Well, the word doesn’t quite cut it when you have a machete—yes, a real one, stolen from the gardening shed behind the castle—stuck halfway into the wall like some sort of violent decoration. Right above it hung a crumpled sheet of paper with a childish doodle of Lady Miria, tongue out, middle finger raised, her perfect hair exaggerated into messy lines.
The drawing was crowned by the polite, handwritten title: “Ice Bitch.”
The letters had been pressed so hard into the paper that the marker bled through and stained the wall underneath. Fer had written it in one of those bursts of rage that start hot, then cool into shame, and finally stay there: like graffiti in your own memory.
The reason for this masterpiece of emotional expression? Miria Frostweaver had beaten her in a one-on-one duel. In front of the entire class.
Fer could still feel the heat crawling up her neck every time she remembered the applause afterward, the gasps, the smirk on Miria’s infuriatingly calm face. All because Feralynn, soldier-trained and battle-tested, forgot the simplest rule of all when facing someone who conjures ice: watch your damn step.
Her boots had skidded. Her balance had betrayed her. A second later she was on her back, staring at the ceiling, and Miria’s spell froze the ground beside her just enough to make sure she couldn’t get up without looking ridiculous. The laughter of the students still echoed faintly somewhere in her skull, like a curse she couldn’t dispel.
After that day, she stormed back to her room, still smelling of ozone and embarrassment, and decided the wall deserved to suffer for her humiliation. The machete had hit with a satisfying thunk, the doodle went up as her battle trophy, and the insult followed naturally. As if the words had been waiting all day to spill out of her hand.
And yet, as she looked at the mess now, even she had to admit: it was kind of funny. The machete. The note. The absurd pettiness of it all. A war veteran turned student, losing her temper over a duel in a classroom.
Maybe, she thought, that was the real joke of her new life.
The Jason mask she wore on Halloween night was still lying face-down on the floor, its polished plastic catching the moonlight like a secret. Beside it sat the cheap pumpkin bucket, its paint chipped and the handle bent, now overflowing with crumpled candy wrappers, a sugary graveyard of the night’s spoils. The faint smell of chocolate still lingered in the air, mixing with the metallic tang of dust and old iron.
That night, she and Annya had gone out to patrol the neighborhood, self-appointed guardians of the smaller kids swarming from door to door in costumes far more innocent than theirs.
Fer took the role a little too seriously. She kept to the edges of the street like she was on reconnaissance, scanning for suspicious adults, stray dogs, or ghosts that didn’t know how to mind their own business.
And of course, being the responsible “bodyguard,” she wasn’t about to let all that effort go unpaid, right?. Every time the kids came back squealing with new candy, she quietly collected her bodyguard tax.
A chocolate here, a caramel there. Always timing it for when Annya turned around to wave at some parent or fix a crooked costume. She’d learned how to swipe sweets as efficiently as she once disarmed enemies.
Naturally, the routine didn’t last long. Annya had the nose of a detective when it came to sugar. But that night, the two of them were so giddy from the cold air and laughter that Fer’s small acts of thievery went unpunished.
Maybe Annya pretended not to notice. Maybe she really didn’t care. Either way, the memory still made Fer smirk whenever she saw that empty pumpkin bucket. It was her trophy of a night when she got to pretend, if only for a few hours, that the world was simple again.
She even tried trick-or-treating on her own, and at first everything went fine. Adults praised her classic slasher costume.
Until she nearly gave a poor old man a fatal heart attack when he saw a girl with glowing red eyes, a hockey mask, and a machete that looked far too real raised in an attack pose.
“Fer! What did you just do?!”
“What?! Nothing! The idiot fainted!”
“Is he alive?!”
“...I think so. Let me check–”
“Don’t just poke him with your machete!”
“I’M JUST CHECKING!”
After that little incident, Annya collected candy for both of them and ended up sharing it.
That night… was also the first time Fer had ever danced at a party with kids her age. It still felt unreal when she thought about it. How something so normal could be so terrifying. After they’d finished shepherding the younger children home, she and Annya had gotten the rare official permission of Darina’s excessive worry to go to an actual Halloween party.
Jax and Rose tagged along, loud and confident.
Fer had tried to convince herself it would be harmless. Just a few hours. Just noise and candy and pretending to be someone ordinary.
The moment the four of them crossed the door of the lavish two-story house, she knew she’d been wrong. The place belonged to one of the rich sophomore boys. The kind who could throw “small gatherings” that looked like music videos.
