YAN

  THE CITY REVEALED ITSELF IN SILENCE. A jagged line of rooftops broke the horizon first. Hunched silhouettes of sun baked clay and cracked sandstone, pierced here and there by thin, spired towers that rose like spears into the choking grey sky. They weren’t built for defence. These were observation posts, ancient and severe, their narrow windows like slits cut into time itself. The city sprawled beneath them in earthen tones, layered and labyrinthine, like it had been carved directly out of the bones of the desert.

  As Yanick and Rayla drew closer, the city shed its corpse-like mask. From the dust and ruin bloomed colour and clamour. Tattered fabrics strung between buildings like faded prayer flags, the clink of hammered metal, the shouts of traders haggling in a dozen tongues. Life, stubborn and layered, carved into the dry hide of the desert. It was a city not untouched by war, but perhaps unimpressed by it. Or perhaps it had simply grown old enough to pretend the end of the world wasn’t its concern.

  “This is it,” Rayla said. Her voice was low, but it held that same iron edge he remembered from the mountain paths. She leaned hard on the makeshift cane she’d carved from a splintered signpost. The desert light made her skin look almost translucent, waxy, like old paper stretched too thin. Her breaths came shallow, dragging like cloth through grit. Her wound though seemed to bother her less and less.

  Yanick on the other hand had to inject himself with the syringes a couple of times. Always at night, when she was asleep.

  “This is one of their cities,” Rayla said again. “A stronghold of the Faithful. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay here. I’ll be back before sunset.”

  Yanick didn’t answer right away. He let her words hang, the silence between them filled with the rasp of wind against bone dry stone. He’d heard stories of the Faithful cities, walled zealot nests where pale skinned Nordlings were spat on, stripped, or vanished. Places where men like him, white-haired, white-skinned, bore too close a resemblance to the old myths of the Black Moon. Ghosts. Warnings.

  But as they crested the last ridge and came down the broken path toward the city’s gate—if one could call it a city gate, those two crooked towers of scorched sandstone leaning toward each other like conspirators—Yanick stopped.

  There were people moving in and out. Dozens. Maybe more.

  Nordlings. Svarts. Dwarves. Even Sajanos, their yellow-sunned skin unmistakable, wrapped in dust-scarves and long desert cloaks.

  He turned to Rayla. She had stopped too, her eyes narrowed, her jaw tight with something like disbelief.

  “This isn’t right,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. “These cities… they used to be closed. Controlled. Segregated. This isn’t…” She trailed off, watching as a dwarf with a copper-plated jaw haggled with a Sajano woman over the price of water filters. “This wasn’t how it used to be.”

  “You sure this is one of their strongholds?” Yanick asked, voice low.

  She didn’t answer. Just stared a moment longer before planting her stick forward and limping toward the gates.

  The streets wound like tangled roots, narrow and alive, bursting with sound and scent. It was a labyrinth, not of stone, but of culture layered thick over scorched earth. Smoke rose from iron pans where strange oils spat and sizzled, laced with spices that stung the nose and tugged at memory, scents Yanick couldn’t name, but somehow felt in his blood. Something similar Ademund used to prepare in his inn.

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  Music threaded through it all: fast, string-heavy, a wild rhythm full of joy and sorrow. It rose from alleyways and doorways, from fingers calloused by sun and wind, from hearts that had seen too many wars and learned to dance anyway.

  Women with skin as black as obsidian sold sun-speckled fruit beside traders so pale they could have come from the northern peaks. Children dashed barefoot between carts, laughter sharp as broken glass.

  Bright banners, every shade of red, green, and gold, fluttered from rooftops warped by heat and time. The Moon banners among them. A gentle reminder that the one and only god is being worshipped here.

  Yanick stood in awe for a moment, looking at one of them. It has been a long time since he felt moon’s eye mocking him, laughing. It worried him a little.

  Chaos reigned here, but not the kind that destroyed. It was the chaos of creation, of survival reworked into something new.

  Rayla slowed beneath a faded shade cloth strung between two buildings. She leaned against a crumbling wall, sweat beading on her brow, and let her eyes drift across the street.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” she said, almost to herself.

  “Me neither,” Yanick admitted.

  She glanced at him, then back at the shifting marketplace.

  “It looks like Valhafen,” he said.

  And it did. The memory struck him like a cold wind. Valhafen, a city by the sea, where he met her. Amaia.

  This place had no sea, no salt in the air, but it had the same pulse. The same mosaic soul.

  Yanick watched as a man with copper piercings argued with a masked trader cloaked in golden robes. A group of girls passed by laughing, one of them wearing a vest stitched with symbols of both the moon and sun. On a box nearby, a preacher ranted at the sky, his voice cracking through half-remembered scripture. The crowd jeered, some tossed coins. Others just listened, hollow-eyed and curious.

  Rayla’s mouth twisted, not quite a smile.

  “Last time I was here,” she said, “the streets were patrolled by zealots. Curfews. Identity checks. Every face marked by fear or devotion. It was clean. Controlled. Lifeless.”

  “What changed?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But this isn’t their capital. It’s something else. A place between. Maybe free.”

  Yanick nodded.

  “Then we use the time well. We should ask around. See if anyone’s seen Nemeth. Or Ellie.”

  Rayla narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Don’t waste time. They’re not here.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do,” she said. “I know Ellie. She wouldn’t linger in a place like this. She’d go straight to the next compound. East of here. Through the salt flats.”

  Yanick glanced toward the rising smoke of the city, to the hundred stories waiting in every alleyway. A thousand chances to find a clue. But time, like everything else, was running thin.

  They wove through the markets, blending into the pulse of the crowd. Past shrines of scavenged steel where old circuit boards had been carved into the shape of suns and angels. Past storytellers seated cross-legged on patterned rugs, singing history in broken tongues, the past reduced to rhythm and rhyme.

  People didn’t look twice at them.

  They stopped at a food stall run by a woman draped in silks that shimmered like beetle shells. Dried meat wrapped in leaves, water skins sealed with wax, thin black bread laced with salt and herbs, traveller’s food.

  As the merchant packed their provisions, Yanick saw a tattoo on her wrist. He glanced at Rayla, she noticed too. She tucked one of the water skins into her belt, her expression unreadable.

  By dusk, they’d reached the eastern gate. The light bled red across the rooftops behind them. Ahead, the world cracked open, fractured flats stretching far into a night coloured horizon, dust dancing like ghosts across the ground. Not a road. Not even a trail. Just silence, broken only by the wind.

  “This way,” Rayla said.

  The market faded behind them. So did the clatter of voices, the scent of spice and dust, the warm press of bodies moving shoulder to shoulder in the bazaar. Gone was the illusion of peace. Out here, there was nothing but wind whipped silence and the red earth groaning under their boots.

  Just the two of them now, two ghosts walking a path laid by war. The compound waited somewhere ahead, crouched in the distance like a wound refusing to close. And the trail of Nemeth and Ellie still pulsed warm beneath the surface, like blood through cracked skin.

  Yanick didn’t look back. But his pulse refused to settle. Something inside him was still pacing. Memories that hurt almost as much as the wrist.

  Only when the last murmur of the city had vanished behind a dune did he speak.

  “What do you think?” His voice broke the silence like a stone dropped into water.

  Rayla didn’t slow.

  “About what?”

  “You saw it,” he said. “That woman’s wrist. You know what it means.”

  She stopped then, the wind tugging at her coat. Slowly, without a word, she unwrapped the thin leather cord around her wrist. Beneath it, the skin was ruined, crosshatched with scars, brutal and deliberate.