YAN

  DAYS BLURRED INTO HEAT. Into silence. Into pale red plains that shimmered under a sky bleached to bone. They moved with the sun on their backs, sleeping in the shadows of broken things, cracked statues, old wreckage, the skeletons of lost world. Water was rationed. Food shared in quiet. The road east was lonelier than the last, more brittle, more bare.

  The next town rose out of the dust like a scab, low buildings hunched in the heat, clustered around a natural harbour where rusted ships bobbed like corpses too stubborn to sink. It was smaller than the last city, but louder in its own way. Crude laughter echoed off cracked brick. The air stank of brine and rot. And everywhere, eyes watched.

  There were no banners here. No colours. No laughter. Just darker skin and darker stares. Closed faces etched with suspicion and fatigue. No Svarts hawking their carved trinkets, no Sajanos in patterned robes sharing tales or tea. And definitely no Nordlings. This wasn’t a place of mingling or melting. It was a place of survival. Dock folk and lowlanders moved like ghosts through alleyways slick with fish blood and salt rot. The air was dense with the smell of rust, sweat, and brine. Rusted ships creaked at anchor like dying animals refusing to sink. Thin children watched from behind broken crates. Women bartered in whispers over bruised fruit and stale bread. Men sat hunched in corners, eyes low, hands never far from their belts.

  Not a single pale face among them—until Yanick walked in.

  He might as well have been glowing.

  Every head turned, every voice dipped. The silence that followed him wasn’t reverence. It was a quiet, coiled warning. This place did not forget faces. Did not forgive strangers. And Yanick wore both.

  He tried to keep his head down. Rayla warned him, but it was already too late. One bump. One wrong look. Then came the hands, grabbing, shoving. Voices thick with venom.

  “Moon-blood,” one of them spat. “Wrong side of the water, white skin.”

  Yanick didn’t remember throwing the first punch. But then the flood hits.

  It doesn’t come with rage—it comes with focus.

  The other mind.

  It cracks through the chaos like ice through glass—sharp, cold, perfect. The noise fades. The shouting becomes distant. The pain in his joints dulls. Something ancient and efficient inside him wakes up.

  He moves.

  The first man lunges. Yanick pivots and smashes an elbow into his face. The nose breaks. The man crumples.

  Another swings a pipe. Yanick ducks, grabs his wrist mid-swing, and twists. Hard. Bone cracks. A scream. The pipe clatters to the ground.

  A third man tries to grapple him from behind. Yanick shifts his weight, drives his heel backward into the attacker’s shin, then whips around and strikes the man’s temple with the heel of his palm. The body drops, boneless.

  He’s breathing hard now. Or maybe that’s not him. Maybe that’s the other mind, panting through him. Calculating. Waiting for the next one.

  But there is no next one.

  Only silence.

  And pain.

  Only after the crowd had scattered, and the broken were left in the dust, did he hear it. The voice. Inside. Whispering not in words, but certainty.

  Lunareth. We should go to Lunareth.

  Rayla pulled him away by the arm. They didn’t stop until they reached the outskirts, where the sea couldn’t touch them and the sky had cooled.

  They ducked behind a stack of rotting fish crates in a forgotten corner of the docks. The stink clung to everything. Salt, oil, and something fouler, like decay. A derelict skiff creaked in the breeze, its sail nothing but holes and patches. Far enough from the jeering crowd now. Just gulls overhead and the quiet slap of water against wood.

  Rayla sat him down hard on a crate and stared at him.

  “When did it start?”

  He didn’t answer at first, still breathing through the pain, the aftershocks of something ancient and mechanical crawling back into its cage. She waited. Didn’t speak again until he looked at her.

  “The other mind,” she said. “When did you first feel it?”

  “At the farm, maybe,” Yanick said. Then shook his head. “No… earlier.”

  She tilted her head, watching.

  “It was in that tavern,” he admitted. “When Koleth and I were spotted by the guards. We were following Gabbles. I thought it was just an adrenaline spike, the panic taking over. But… it was the same thing.”

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  “Never before that?”

  “No. Why?”

  Rayla’s eyes narrowed.

  “I’m trying to determine when they injected you. Because you had to be. That thing inside you, it’s not just some mental break. It’s designed.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but stopped. There was a memory, not a clear one, more like a fogged window. A needle. A cold hand. A whisper of breath. His father?

  No. He pushed the thought away. Couldn’t be.

  “I don’t know when,” he said. “It’s all blurred.”

  Rayla nodded slowly, then rolled up her sleeve. Her wrist, where the tattoo had been, was pale and puckered with scar tissue.

  “I was being changed slowly,” Rayla said. Her voice had lost its sharpness. Now it was quiet, level, almost weary. “They spaced the doses. Little injections, just enough to push the mind. The change was meant to feel natural. Invisible. Like it was part of growing up.”

  She paused, staring past him into the shifting blues of the sky. Her hands worked unconsciously at the scarred skin of her wrist, fingers brushing the ridges where the mark used to be.

  “I remember the first time it took over. I broke a man’s spine in three places. He was twice my size. I didn’t even realise what I’d done until someone screamed.”

  Yanick watched her in silence.

  “It took months before I could stop it from coming uninvited,” she went on. “And even then… I don’t think it ever finished the job. The change was supposed to be total, but something in me fought back. Kept a piece of me alive. With you—” she looked at him now, searching his face for something “—they didn’t bother with subtlety. They flooded your system. Rushed it. Like they needed you ready too fast.”