The air was alive with blaring music that shook the walls and pulsed through the floorboards. Strobes of orange, green, and violet slashed across the crowd like restless spirits, flashing teeth, glitter, fake blood. The scent hit her next: soda, perfume, and hair spray thick enough to choke on.
Fer froze in the doorway, a soldier dropped into an alien battlefield. Her boots stuck to the sticky floor, her heartbeat syncing with the chaotic rhythm pounding through the speakers.
Teenagers laughed, shouted, filmed themselves, spilled drinks, flirted shamelessly.
She could already feel a headache coming on. This wasn’t her kind of chaos. The kind that had purpose, that made sense. This was chaos for fun. For people who didn’t know what it meant to be scared of silence.
Annya, of course, fit right in. She twirled her zombie-nurse skirt, laughing as Rose immediately dragged her toward the dance floor. Jax was already halfway to the speakers, chatting up strangers like he owned the place.
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And Fer? Fer lingered by the doorway a second too long, still clutching her bucket, wondering what in all the frozen hells she was doing there.
She didn’t know what to do except follow Annya as if she were a lifeline in an ocean full of hungry sharks. The music was loud, but It wasn't the nu-metal she listened to. It was pop, the kind Annya played in her room while doing homework or humming in the bus.
She still remembers how tightly she gripped her cup of punch—non-alcoholic, of course—when she saw the boys of their classroom inviting her friend to dance. Her throat knotted as she watched Annya laugh, moving among them, catching one too many winks. She clenched the cup so hard her hands accidentally set it on fire and had to run to the bathroom to extinguish the flames on her palms.
Watching her few friends dance, socialize, live so freely hurt. It hurt more than she wanted to admit. The same girl capable of infiltrating and eliminating an armed squad was afraid to start a simple conversation on her own. Or worse, to dance in front of others. She never thought she’d end up missing Miria’s teasing in the training room; at least that was easier to bear. And she could easily back-fire in any case. But not when you are the training dummy, and the duel is to simply relax.
Still wearing her mask, she quietly slipped out into the backyard and leaned against a wall near the front door, vaguely toying with her old Zippo lighter. A boy approached and nicely asked her to get inside and dance, but she was so damn lost in thought that, startled, she reflexively punched him.
She knocked him unconscious. Scared, she checked no one saw it happen. The rest were busy, so she decided to hide the poor boy behind some bushes and arranged several disposable cups around him to disguise the scene.
Luckily, her face was covered; he wouldn't remember her… though his broken nose wouldn’t say the same.
“Come on, killer! One song and I’ll let you crawl back to your pit of darkness!”
That’s what Annya shouted when she found her pouring herself another cup of punch. Fer almost dropped it when she saw her illuminated by the party lights, in that costume that made her look like the cure to her loneliness. Annya reached out a hand, smiling wide.
“…With the mask on,” Fer firmly requested, to hide a face redder than a fresh apple.
The strangest sight of the night wasn’t the creative costumes or the floating, spark-spitting enchanted decorations of the house.
Not even the grand masquerade ball taking place at the Amberfall palace across the city, where Miria danced graceful waltzs with the noble sons of the Bloomwarden and the Goldbrand families.
It was seeing the serious girl who rarely smiles dancing awkwardly with the brightest one in the room. Both laughing by pure accident. Holding hands, not caring about Jax and Rose’s mischievous looks on them suggesting other things, nor the shoulder bumps from others crossing the floor.
Maybe it was the ridiculous amount of sugar they’d eaten, or the euphoria of the moment, but both their hearts beat with a pure, childlike joy. The eyes hidden behind Fer’s mask cried without her noticing, though not from sadness. Her cheeks ached from smiling so much. They kept dancing until their feet begged for even a single glimpse of mercy.
That night, the four of them fell asleep, exhausted, in the back seat of Mrs. Oak’s car, with Darina at the wheel.
Feralynn would never forget that night for the rest of her life.
Back in the present, in her room… the dark-haired girl wasn’t exactly an organized student. Let alone as a person at all. On her desk still lay piles of unfinished Algebra homework. On the wall in front of her, beside the window, hung another paper pinned with a dagger, reading in big block letters: “DON’T FORGET: HISTORY EXAM.” Beneath it, a list of items crossed out with a red marker, as messy as her limited patience.
Her black backpack sat half-open on the chair, still stuffed with empty cookie bags she used to share with Annya during lunch, and a couple of drained energy-drink cans: the silent witnesses of her usual insomnia.
