Some children are born to change the world. Others are born to destroy it. At five years old, Ethan Gust was still too young to know which one he was.The village of Seabreeze was small, a scatter of clay houses with wooden roofs pressed close to the great forest of Kyros. People wake early here. Mothers carried water in clay jars that clicked softly against their hips, fathers split wood with steady strokes that echoed in the square, and children sprinted in dusty loops until the first voices called them back.Ethan was one of those children. Only five years old, he ran through the Whispergrass at the edge of the square, his feet brushing the tall stalks. The grass rattled as if it were trying out words. He laughed and answered with nonsense sounds, happy to pretend he understood.When the games ended and his friends were called home for supper, Ethan wandered along the narrow lane behind his cottage at the village's edge, where the ground lifted into a low rise.He ventured down the

The days settled into a pattern of careful loneliness.Ethan walked the village paths alone now, his footsteps echoing in squares that once rang with children's laughter. The other boys and girls watched him from doorways and windows, curious, fearful, forbidden to approach. Their parents' whispered warnings followed him like shadows: Stay away from the horn-boy. Don't let him touch you. Something dark grows in him.But he was never truly alone. The beasts of Kyros loved him with a devotion that filled the hollow spaces left by human rejection. Glowmice danced around his ankles in spirals of soft green light. Cloud moths settled on his shoulders like living jewelry. The tiny crystal-backed drake whom he'd named Shimmer for the way sunlight fractured across her scales perched on his arm and hummed melodies that sounded almost like lullabies.At home, Lila worked twice as hard to fill the silence where friends' voices should have been. She invented games from nothing, shadow puppets on

After checking on Ethan one final time, Lila returned to the kitchen where Marlin Gust still sat at the worn wooden table. The tremor in his hands had worsened, she noticed, barely visible but unmistakable to her healer's eye."Are you all right?" she asked again, settling beside him with practiced concern."I'm fine," Marlin replied, but his voice carried the weight of untruth.Without asking permission, Lila took his hands in hers. Warm green light flowed from her palms, seeping into his skin like sunlight through water. The tremor eased, and color returned to his weathered features."How bad was it?" she whispered when the healing light faded.Marlin flexed his fingers experimentally, then met her eyes with grim honesty. "His power... it's growing faster than we expected. No ordinary human could survive his touch now."The words hung between them like a death sentence."What happens when he removes it again?" Marlin asked after a long silence. "And he will remove it again, Lila. Yo

The evening air hung thick with resin and the gentle hum of night insects as Ethan slipped into the forest. His father had left for his evening hunt, and his mother was absorbed in grinding moonpetal seeds by lamplight. The cottage felt too small tonight, filled with the weight of questions that had been building in his chest for months.At fourteen, the doubts had grown too strong to ignore. Six years of wearing the glove without incident had given him confidence, but it had also planted seeds of hope that perhaps his curse had finally weakened. Perhaps he was finally free.He walked deeper beneath the towering black spears of the Ashspires, drawn by an irresistible need for solitude and answers. The creatures of Kyros stirred at his approach, sensing his familiar presence.Glowmice scattered in curious arcs around his boots, their green bellies pulsing like earthbound stars. A pair of fawncats padded behind him at a respectful distance, tails raised, eyes bright with familiar devoti

Ethan sat in the moonlit clearing, his whole body shaking. His hands were still stained with his mother's blood dark and sticky, drying into the creases of his palms. He could still feel the warmth of it, the terrible wetness as it had poured between his fingers while he'd tried uselessly to stop the flow."I left her," he whispered, the words tasting like poison. "I left Ma bleeding in the dirt."The fox kit trembled in his arms, whimpering with each labored breath. Its left hind leg was twisted at a horrible angle, clearly shattered, but Ethan barely registered it. All he could see was his mother's face pale as death, blood on her lips, telling him to run.And he had run. Like a coward, he had run."She told me to find Father," he choked out, trying to justify it to himself, to the forest, to the dying creature in his arms. "She said to find him. But what if she's bleeding out right now while I'm sitting here? What if she needs me, and I'm not there?"The kit made a pitiful sound, a