  He swallowed.

  “That’s why it’s still fighting me.”

  Rayla nodded.

  “Exactly. It doesn’t know if it owns you yet. So it rips through you every time like a beast trying to finish what it started.”

  “Do you still get… attacks?”

  “Not for years,” she said. “It settled into me. Curled up and made itself a home. Became part of who I am. A sleeping thing, waiting.”

  “You said your change was not complete. Was it why Ellie sent you away?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I think the change couldn’t be completed because of that.”

  There was a tightness in her voice now, a bitterness she hadn’t meant to show. She let out a breath.

  “You know,” she continued, “when I learned my family was killed… it stirred. Like a match struck in the dark. I could feel it in my teeth, in my bones. It wanted to wake. Wanted to burn everything down.”

  He looked at her, wary.

  “But it didn’t.”

  “No.” She smiled then, thin and humourless. “I drowned it in vodka. Every night, until I couldn’t remember the faces of the people I lost. Until even the ghost gave up.”

  There was a long pause. The sea gnawed at the pilings beneath them. Wind hissed through torn sails and dry nets.

  “Not many things stronger than grief,” she said. “But alcohol comes close. Sometimes.”

  He chuckled, weakly.

  “That easy, huh?”

  “No,” she said. “It never is.”

  A gull cried above them. Wind scraped through the broken rigging.

  “That’s another reason we need to find Ellie,” Rayla said. “She may know how to stop the change in you. Or at least slow it. If anyone can, it’s her.”

  Yanick looked toward the water. The wind had shifted. Salt stung his eyes.

  “There’s something else,” Yanick said, eyes fixed on the floorboards beneath them, where salt and dust gathered in the cracks. His voice came out low, uncertain, like he was afraid saying it would make it more real.

  Rayla didn’t respond at first. But something in her posture changed—subtle, instinctive. The kind of stillness that predators fall into just before they strike.

  “It told me something,” he went on.

  Now she looked up.

  “It spoke?”

  He nodded, but slowly, as if unsure of it himself. “Not in words. Not out loud. It was more like a… thought. But it wasn’t mine. It pushed into my head like it had always belonged there. And I knew. I just knew it was him.”

  “The ghost,” she said, but quickly corrected herself. “You mean your other mind.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

  Rayla’s face didn’t shift, but the muscles in her neck tightened. The shadows under her eyes deepened. She already knew what he was going to say next. She didn’t interrupt. just waited, silently inviting the worst.

  “It told me where to go,” Yanick said.

  Her breath caught, just once. Barely audible.

  “Where?”

  He hesitated. The word felt heavy in his mouth, like it had weight, like it might fall and crack the earth open.

  “Lunareth.”

  For a second, the name just hung there between them, untouched.

  Then Rayla moved, but not forward, not away. She simply straightened, like something had snapped into place. The calm she wore cracked at the edges, not from panic, but from something far colder.

  “If that voice tells you to go to Lunareth,” she said slowly, deliberately, each word carved from stone, “then that’s exactly where you must never go.”

  They sat in silence, the kind that didn’t need to be filled. Only the sea spoke now, murmuring against the wooden stilts beneath them, a rhythm older than memory. Somewhere out on the water, a gull screamed, sharp and lonely.

  Rayla exhaled slowly. Then she stood.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Yanick followed her without a word. They moved along the edge of the dock, walking in the half-shadow of rotting hulls and hanging nets. The city was quieter here, the buildings thinner, more brittle.

  The stink of fish mingled with the metallic scent of diesel. Above them, the sky hung like damp cloth, heavy, low, bruised by the coming night.

  Then Rayla stopped, grabbing Yanick by the sleeve.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  Across the docks, past the crates and rusted chains, two figures stood in profile near the boarding ramp of a long, narrow cargo vessel. One of them tall, hunched slightly at the shoulders, wrapped in dark cloth was unmistakably Nemeth. The other, beside him, held herself like someone used to command. Even from this distance, there was no doubt. Ellie.

  Yanick’s breath caught.

  They were saying goodbye.

  No words reached them, but the gestures spoke loud enough. Ellie touched Nemeth’s arm, gently, like she was reminding him of something he’d rather forget. He didn’t look back. When she turned to board, he turned and walked away.

  Yanick made to follow, but Rayla held him back.

  “Wait.”

  The ship’s horn blared once. A long, mournful note. Crewmen shouted, and ropes were drawn in.

  Rayla grabbed a passing dockhand.

  “That vessel. Where is it headed?”

  The man gave her a glance, then shrugged.

  “Lunareth,” he said, like it was nothing. “We bring the offerings for the one and only god.”

  Rayla’s hand tightened into a fist.

  “I’m going,” she said, already stepping toward the ramp.

  Yanick blinked.

  “But—”

  “You’re not,” she snapped, turning back to face him. Her voice softened, but only slightly. “You can’t. Not after what that thing inside you said.”

  He hesitated, torn between instinct and obedience.

  “What about Nemeth?”

  She nodded slowly, eyes narrowing in the direction the old man had vanished.

  “You follow him. You finish it.”

  Yanick’s jaw tensed.

  “You still want him dead?”

  Rayla stared at him, her expression unreadable. Then she stepped close, close enough for him to smell the salt on her coat and the steel in her breath.

  “Bring me his head,” she said, “like I asked you to long ago.”

  Then she turned and ran toward the ship, not looking back.