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prologue — a vision of murder
It's human nature to live at the edge of a constant state of waiting, wondering pondering over when death will appear. Yuna didn't need waiting, wondering or pondering because she knew—knew the precise moment she'd breathe her last breath, blink her last blink, eat her last meal—she'd always known.
To be more clear, she'd always known since the emergence of her abilities, when whatever mutated Grisha blood in her kicked in and caused her to stop wondering at a tender age. They called it psion, the conscious control of psychic, telepathic and paranormal phenomena. Yuna only knew it by a single name, shackles.
Shu Han tested children for Grisha powers at no later than twelve years of age, tore children from homes and strung them like cattle in labs funded by the imperial family. Those children never returned home and if they did it was always in a wooden box, Yuna didn't want to be a body in a wooden box.
When the soldiers came she could do nothing against them, they were fast, almost perfect in the way they pushed her hands a forceful distance apart and dragged her along the district she lived in. None of the other nomads offered any help but it was not their fault, Shu soldiers had weapons, they had years of training to tear down Grisha like pigs in a slaughterhouse.
She had made one fundamental mistake but had been so young it didn't seem very large until she was much older. The Captain in charge of rounding up Grisha had caught her eye, had looked to her for longer than a second but that was all she needed.
He was covered in death. She could see it in a blaze of fire that covered his whole body and made his corpse look like a mutilated slab of burnt meat, the kind that Yuna saw rich Shu dispose of in the slums.
"You're going to die," She had spoken aloud, a small and painfully high-pitched voice stuttering at the brunt of another harsh shove. "Ravka will attack and you will die in a fire."
A day had gone by since she'd mentioned his death and in the seconds before she would be sent to the Grisha test center a large hand accompanied by a smile crouched in front of her. The man pretended to be kind, smiled like she couldn't tell how fake it was and gave her the words she'd already known to occur long before he made his presence known.
"Captain Zhao is dead," His lips stretched even further if that could have been possible. "A Ravkan attack while they were transporting supplies just close to the border. An attack led by Inferni."
His name, the man who smiled so falsely to her, was Unit Commander Xui Yul-Chen and he was the devil who wore the skin of man.
