questions dying on his lips as his eyes found what I had seen. The blue pillar seemed to pulse and breathe, casting an unnatural light that transformed the familiar landscape into something alien. “Sweet Mother,” my mother whispered as my husband instinctively moved to stand before his family, as if his body could shield us from whatever inexplicable horror we were witnessing.
My breath caught in my throat as I realized the terrible truth—what I had seen earlier was only the beginning. The pillar was no longer just a distant column; it had widened, swollen like a river in flood, consuming everything in its path. The blue fire moved with awful purpose, not flickering like natural flames but flowing like water or living tissue, extending tendrils that reached outward from the central mass to engulf buildings, streets, and parks.
“The city,” my father breathed, his voice hollow with disbelief. Where once stood thousands of homes—where my older brother and his wife had moved just three months prior, where the market bustled every Wednesday, where the cathedral bells rang each Sunday—now existed only the eerie blue glow, expanding steadily toward the farmlands beyond. In the mere minutes it had taken me to wake my parents and bring them outside, an entire community had been swallowed whole, leaving nothing behind but the silent, inexorable advance of that impossible flame.
I watched, frozen in a trance of horror, as my parents’ words tumbled over each other in desperate bursts. My father was already calculating escape routes, throwing out names of distant relatives who might shelter us, while my mother clutched her bracelet so tightly her knuckles gleamed white in the eerie blue glow. But with each frantic suggestion, we all kept glancing back at that approaching wall of flame, measuring its progress against familiar landmarks. The Stadthof farm was gone. Then the old mill. The stone bridge that had stood for three hundred years dissolved like sugar in tea when the blue reached it. What had taken my brother a full hour to walk from the city’s edge had been consumed in mere minutes.
“We have to try, Margaret,” my father insisted, voice cracking as he gripped my mother’s shoulders. “The horse might—” but the words died as we all watched the blue fire leap across the river like it was nothing but a crack in the pavement. My mother shook her head, a strange calm settling over her features as she covered my husband’s rough hands with her own.
“Johann,” my mother said softly, using my father’s full name in a way she only did in moments of utmost importance, “there’s nowhere to run that would be far enough. I’d rather spend our last moments holding you both than die alone on some dusty road.” Something broke in my father’s expression then, a lifetime of stubborn determination crumbling in the face of the impossible. I felt my throat tighten as I watched him struggle—this man who had fought every hardship life had thrown at our family, who had never admitted defeat, now recognizing a battle that couldn’t be won, a battle that he couldn’t even begin to fight.
We came together then, a small tight circle of warmth against the advancing chill. I felt my parents’ arms wrap around me, steady and strong despite the tremors I could feel running through them. No one spoke of fear, though it pulsed between us with each rapid heartbeat. Instead, my mother hummed the lullaby she’d sung when I was small, and my father’s deep voice murmured prayers half-remembered from childhood. Together we watched the blue fire flow across our fields, consuming the autumn wheat we’d planted with such hope, erasing the stone walls built by ancestors whose names we still recited at family gatherings. The familiar world dissolved before our eyes, and still we held each other, three small figures outlined against the consuming blue, waiting for whatever came next.
Moments before the blue fire consumes the final stretch of land before our farm, I notice a little flash of blue light in the sky near our farm, nothing compared to the flames, and I’m almost disappointed I saw anything at all. My breath quickens as I seek comfort in what is likely my parent’s final embrace. A moment later the night sky fractures with impossible light. Glowing azure runes blink into existence overhead—first one, then dozens, then hundreds—forming a vast array that stretches beyond the horizon in every direction. Unlike the cold dread of the encroaching flames, these symbols emanate a different quality of power—ancient yet purposeful, terrible but somehow reassuring. Each rune pulses with internal light, complex patterns interweaving and flowing between symbols like a written language I can almost understand, hovering between recognition and mystery.
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My breath catches as my mind grasps the sheer scale of what I’m witnessing. The runes must be impossibly vast, perhaps miles high, to appear so detailed from this distance. Their positioning seems deliberate, forming a perfect circle around the consumed lands, with smaller arrays nestled within the larger pattern. Whatever force created these symbols in the sky commands power beyond anything in my grandmother’s wildest tales, beyond anything I could have imagined possible in our small corner of the world.
“Vater im Himmel,” my father curses, voice rough with awe and fear, his weathered hand gripping my shoulder so tightly it almost hurts. The curse, the strongest one he ever uses, feels laughably insufficient. Beside us, my mother has fallen to her knees, her bracelet twisting between trembling fingers as she whispers, “Blessed Mother, shield us from powers not meant for mortal eyes.” The prayers tumble faster as the blue flames surge toward our farm, toward the boundary marked by those glowing symbols, a final desperate rush before collision.
When the fire meets the circle of runes, the world holds its breath for one eternal moment—then the symbols flare with blinding intensity, their azure light transforming to brilliant white that bathes the countryside in daylight brilliance. I shield my eyes but cannot look away as the runes pulse three times, each flash more powerful than the last, pushing back against the consuming fire. Every flash is punctuated by an impossibly ancient sound blasting over the fields, like the clarion call of an angel. A sound for which the meaning has been lost centuries ago, but which I instinctively recognize as “No!” Where moments ago the flames advanced with unstoppable force, now they recoil from the boundary, testing it like waves against a seawall before settling into an uneasy stillness. The blue tower remains, trapped within the circle of light, but its hunger has been contained—at least for now.
