The Forgotten Sun

[ POV: KAELIA BRYNN HALLOWAY ]

I had no memory of the real sun.

I was too small to store the image in my head when the sky was stolen, dragged behind an endless blanket of ash and locked away forever. Sometimes it surfaced in dreams, distant and blurred at the edges like water-damaged photographs. A blanket spread across green grass. Dry heat baking into bare shoulders. My mother laughing while she poured lemonade from a glass pitcher, my father leaning back against an oak tree, and Liora sleeping in a wicker basket between us.

Those fragments were illusions, nothing more than ghost stories my mind invented to fill the dark. It had been years since the world lost its daylight, and nearly as long since fever took my mother to a shallow grave behind the district wall. Now, only my father remained to tell the tale. He used to sit on the edge of my mattress during winter lockouts, whispering about the days before the Fang War when the sky was a deep, shocking blue. He swore that if you stared up into the noon heat back then, the brightness would sear your vision until tears ran down your cheeks. He called it magnificent. He called it life.

I pressed the tip of my yellow felt marker against the folded paper on my desk. Methodically, stroke by stroke, I filled in the uneven circle sketched across the lined sheet. I stared at the bright ink, trying to picture what that warmth felt like against human skin. In an old book hidden beneath the floorboards in our cellar, a forgotten poet had described it as an angel’s palm resting against your cheek.

My attention drifted toward the classroom window. Outside, cold rain streaked the grime-caked glass, blurring the rusted barbed wire running along the courtyard wall. Beyond the perimeter fence, the sky hung low and heavy, an unbroken ceiling of bruised slate and chimney soot. It looked like an iron vault clamped over our heads. It felt like the hollow space inside my ribs.

A harsh brass bell clattered from the ceiling, shattering the quiet.

"That concludes our third period," Miss Blythe announced, setting her chalk into the grooved wooden tray. "Recess has begun. You may pack your belongings."

The room stirred instantly. Wooden chair legs shrieked against the linoleum as thirty students scrambled to gather their binders and coats. Low mutters spread across the rows, voices thick with relief at escaping another hour of administrative history. I could not blame them. In Eclipse High, every classroom felt like a holding pen where human cattle waited for the next bell, the next tally, or the next census inspection.

I set the marker down and capped it with a faint click. Carefully, so as not to crease the edges, I slid the freshly colored yellow card between the pages of my heavy history text. I gathered my notebooks into my arms and rose from my desk, intending to blend into the stream of bodies moving toward the corridor.

"Miss Halloway."

I halted two paces from the open door. Suppressing a sigh, I arranged my expression into something polite and neutral before turning back around.

Miss Blythe stood behind her oak podium, a thin stack of papers resting in her hands. She wore a dark wool cardigan buttoned up to her throat, her brown hair pinned back in a tidy coil. Among the human staff at our school, she was an anomaly. Most human teachers here had their spirits beaten out of them years ago by the district overseers, drifting through their lectures like hollow puppets waiting for their blood tax appointments. But Miss Blythe carried herself with a quiet, stubborn poise. Even the fledgling vampires from the merchant families treated her with a strange, grudging restraint.

She lifted a loose parchment from her desk and held it out. "Your essay on the Origin of the Fanged, Class Vampire was exceptional. Your analysis of the pre-war treaties showed rare diligence."

I stepped back toward her desk and took the paper from her hands. In the upper right corner, penned in sharp red ink, sat a clean A-plus.

A mark like that was supposed to signify achievement, but under the rule of the High Fang, academic merit was an empty gesture. A human student could memorize every legal precedent from the founding era to the surrender, yet none of it would secure an apprenticeship in the central courts or an administrative seat in the provincial council. At best, high marks kept you off the manual labor drafts at the coal docks. At worst, they made the overseers look at you a second longer during the harvest assessments, checking to see if your blood ran as clean as your penmanship.

"I spent three evenings in the municipal archives finding those treaty clauses," I said, folding the essay down the middle so the red grade was hidden. "I wanted to make sure the dates were accurate."

Miss Blythe rested her hands against the edge of the wood, studying me with warm, observant eyes. "Your effort shows, Kaelia. It is rare to read work from a student who understands that history is more than names on a memorial plaque. I expect your upcoming paper on the Noble Vampire Houses will be just as thorough."

"I will do my best," I replied, keeping my tone clipped and respectful.

I took half a step backward, hoping she would give me leave to go, but she remained still. The faint smile on her face softened into something far more personal, tinged with a shadow of quiet worry.

"Your father mentioned your sister during the district registry check yesterday," Miss Blythe said quietly. "Liora turns twelve today, does she not?"

The breath locked in my throat. My fingers tightened over the edges of my notebooks until the cardboard dug painfully into my ribs.

Twelve. The number sat between us like an iron blade resting on the desk.

In our world, twelve was not just another year of childhood. It was the boundary line. It was the cursed threshold where the blood of a human girl was tested by nature itself. If she passed the year as a mundane mortal, she remained safe from the aristocracy—free to live a quiet, unremarkable life as a worker, a clerk, or an artisan under the Fang dominion. But if the Strike awakened within her veins, her humanity was stripped away. She became a Sworn—a soulbound match destined to serve as the living anchor and battery for a High Fang lord.

"She does," I said, forcing my voice to remain even. "And she is terrified."

Miss Blythe lowered her chin, her hazel eyes dimming with deep empathy. "Any child would be. But I noticed the card you were drawing during my lecture. The color was very bright."

