The world had gone quiet for the first time in her life.

Amelia had been burdened with the cries of the souls lost long before her time at an age when death was nothing but a faraway concept to her. Her mother had passed it down to her, and her sisters as her mother had before her, and her mother before. She’d spent countless nights lying awake, begging the voices to stop calling to her, reaching out their gnarled hands and scratching the corners of her mind that she had thought were untouchable. Unsurprisingly, she had been wrong.

But when she awoke in the arms of a stranger and only shrill ringing to fill her ears, a smile spread helplessly across her face. She had not known that there would be a surprise attack on the palace that night. That was the point of a surprise attack. She had not known that the walls of the glorious castle would cave in at the blow and trap her underneath. She had not known a guard would save her. She had not known the world would go silent the day she accepted this daunting mission.

But as she watched the castle lit aflame behind her and the spires come crumbling down in a blazing glory, she realized that for the first time in her life, no one was there to call her name.

Amelia laughed and she could not hear it, and it was glorious.