Chapter 12 | Part 1

The first thing she felt was the cold.

Wet grass pressed against her cheek. Her hands were numb, fingers curled into soil that squelched between them. Somewhere nearby, a bird called—ordinary, unbothered, as if the world hadn’t just torn itself open and shown her something that wouldn’t leave.

Maris Hale opened her eyes.

The sun was wrong. It had been morning when she’d been walking the road to Riverhold. Now it hung low and golden, angled toward evening. Hours. She’d lost hours again.

She tried to sit up. Her body disagreed. Pain lanced through her skull—the familiar aftermath, the price she paid every time the visions came. Her tongue throbbed, and when she touched it gingerly, her fingers came away with the copper taste of blood. She’d bitten through it again.

Boat. Black water. A hand slipping under.

The fragments surfaced unbidden, sharp-edged and insistent. She pushed them down, focused on the physical instead. Ground beneath her. Sky above. Birds singing their stupid, oblivious songs.

She was lying in a field somewhere outside Riverhold. The town’s silhouette was visible against the horizon—walls and rooftops and the faint suggestion of smoke from chimneys. She didn’t remember walking here. Didn’t remember falling.

But then, she never did.

“Right,” she said aloud, testing her voice. It came out cracked and raw, like she’d been screaming. “That was fun.”

No one answered. Of course no one answered. Seers didn’t attract help; they attracted fear. A woman lying in a field, foam on her lips and blood on her tongue—people learned to walk around that particular problem rather than through it.

She got her elbows under her. The world tilted, steadied. She got her knees under her. The world tilted again, more insistently. She waited it out, breathing slow, counting heartbeats.

One. Two. Three. Four—

Black water. The hand reaching up. Fingers splayed, desperate, grasping for something solid and finding nothing—

She shoved the image away so hard she nearly fell over again.

“Stop,” she whispered. “Please, just—stop.”

The visions had been coming more frequently lately. Stronger. More specific. For years they’d been fragments—flashes of color, half-heard words, feelings without context. Useful only as proof of her difference, her wrongness, her inability to be normal.

But this one had been clear. Crystal clear. A small boat on water that moved like it was alive. Black water, thick and wrong. And a hand—grey-dark skin, long fingers—slipping beneath the surface while chaos churned around it.

Someone was drowning. Or had drowned. Or would drown. The visions never came with timestamps.

She finally managed to stand. Her legs trembled but held. Her head ached like someone had driven a spike through it, but she could think clearly enough. That was progress.

The field stretched around her in all directions—farmland, recently harvested, stubble scratching at her ankles. She couldn’t remember leaving the road, crossing the field, or falling.

That was the part she hated most. Not the pain, not the blood, not the visions themselves. The gaps. The stolen time. The moments of her life that simply disappeared, replaced by images of things she didn’t understand and couldn’t control.

She started walking toward Riverhold. Each step was a negotiation with a body that wanted nothing more than to lie back down in the grass and wait for the world to stop spinning.

Black water. The hand. Someone drowning.

The image refused to fade. Usually, visions began dissolving the moment she woke, leaving only impressions and fragments. But this one clung to her, sharp and whole and persistent.

Something in Riverhold was waiting. She could feel it—a pull, like a thread tied to her chest, like something was calling her name in a frequency just below hearing.

She’d felt calls before. They usually led to trouble.

But ignoring them led to worse.

Maris kept walking.

End of Chapter 12.1 —> 12.2: The Grass Where She Fell: The Stable Image