Instead of hugging her rifle—a habit from the snow camps still etched in her body—she now wrapped her arms around her pillow. The few times she’d been in Annya’s room, that fortress of pink and plushies, she’d felt the impulse to buy one herself. But the shame of her mother catching her sleeping with a stuffed toy stopped her. She didn’t want to seem like a child.
“…”
In silence, she waited for sleep to come. She blinked slowly, clutching the pillow against her chest, until she decided to cover herself completely under the blankets: she couldn’t stand the absolute silence of her room. She shifted inside her cocoon of thick covers, searching for a comfortable position as the night chill slipped through the seams.
Left. Right. Nothing. Left again. Face-down. No. Up. Right again. Nothing. The mattress creaked faintly with every turn, as if it were protesting along with her.
And still, her mind refused to rest.
Without any permission, it replayed Annya’s smile under the party lights, her breathless laughter as they danced, the music vibrating in her ears, their intertwined hands moving to the same rhythm.
“Ughh…”
With her characteristic groan, she let her body slowly slide off the bed until she hit the floor with a dull thud. Lying on her back, she stared at the ceiling. Then vaguely turned her head to check that the fire extinguishers were still under the bed. And there they were. Her faithful guardians against any nightmare that might wake her hands wrapped in flames… again.
Without getting up, she stretched an arm toward the nightstand to grab her alarm clock. She just wanted to know how long she hadn’t slept.
“Great. Almost three fucking a.m.,” she muttered hoarsely. "I hate this..."
She sighed and tossed the clock onto the desk, not really caring where it landed. Nights were hard, especially after the second session with Romina that week.
They had accessed two new memories from her soul. One worse than the other. The first was, relatively speaking, tolerable. Even happier: a night camping with her father in a shelter, watching the stars. The second… another mission with Solerian soldiers. More gunfire. More bodies burned by a younger Fer.
That time, Feralynn brought popcorn. She shared it with Romina as they watched the scenes like an action movie’s filming set. The professor found it amusing how her student processed the horror of that afternoon with such peculiar lightness. Even if the scenes shocked her.
“At this point, It’s just better than whining.”
That’s what she’d said, face blank, mouth full of popcorn, while her younger self set soldiers ablaze in the memory in front of them.
That day two new wounds were stitched on her heart. Though the price was more frequent nightmares, the emotional residue left behind by her teacher’s spell sessions. Something not even Romina expected to happen.
Resigned, she stood up and walked to the bathroom attached to her room. She turned on the light. Her reflection stared back at her with dark circles like burnt coffee. She opened the medicine-cabinet mirror and took out a small bottle bought days earlier at the pharmacy, hidden from her mother and Annya.
She murmured the drug’s name, running her thumb over the label as if performing a sacred ritual.
NULLWINE
Sleep & Emotional Stabilizer
15 ml dropper bottle – Oral use only
Calming elixir designed to induce sleep and reduce emotional overactivity. Formulated with dreamroot extract and low-grade null-aether, it gently slows the flow and softens heightened emotional states.
USES:
? Insomnia
? Night terrors, post-combat nerves
? Emotional spikes (rage, grief, panic)
DIRECTIONS:
Take 5–10 drops under the tongue before sleep.
Do not exceed 20 drops in 24 hours. Effects begin within 10–15 minutes.
WARNINGS:
May cause drowsiness, emotional dulling, or vivid dreams.
Do not combine with stimulants, memory enhancers, or combat-focus tonics.
Not recommended during active work.
Carefully, she uncapped the bottle and drew a small dose with the dropper. She opened her mouth, stuck out her tongue, and counted in silence each metallic drop as it fell.
One. Two. Five. Seven. Ten. She stopped at ten. Enough for a few hours of rest to endure the day.
The oxidized-metal taste of the Nullwine made her grimace; it was like putting liquid gunpowder on her palate.
Back in bed, she hugged her loyal pillow. Before closing her eyes, she glanced out the window toward the neighboring house: the light in Annya’s room was still on upstairs.
“What the fuck is she doing up this late?” she muttered, half curious, half jealous.
Wrapped again in blankets, she wondered what her friend might be doing at that hour. She smirked, imagining her summoning a cupcake demon in a pentagram made of sugar and flour.
The numbers on the clock lost their shape, and Feralynn’s mind began to blur. Her jaw relaxed, her breathing slowed, and between soft snores she finally drifted into sleep.
…
…
…
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