YAN
SHE WAITED OUTSIDE. Didn’t have much choice—she could barely walk.
The old woman had done a great job patching Rayla up, stitching torn flesh and sealing bleeding vessels with the precision of someone who had spent their life in blood and ruin. But even with all her experience, there were no miracles here. Yanick’s own mangled hand was the greatest example of that fact.
He wanted to leave the red behind, but as he stepped through the broken door frame the red followed. It soaked into the floor, into his boots, into his breath.
“If you’re finished,” Rayla said without looking at him, “let’s move.”
He stood there, chest tight, blood crusted along the seams of his jacket. It took him longer than it should have to find words.
“Where?”
Rayla turned her head, and he saw the exhaustion in her face, the way pain pulled at her mouth. But the fire in her eyes didn’t waver.
“After him,” she said. Her voice was still harsh, only now weaker. “You owe me that. You owe them that…”
Yanick swallowed the bitterness rising in his throat. He nodded once and stepped forward, meaning to lift her onto his back.
“No,” she barked, the sound sharp, savage.
The true she-wolf he remembered. Stubborn, proud, bleeding, but standing.
“How else you want to do it?” he asked, lowering his arms slightly.
“Just help me get up,” she growled, “and let’s go back inside.”
“Inside?” He hesitated.
“Same way they went. We need to follow them.”
With a grunt, she took his offered arm. Her fingers clenched around his wrist like iron hooks, and he pulled her up.
Her knees wobbled, and for a moment he thought she might fall again, but she caught herself. Set her jaw. Took the lead.
They moved, step by step, back into the broken belly of the compound.
The corridors yawned before them, silent now, except for the drag of Rayla’s boots and the thud of Yanick’s heart.
Men and women who gathered around, waiting, eager to know what happened. Now their bodies lined the passageways. The price for curiosity was death. Some slumped against the walls, heads lolling at unnatural angles. Others sprawled across the floor, mouths open in wordless final questions.
Yanick caught glimpses of their faces, the woman from the mess hall, the man with the limp, a boy no older than sixteen.
He had no memory of killing them. But the blood on his boots said otherwise.
Rayla pressed on, jaw tight.
When they reached the large room where the real slaughter had taken place, the air thickened, grew heavier.
The stench of blood was almost a living thing now, clinging to the walls, seeping into the cracked floor.
Five bodies waited for them there. Rayla’s crew. Koleth, Varn and Thirra, Brask, Eloen. His crew.
Their weapons lay abandoned where they had fallen. The table Yanick had upended during the fight still rested on its side like a broken shield.
Rayla’s steps faltered.
For a moment, she just stood there, breathing hard, eyes flickering over their fallen forms.
Then she moved again. Past them, through them, her fingers brushing briefly across Varn’s boot in a gesture almost too quick to catch.
A goodbye. A promise.
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She led him to the back of the room, to a doorway half-splintered open, the metal frame twisted from some earlier violence.
Beyond it, a narrow corridor stretched forward into dimness, lit only by the flickering strips embedded into the walls.
It smelled of oil and blood and the coldness of machines.
The way the cowards had run. Nemeth had a long history of running away.
Rayla didn’t slow.
She limped onward, and Yanick followed, each step dragging the ghosts with them deeper into the dark.
“Is she truly your mother?” Yanick asked, not sure why, not sure why now. But the words slipped free before he could catch them.
“She was.”
“Was?” The answer caught him off guard. “Do you think he killed her?”
Rayla shook her head, a gesture so slight in the dark that he almost missed it.
“She gave me away,” she said. Her voice sounded hollow, scraped clean by old wounds. “She's not my mother anymore.”
They walked on in silence, the sound of their steps scraping against concrete and bloodstains. Every few paces the emergency lights flickered, throwing long, thin shadows like knives along the walls.
After a while, Yanick spoke again. His throat felt raw.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Ellie asked me to bring you here. She said you have some information about the war. About their plans.”
“Whose plans?” Rayla spat, sharp like broken glass. “I know as much as you do. She lied to you, Yanick. That’s what she does. Lies.”
“But you’re one of them, right?”
“One of who?”
