Fractureborn

Thirteen years ago, the Kingdom of Agrekya let arrows fall on its own people to stop a plague.

A little girl named Alexia stood in the mud while her father held her and lied that they'd be fine, then the arrows fell and he was gone, and something inside her went dark the same night he did. Fractureborns had appeared alongside the Lymesis, not as a second plague but as its answer, shielding the sick, healing the dying, until the monarch and the Duke decided gratitude wasn't worth the risk, and ordered infected and uninfected alike put down together.

Alexia survived that massacre, but she didn't survive what came next: one of the very Fractureborns who had tried to save the kingdom turned on it instead, burning through the ashes without pattern or mercy, and took with it the only goodwill her people had left. She survived the fire too, but everything from before that night is gone, wiped clean, replaced only by grief, a name given to her by Berun, the retired fisherman who took her in, and a question she has never stopped asking.

Fractureborns are disappearing across the kingdom now, and nobody is looking: not the public that watched one of them burn through entire regions, not the Duke who rules where the monarchy used to, nobody but Alexia, who is certain that whoever is taking them already knows what happened to her thirteen years ago.

But what if some truths were buried for a reason?