An Excerpt from Facets:

She stood alone, staring at the smoking ruin that had once been her home. The heat still radiated from the charred remains, flickering embers glowed faintly beneath layers of ash, and the air tasted bitter, heavy with soot. She took a trembling breath, her mind blank, her chest hollow. How she had made it outside, she couldn’t recall. Her clothes were singed, her hands raw, but her mind felt wrapped in a strange, dull haze that dulled the sharp edges of the memory. She had nothing left to hold onto, no answers, only a lingering ache and the fading echo of her mother’s voice.

As days turned into weeks, and then months, Félagi drifted into the shadows of the city, a silent figure slipping in and out of sight. She clung to street corners and darkened alleys, scavenging scraps to survive, trusting only her instincts to guide her. People passed her by with averted eyes or the indifferent glances reserved for stray animals. She was alone, but that became her reality, an existence she accepted without question.

The fire and her mother’s face became like half-forgotten dreams, slipping further from her grasp each day. The echoes of that night—smoke and ash, pain and heat—lingered at the edges of her mind, shadows without substance, memories without meaning. She found herself reaching back, trying to piece them together, but the memories refused to surface, trapped beneath a wall her mind had raised to protect itself.

It wasn’t just her memories that remained locked away. There was a part of her, a sense of something within herself, that she had lost that night. A warmth, a light—a power she no longer felt, buried alongside the memory of the fire. She had once known it, once felt it pulse within her like the beat of her heart, but now it was distant, unresponsive, like a forgotten lullaby left to fade in silence. 

Unaware of her own gifts, Félagi roamed the city streets with only her wits to shield her. She hardened herself against hunger and cold, against the loneliness that gnawed at her as she watched others hurry past. The warmth she remembered—the touch of her mother’s hands, the sound of her laughter, the safety of her voice—was gone, leaving only emptiness behind. She whispered to herself on the coldest nights, imagining her mother there beside her, guiding her through the shadows, keeping her safe.

But as the memory of her mother’s face blurred, her heart, too, began to shut itself away. Grief, survival—these became her world, a world she wandered in silence, waiting for something she couldn’t name, something lost in the ashes of her past.