I thought he must still be young. Not a child, but not a grown man either. I liked to imagine we were the same age.

As I waited for him to wake up, vague memories returned to me. A mining town bustling with people. My father returning from below ground, smelling of coal dust and wet earth. Countless hours spent by the fire as my mother taught me her embroidery. When we ran out of thread, she drew the stitches in the fireplace ashes, guiding my fingertips over the symbols until I memorized them completely.

Then there were darker memories of corpses lying on the cobblestones, gunfire and artillery blasts in the night, and streets filled with coal smoke and inky grease from the mining machines. The memory of the Groznaya War hung over me. My childhood had been plagued by executions—both of suspected spies for Groznaya, and those accused of being kolduny and heretics.

Each time, the condemned would be tethered to a steel post in the center square, before a bogatyr soldier released a lightning bolt down upon them. The stench had been so horrific that observers would press satchels of herbs over their noses. And once it was over, the scraps of the deceased’s burnt clothes would be collected and sold—even relics of the bogatyri’s wrath were considered holy.

But the worst memory of all from that time was the cave-in mere days before we left. It was one of my few memories that remained pristine. I would never forget my mother gripping my hand as we’d walked past the rows of bodies laid out in the dirt, some just piles of parts covered by sheets.

My father had been fortunate. His features had been recognizable still, unlike many of the others whose families had to resort to sifting through their clothing and pockets to identify them. It never mattered in the end though. Their tendons were severed by the same silver blade, and their bodies burnt on the same pyre.

I hissed as the needle slipped through the cloth and pricked my finger. A quivering drop of blood welled from the wound. Staring at it, I found myself thinking back to the boy who had perished in the wreck.

I had asked my adoptive parents many times why some people came back and others simply died, and they had always been vague about their answers. Mama believed that there were springs of power in the world, areas where the barrier between the human realm and the goddesses’ realm was a little thinner. Rivers, certain glades, caves, ponds, crossroads, sometimes potter’s fields.

It was in those places the goddesses listened as we were dying and answered our deepest prayers—for another breath, for one more sunset, for the touch of a lover.

Papa told me once that he had been killed in a potter’s field in the empire’s far south, at the edge of the Black Steppe. He had been murdered by men who had hated him for no other reason than that he was a stranger. And once it was over, he had awoken with his mouth crammed with spindly yellow steppe-grass, and his skin already bloated, the bullet still inside him. He spent years living like an animal, hunting and scavenging, before Mama helped return him to his senses. Most upyri ate the dead and the living alike, but my family had found a way around it, by slowly starving themselves until they craved nothing at all.