Of all enemies, none is crueler than the mind.

​

At the edge of oblivion—high upon the steepest cliff—stood a girl suspended between life and death.

Janna—hauntingly lovely, almost a woman at sixteen—stared at the bleeding horizon, her wide blue eyes long emptied of hope.
The soil crumbled beneath her bare toes, as though the earth itself urged her forward.

​

The year was 1399. The place: a jagged mount that loomed over Valtice, a sleepy border town tucked deep within the hills of southern Bohemia. Wenceslaus IV held the throne.

​

Spring had come shyly, not yet brave enough to thaw the stones—a tender bloom hesitant beneath winter’s lingering breath. The sky pressed low and gray; far below, the river churned with the violent melt of ice, and in the distance the clustered rooftops of the town seemed painted upon a dream.

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And there she stood—alone—at the edge of all things.

​

“It is time,” she murmured into the cold.

​

Her breath fled her in ragged clouds, the words carried off by the wind. Yet it wasn’t the chill that stole her breath—it was the hollow ache that had settled where her heart once beat. Her pulse thundered in her ears like distant war drums. The wind, wild and merciless, tore at her woolen robe and undid her loose braids like a jealous lover—howling with the voices of a hundred ghosts, biting her skin, whispering promises of what the world had never given: tranquility, stillness, peace.

​

Then came the other voices—ones not borne by the wind but crawling from within. They slithered through the hollow corridors of her mind, speaking venom in a tongue only she could hear: the tongue of the forsaken.

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“You were never meant to stay.”
“Your best days are already behind you.”
“Just one step.”
“Jump.”

How many times must we hear a lie before we believe it?

​

When facing the end, the mind tends to drift—always back to the beginning.

​

And suddenly she was a child again.
Not sixteen, but six.

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