Chapter Text
Dawn came quietly in the Illyrian mountains, but never gently.
It pressed its cold fingers beneath the doors of ramshackle houses, slipped beneath blankets, pulled women from their beds long before the sun touched the peaks.
She rose with the others.
She always did.
In the camp, mornings belonged to the women.
They moved like a tide through narrow paths and crooked alleys, tending to tasks that never ended.
She stoked the communal fires, smoke biting at her eyes.
Beside her, Yrene kneaded dough with hands already bruised from yesterday’s chores.
Children cried.
Someone called for more water.
Another for more mending thread.
Women kneel over cookfires, stirring thin porridge.
Girls carry water that freezes at the edges of their buckets.
Grandmothers scrub blood from training leathers without complaint.
There were no thank-yous.
No acknowledgements.
Just the silent expectation that they would bend, bow, serve.
All day.
Every day.
A rhythm carved into bone.
Alara lists her tasks under her breath as she works — chopping roots, patching a tear in a tunic, lifting crates, fetching water. The rhythm is numbing. Endless. As if the mountain carved those roles into her bones.
She finished her assigned work early, a small rebellion, and slipped behind the tanner’s shed, where the mountain wind cut sharp between two steep cliffs.
There, hidden from the eyes of males who might laugh or strike or report her, she strapped the crude glider to her arms.
It was little more than scavenged lumber and stitched hide, uneven and patched.
Clipped wings were never meant to catch the wind.
But she refused to let that stop her.
She stepped to the cliff’s lip, heart pounding a rhythm older than the camps, older than the knives that took her freedom.
The wind rose.
She ran.
And for a breath, just a single, fragile breath, she felt the sky trying to take her. Like a mother hold when lifting her child from the ground and allowing them a small taste of freedom before it's stripped on the appearance of their first bleed.
The glider wobbled, dipped, then yanked her sideways, slamming her to the dirt.
Pain lit her ribs.
But she pushed herself up, grit already in her palms, fury already making her steady her legs. The pain of landing in the dirt was nothing when put into context. the pain meant a taste of freedom, the other pain Alara had felt was suffocating and why she fought so hard to fight back against the patriarchal system that caused the dull ache that never stopped. Her clipped wings had become a dead weight after her father had found the bloody sheets her mother had tried desperately to burn. that night was burnt into her mind as she looked up towards the tip of Ramiel, the peak she hoped her mothers spirit got to reach after her father had beaten her to death for what she had tried to hide, when she tried to save Alara.
She shakes her head as she brushes off her hands and straightens her spine, adjusting her wings on her back, grimacing at the discomfort caused by the severed tendons in her wings.
Tomorrow, she thought.
She would try again tomorrow.
The tasks would never end, the cooking, the mending, the hauling, the endless, devoted labour, but this moment, this breath of wind?
It was hers.
And one day, she would fly.
She tells herself she is not foolish. She tells herself that every stolen attempt matters. She tells herself she is not broken beyond repair.
All day, every day, she thinks as she returns to her chores, the mountain takes whatever I have left.
She never says it aloud. But the thought sits behind her ribs like a bruise.