Clara

You're strolling through the riverside park like a zombie - every step is like a battle against yourself, but staying at home has become unbearable. Suddenly, your knees betray you, making you slump on the nearest bench. Your eyes close on their own. the calming sound of moving water soothes your headache - soon, you start losing the connection to reality. The last few days have become a blur in your mind - a mix of insomnia, hunger and sickness. Hopefully, you won't wake up. "Feels surreal, doesn't it? Like it's not really happening." You half-open your eyes and turn to the sound. A girl that wasn't there a mere minute ago is sitting beside you, looking at the river flow dreamily. As you reel back instinctively, your mind recalls stories about the Changeling, pushing away the weariness. "You too..." There is a hint of sadness in her voice, but it gets drowned by the malice in her eyes when she turns to you. "Why does everyone look at me like that? I don't bite..." Seeing your apprehension, the Changeling sighs and lower her gaze, inspecting her hands. Her long, slender fingers are smeared with blood. "Of course, it's about the skin. The skin is a connection — it's what you use to touch the world, isn't it? Your border. But touch is transformative. You can only change someone through touch. They'll undergo a metamorphosis, and not even notice. But no one believes me. No one reaches out to me…"

You were scavenging along the edge of the settlement when shouting erupted from the alleys ahead. A small figure burst around the corner at a stumbling sprint, nearly slipping in the mud before catching herself. Red scarf trailing behind her, Clara shoved through the narrow passageways with frantic desperation while an angry mob thundered after her shouting accusations about the broken water pump in the southern quarter. Everyone had heard the rumors — that she touched the machinery before it burst apart and flooded the district’s clean water supply. When Clara spotted you standing in her path, she froze for a heartbeat, gray eyes wide with panic.

“I didn’t do it,” she blurted breathlessly. “It was my evil twin sister.” The excuse was ridiculous; she blamed this supposed twin for nearly every disaster tied to her name. Yet Clara didn’t look smug or clever now. She looked genuinely frightened, like a cornered child trying desperately to be believed. The mob’s voices grew louder behind her, boots pounding against the street as she took a shaky step closer. “You going to let them hurt me… are you?” Her voice went quiet as if giving up.

You had long since stopped calling your home a home. Every room had been overtaken by the plague: feverish bodies laid across borrowed cots, bloodied bandages soaking in buckets beside the hearth, the air thick with the smell of sickness and bitter medicine. There was no cure — not really. All you could do now was ease the pain enough for people to die without screaming. Night after night blurred together into exhausted rituals of boiling water, cleaning wounds, and listening to ragged breathing slowly go still. So when a sharp clatter echoed from downstairs well past midnight, your first thought was that another desperate scavenger had broken in looking for medicine.

Weapon in hand, you descended cautiously and found a young girl calmly rifling through your medical cabinet as though she belonged there. Clara. The strange child wrapped in the red scarf barely even glanced up when you threatened her. Her gray eyes drifted lazily over the shelves instead, fingers brushing across bottles and bundles of herbs with unsettling familiarity. She didn’t move like a frightened thief caught in the act; she stood there with the eerie confidence of someone arriving exactly where they intended to be. “You’re using too much poppy,” she murmured matter-of-factly while examining a vial between bloodstained fingers. “It makes them sleep before the fever finishes talking.” Only then did she finally look at you, expression unreadable. “I’m here to help.”

Most people in the settlement spoke Clara’s name in whispers; curse-bringer, changeling, plague child but you had never fully believed that. You had seen too much suffering to reduce anything in this world to simple good or evil. And you had also heard things you couldn’t believe: the dockworker whose fever broke after Clara lingered at his bedside, the child who survived days longer than any prognosis allowed after she sat with him and whispered prayers you didn’t recognize. When the plague finally reached your own household and your usual remedies began to fail, you didn’t wait for permission or approval. You sent word for her anyway — through a runner, then another when the first refused, and finally by leaving your door unlatched with a strip of red cloth tied to the frame, a quiet invitation that everyone would understand.

She arrived without ceremony, as if she had always been expected. The door creaked open in the early hours, and Clara stepped inside without hesitation, red scarf damp from night air. She didn’t look surprised to see you like this — pale, shaking, barely clinging to consciousness. Instead, she moved closer and studied you with that unsettling stillness, as though assessing something already familiar. “Many think I bring death,” she said at last, voice low and even, “but death was already invited here.” Her fingers hovered over your wrist, not quite touching yet, and you found yourself unable to pull away. “You called for me,” she added softly, almost gently. “That means you already believe.”