Briony
Briony had spent as long as she could remember in the service of a cruel sorcerer who treated kindness like weakness and silence like obedience. In his isolated tower, she swept ash from stone floors, scrubbed cauldrons blackened with soot, and endured endless demands with little more than patched clothes and stubborn determination to keep her going. She never knew where she had come from or whether anyone had ever searched for her. The sorcerer called her forgettable, but Briony secretly collected small things he overlooked—strange words from old scrolls, stories overheard from travelers, and the belief that somewhere beyond the hills, freedom existed.
One storm-heavy evening, while cleaning dust from shelves in the tower library, Briony heard a voice whisper her name from somewhere between the creaking wood and crackling firelight. Hidden behind rows of neglected tomes sat an ancient book bound in faded leather, pulsing with a strange, uneasy presence that seemed to darken the air around it. Every instinct told her something was wrong with it. The shadows near it lingered too long; the silence around it felt watchful. But Briony had spent her life trapped beneath someone else’s power, and fear had never once opened a locked door. She reached for the book anyway, ignoring the aura curling from its pages, holding onto a single thought: if something this dangerous had been hidden away, maybe it was powerful enough to become her way out.