The shimmering azure symbols vanished as abruptly as they had appeared, plunging the countryside back into darkness broken only by the eerie glow of the contained flames. The sudden absence of their protective light sent a renewed wave of terror through my body, my eyes darting frantically to the wall of blue fire that had consumed half our world. A collective gasp escaped our lips as we waited for the inevitable surge forward—but the flames remained eerily static, still towering impossibly high into the night sky yet advancing no further than the invisible boundary the runes had established. The fire pulsed and shifted within its confines like a living thing testing the limits of its cage, but for now at least, it seemed our small corner of the world had been spared.
Then I noticed the falling figure, my eyes drawn back to that spot in the sky where I’d glimpsed that initial flash of light. “Look!” I cried, pointing upward as something—someone—plummeted from the heavens, a dark silhouette against the star-scattered night. We watched in stunned silence as the figure crashed into the soft earth of our fallow field, the impact muffled by the freshly turned soil that had been prepared for winter wheat. My father was the first to move, caution warring with compassion as he grabbed the old iron lantern hanging by our door.
The three of us approached cautiously, the lantern’s warm light pushing back the darkness to reveal not the broken body we had expected, but a woman lying unnaturally still amidst the disturbed earth. She appeared to be in her fourth decade, her face bearing the refined beauty of middle age rather than youth, with no visible injuries despite her impossible fall. Most striking were her robes—garments of such intricate craftsmanship and unusual design that my mother made the sign of the Mother’s Embrace across her breast in reflexive awe. The fabric seemed to shift between colors even in the steady lantern light, embroidered with symbols that bore unsettling resemblance to those that had blazed across the sky moments earlier, and adorned with gems that surely would have ransomed our entire province.
My father knelt beside the still form, rough farmer’s fingers pressing gently against the stranger’s neck before leaning close to her parted lips. “She lives,” he announced with evident relief, though his brow remained furrowed with concern, “but her breath comes shallow and slow, like one deep in winter sleep.” My mother had already removed her woolen shawl, tucking it around the unconscious woman with the same tender efficiency with which she had tended countless sick lambs and calves. “Whoever she is,” she said firmly, meeting my father’s uncertain gaze, “the Father and Mother guided her to our doorstep on this night of all nights. We cannot leave her to the mercy of the cold.” As if to underscore her words, the distant wall of blue flame pulsed ominously, a reminder of how close oblivion still lurked.
We carried the mysterious woman back to our farmhouse, her unconscious form lighter than expected despite her impressive stature. My father fashioned a makeshift bed near the hearth, where the warmth of the flames could chase away the unnatural chill that seemed to cling to her skin. We worked in hushed whispers, arranging blankets and pillows as if preparing a sickbed for royalty rather than a stranger who had fallen from the sky. My mother brewed strong herbal tea that went untouched, while I sat vigilant by the window, watching the imprisoned blue fire gradually dim from brilliant azure to a subdued cobalt, though never fully extinguishing. Sleep eluded our family that night, our eyes drawn repeatedly between our unconscious guest and the apocalyptic glow that had consumed half our world just hours before.
Dawn arrived with hesitant fingers of light stretching across a landscape divided between ordinary farmland and the strange blue haze that marked where the barrier stood. The woman remained motionless on her makeshift bed, her breathing so shallow that my mother checked several times to ensure life still flowed within her elegant form. We took turns throughout the morning—fetching water, tending to the bewildered animals that had finally resumed movement, preparing a simple noon meal that none of us had appetite to eat—all while casting anxious glances toward our mysterious visitor. It wasn’t until the sun had climbed to its zenith that the first sign of change appeared: a slight flutter of eyelids, a subtle deepening of breath, fingers that twitched against the rough homespun blanket.
My family gathered at a respectful distance as our guest’s awakening progressed with deliberate slowness over the following hours. Each small movement seemed purposeful, controlled—the gradual flexing of fingers, the measured rolling of shoulders, the deep, conscious breaths that expanded her chest beneath those strange color-shifting robes. When at last her eyes opened, they revealed irises of such a deep indigo that they might have been cut from the same cloth as the mysterious flames. Without hesitation or disorientation, she rose to her feet in one fluid motion, standing tall and straight as if she hadn’t fallen from the heavens mere hours ago. We instinctively stepped back, my father placing himself slightly ahead of my mother and me, torn between offering hospitality and maintaining caution before this woman whose very presence seemed to command the air around her.
“Who are you?” I breathed, the question escaping before I could consider the propriety of addressing our guest so directly. There was something both terrifying and magnificent about the woman now fully awake—the way she held herself, the quiet confidence that radiated from her like heat from a forge, the subtle shimmer of power that seemed to dance along the edges of her robes like summer lightning. In that moment, standing in our humble farmhouse kitchen with dried herbs hanging from the rafters and simple pottery on rough-hewn shelves, she looked as out of place as a diamond resting in a field of river stones.
The woman’s face softened, the severe beauty of her features warming as she inclined her head first to my father, then mother, and finally to me—each gesture measured and precise, carrying the weight of ancient courtesy. “I must first offer my deepest gratitude for your care and shelter,” she said, her voice resonant with an accent I couldn’t place, melodious yet edged with authority that brooked no question. “You have shown true grace in the eyes of the Father and Mother.” She straightened then, seeming to grow taller as her shoulders squared, her presence expanding until it filled every corner of our modest home. “I am Natalie the Third, by divine mandate Empress of the Seven Continental Crowns, Keeper of the Eternal Flame, Guardian of the Ancient Covenant, and by the grace of the holy Father and Mother, twenty-third ruler of the High Empire.”