A wave of warmth climbed the back of my neck. I looked down at my history book, embarrassed that she had caught me neglecting her lesson, yet grateful that she had not reprimanded me in front of the others.

"She has never seen what sunlight looks like," I said softly, staring down at my boots. "I thought it might make the house feel less dark when I get home."

Miss Blythe stepped around the podium and rested a hand gently against my shoulder for a single, reassuring second. "Give Liora my fondest regards, Kaelia. Tell her that Eclipse High expects her to arrive next term with the same sharp mind her sister possesses."

"I will tell her, Miss Blythe. Thank you."

I offered her a brief, stiff nod, then pivoted on my heel and stepped out into the hallway.

The school corridor smelled of damp wool coats, copper polish, and old floor wax. I drew a deep breath of the cold air, trying to slow the sudden pounding behind my ribs. My mind refused to leave Liora. Twelve years old. By now, my father would have closed the shutters in our small rowhouse, barring the front door against the district wardens. He would be sitting beside her at the kitchen table, watching her hands, waiting to see if any spark of abnormal heat or sudden static crawled across her skin. If midnight struck and her blood remained silent, our family would be safe. If not, the imperial couriers would smell the surge before the sun failed to rise tomorrow.

I pushed my fingers through my thick, unruly curls and quickened my stride down the main hall. Only a few hours remained until the curfew sirens sounded. I needed to finish my afternoon classes, collect my rations from the distribution office, and get home before the gloom deepened into night.

As I rounded the corner leading toward the central locker bays, the usual quiet of the school evaporated.

Dozens of students were gathered in a dense, jostling mass near the administrative notice boards. The air buzzed with frantic whispers, shrill laughter, and the sharp clatter of locker doors slamming shut. The hallway looked as though a windstorm had torn through an office; thin sheets of black-and-white newsprint lay scattered across the linoleum, kicked around by heavy boots and scuffed by sneakers.

I paused near the water fountain, frowning at the spectacle. Eclipse High was normally a grim place. The vampire proctors who guarded the gates did not tolerate loud gatherings, and human students rarely had reason to celebrate anything.

"Did you see the seal on the headline?" a girl shrieked from the center of the crowd, her voice carrying over the din. "It came directly from the Capital Press! He actually claimed her!"

I recognized Chloe’s voice. She was surrounded by her usual pack of cheerleaders, their faces flushed with excitement as they clutched identical flyers against their chests.

"Shut up, there is no way," another voice cut in, high and breathless. "Prince Caius taking a Sworn? He executes people for looking at him sideways in the lower courts!"

"Look at the picture, you idiot!" Chloe snapped back, waving a printed sheet in the air. "The Royal Court verified the bond this morning! They are officially betrothed!"

The words struck me like a bucket of freezing water. My feet carried me forward against my better judgment, drawn toward the edge of the throng.

Prince Caius.

The name alone was enough to send a cold draft through the hallway. The Fang Crown held total authority over the Iron world, and the Dravos line was the black heart of that empire. Any shift in their succession rippled straight through the provinces, dictating tax rates, labor levies, and the movement of the garrison legions.

A discarded flyer fluttered across the floor, sliding over the polished wax until it struck the toe of my boot.

I set my notebooks against my hip, crouched down, and picked up the paper.

The print was rough and cheap, churned out on high-speed provincial presses to spread royal decrees across the occupied zones. But even through the grainy halftone ink, the portrait printed across the front page carried a suffocating weight.

Prince Caius Torin Dravos dominated the frame.

He was young—scarcely twenty years old by human reckoning—yet there was nothing youthful about the brutal cut of his features. The photocopy could not mask the lethal symmetry of his face, the high, sharp cheekbones, or the straight line of a jaw that seemed chiseled from dark marble. His hair was cropped short, dark as pitch, falling forward over a broad, unyielding brow. Even in gray ink, his eyes commanded the page, wide and piercing, hooded beneath heavy lids that radiated cold indifference.

He was the fabled nightmare of the conquered lands: a Tribrid.

The old histories spoke of the bloodlines that converged to create him. Vampire royalty from the ancient Oldblood lines, ferocious shifter blood from the Northern Alphas, and the dark, volatile magic of the High Witches. He carried the curses of all three ruling factions within his veins, a biological weapon crafted to secure the Dravos dynasty forever. It was his bloodline that led the final assault against the human strongholds during the war, and his family’s sorcerers who wove the atmospheric wards that strangled the sun, allowing their predatory kind to hunt beneath perpetual twilight without burning.

I tightened my fingers around the paper, crinkling the cheap edges.

The prince stared directly into the camera with an expression that made my stomach turn. There was no joy in his eyes, no satisfaction, no trace of human emotion. He looked like an executioner posing beside an altar.

Standing at his right shoulder was the woman who had bound him.

She was stunning in a way that made you feel small just looking at her. Her jaw was delicate, her nose straight and proud, and her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders in thick, sculpted waves. She wore a tailored velvet coat fastened with silver clasps that bore the twin-crescent crest of the High Fang.

Unlike the prince, she was smiling. It was a radiant, triumphant expression—the look of an empress who had reached into the fire and pulled out an empire. She stood close against his side, her chin lifted toward the viewer as though daring anyone in the four provinces to challenge her place.

Beneath the portrait, set in bold, imposing capital letters, the imperial gazette had stamped her name and the gift that had marked her blood:

DAPHNE MARIS, WIELDER OF STORMS.