She stopped dead. Turned to him. And for a heartbeat, he swore he saw her—the real Rayla—the fierce, furious creature made of rage and fire, the one who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him against impossible odds. The same fire, not extinguished, only buried.
“Come on,” she said, the words low, almost trembling from the effort of standing. “We’re nearly out of this place.”
“Exactly, Rayla—this place,” he pressed. “You were born and raised here, weren’t you?”
“Partially true,” she muttered, pushing forward again. “She sent me away when I was ten.”
Yanick didn’t say anything, though he had plenty of questions left clawing at the inside of his skull. The darkness thickened around them the deeper they went. Behind them, the corpses, the red, the heavy, dragging weight of everything they couldn’t undo. Ahead—the end of the corridor. Another door.
He had enough of doors. Every time he opened one, something tragic waited on the other side. Every time, his life shifted. And always for the worse.
He pushed the door open with the heel of his hand, the wounded wrist throbbing at the motion. The hinges groaned, dry and brittle like old bone.
And then they stepped out into a different world.
The mountains here were sharper, meaner, like jagged knives piled against the sky. The earth stretched out before them in a broken sea of rock and dust, cracked like an old, dying skin. Nothing green. No rivers. No song of birds. Only silence, heavy and absolute.
Ash grey plains melted into scorched hills, where blackened spires of dead trees clawed at the bruised heavens.
In the far distance, the horizon itself seemed fractured, torn by forgotten impacts from the old wars.
This wasn’t the soft, mournful land of the Nordlings he knew—the misty valleys, the green dales, the slow rivers carrying ghost songs in the morning fog. No. This was a wasteland. A graveyard stretched to the ends of the earth.
And this... this was the realm of the victors.
Yanick stared at the desolation before him and tried to understand how anyone could have conquered the living lands he came from only to choose to live here.
How the Faithful could choose ruin over plenty, ashes over gold. How madness could dress itself in banners and call itself destiny. There was no answer.
Rayla pulled her cloak tighter around her and started down the rocky slope without a word. Yanick followed. There was nothing else to do but keep walking.
The rocks shifted treacherously under his boots. Yanick stumbled. His bad hand slammed against the ground, sending a jolt of raw pain up his arm, straight into his skull. He gritted his teeth so hard he tasted blood. His vision swam.
Cursing under his breath, he fumbled at the bag slung over his shoulder, pulling free one of the syringes he had taken from the compound.
A hand clamped down on his wrist, strong despite its shaking.
“How much of this do you have?” Rayla asked. Her voice was low, rough, but sharp as broken glass.
He opened the bag and showed her.
“I suggest you keep it for real pain,” she said. Her fingers squeezed a little harder, then released. “And pray this will be enough.”
Yanick stared at her for a moment, at the blood-matted hair, the pale skin, the grim set of her jaw. She looked ready to collapse, but she was still standing. Still fighting.
He shoved the syringe back into the bag.
“Get up and let’s go,” she barked, already turning away, limping down the slope.
Yanick wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, tasted dust and iron, and followed.
“This is the good stuff,” Rayla said as they picked their way down the crumbling slope toward the desert. Her voice carried in the dead air, almost too loud against the silence of the waste. “Works for the pain better than vodka.”
She turned her head slightly, studying him. Yanick kept his eyes ahead, refusing her gaze.
“It’s alright,” she said after a moment, with a faint, almost broken smile. “You used to hate me drinking it. Said it dulled the edges. Made me slow. Yet when the real pain came, you turned to it yourself.”
Her words hung between them, heavy and aching. She seemed to wait — maybe for a denial, an excuse, anything. But Yanick stayed silent.
“This stuff,” she continued, gesturing weakly toward the bag, “these syringes... they’ll quiet the ghost inside you for a while. But the more you inject yourself, the shorter the silence lasts. And when the silence is gone...” She trailed off, her mouth tightening.
Yanick felt the bag’s weight pulling on his shoulder, as if every syringe inside was another moment of borrowed peace.
“After I killed Brask and the rest,” he said, his voice low and hoarse, “you said that you know. That you understand. Is that what you meant?”
She nodded once, slow and solemn.
“So you also have it?” he asked. “The other mind?”
Rayla looked at him, really looked this time. The way she never used to look at him before.
“Is that what you call it?” she said. “I call it the ghost.”