Witching Hour, Nikolai Lantsov

Witching Hour

[a little heads up: the format/writing style might change a little throughout the fic because i've been writing this for quite some time and have not yet gotten around to editing it]

This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.

Margaret Atwood

I choked on such longing
I couldn't spit out. Yes, desire is so different
when God bore you hungry.

Yves Olade Belovéd

Among the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?

Angela Carter Night at the Circus

When she was nine, she saw her first pyre━ mere weeks after she'd found that she could control the flame flickering on a lit candle with nothing but her determination. By twelve she was flawlessly fluent in Ravken and Kerch aside her native Fjerdan, by sixteen she had added Shu to the list as well. She'd been a dreamer then; dreaming of a better world in Fjerda, for girls, for Grisha, for herself. She'd dreamed of molding Fjerda into this world. But Vera never got that far.

When she is fourteen she sets her home on fire with nothing but a nightmare and, in fear of her Druskelle father, she escapes over the borders to Ravka, fleeing from the only home she's ever known. Until she is certain that the snow around her would kill her quietly against all her shivering efforts to light fires to keep her warm. She was only half conscious when a party of riders nearly trampled her over, a black coach in their midst.

Volchitsa, the Grisha whisper behind their hands, pointing at her in the Little Palace. Etherealki, the Darkling had explained, smiling at her in his coach after pulling her from the snow, freezing to death. Years later, whispers of a witch with flaming red hair and piercing blue eyes from their own shores rise through the Drüskelle' ranks. They call her Wolf's Bane.

Vera Kvalheim was a ghost. Vera Alekson is a soldier. Ghost, soldier, Wolf's Bane. Vera is all of them. And so much more.

VERA ALEKSON
sophie turner

DISCLAIMER
i do not own the grishaverse, however i do own my original characters and their individual plotlines

WARNING
strong language, includes themes such as violence and character death, war and prejudice

AUTHOR'S NOTE

for ✨context✨: this book will follow the books and not the tv series, this also is the first book of a bigger fic universe i personally call the torch song-anthology which consists of three consecutive books. witching hour (the first book) is set in alina's trilogy. while you can read them all out of order i'd personally recommended reading them in the order they're written as they are in the same universe and have their own spot on the canon timeline (for example: underdog might have spoilers for the end of witching hour since it's set in the soc duology, and thus after witching hour)