Ezra didn't move when Rin said it — older than the Trial itself.
It sounded impossible. The Trial was a cage that changed its shape every time you blinked. Nothing lasted here. Not cities, not people, not even the sun in the sky.
But Rin said it like she'd measured the stone herself. Like she'd counted every brick.
She didn't explain. Just turned and slipped down a narrow street, the kind where you couldn't walk shoulder to shoulder. Ezra followed.
The city breathed around them — if you could call it that. Every alley was lined with woven banners, their edges stiff with old paint. Faces watched from the cloth, stylized and serpent-eyed, mouths half-open like they were caught mid-whisper.
The ground sloped underfoot. Water ran in thin streams between the stones, carrying flower petals and ash. Somewhere above, the sound of a drum rolled once, deep and slow, before vanishing.
Rin kept them moving until the plaza noise had faded to a low, muffled hum. Only then did she speak again, leaning against the shadow of a wall.
"They have no leader you can walk up to. No guards you can bargain with. But they have rules — more than the academy ever dreamed of."
Ezra scanned the nearest doorway. Bone charms hung in rows from the lintel, clicking together when the breeze shifted. "Rules for what?"
"Everything. Where you stand when the drums start. Which paths you can walk at dawn. How you touch the gold-vein trees. Even how you look at the pyramid."
Ezra glanced toward the skyline. The pyramid cut the air like a blade, its upper levels lost in a pale haze. "And if you break them?"
Her gaze didn't waver. "You vanish."
"Vanish where?"
"That's the wrong question."
She didn't elaborate, and Ezra didn't push.
They moved again, taking a covered passage where narrow windows opened onto private courtyards. He caught glimpses — a pair of women grinding herbs into a fine, black powder; a child painting a spiral across his own palm; a man sharpening a blade made entirely of polished bone.
It was all too much like a place that had been alive for longer than it should. People didn't just survive here — they belonged.
Ezra didn't belong. Neither did Rin.
By the time they stopped again, the streets had narrowed so much the walls pressed in close enough for him to touch both at once.
Rin finally turned to face him. There was less paint on her face now, worn away by sweat or time. Beneath it, her skin was pale, almost sallow. She'd lost weight. The tension in her shoulders hadn't eased since she'd spotted him.
"They don't talk about Her," Rin said. "Not to us. Not even to each other. But they all serve the same thing. Everything here moves for it."
Ezra leaned back against the wall. "Her?"
"That's all they say. Her. The one at the top."
He thought of the carved faces in the banners, the serpent eyes. "A ruler?"
"A presence," Rin said. "One they keep fed."
Ezra didn't ask what she meant. The way she said fed already told him more than he wanted to know.
Trust was a currency here, and he'd been running on scraps. Rin might've been the closest thing to an ally he'd found, but that didn't mean he knew her. He didn't even know what she could do — her resonance was a black box, wrapped tight. She'd survived here longer than him, sure… but that only meant she knew how to play a game he hadn't learned yet.
Her eyes lingered on him, narrow and sharp — the kind of look that read too much. Catlike, darting, measuring.
The drum sounded again in the distance. Low. Final.
Rin moved first, brushing past him toward the sound. No hesitation. No glance back.
Ezra stayed still for a moment, watching her vanish into the light that bled through the alley's far end. He could let her walk away.
Stay in the shadows, keep his skin intact, pretend the rest of this city didn't matter.
But she was the only familiar thread in a place that wanted to unravel him. And threads were dangerous to lose.
He followed.
The alleys widened into a slope lined with stone pillars carved into spirals. People streamed past, all moving toward the same point. No shouting, no shoving — just a collective pull, like water rushing toward a drain.
Rin slipped into their current. Ezra did the same, keeping one step behind her. The scent changed the closer they came — incense thick enough to catch in his throat, undercut by something metallic.
They emerged into the edge of a vast square. The pyramid loomed at its center, its base swallowed by shadow. Ranks of torches burned along the steps, the light catching on lines of figures kneeling in ordered rows.
Ezra's eyes swept the crowd. The paint. The weapons. The expressions — calm, reverent, like they'd already accepted whatever came next.
The crowd moved like one body, the slope funneling them into the square until Ezra felt the press of them on every side. Not hands. Not shoves. Just an unspoken current — a force that decided where you stood before you even thought about it.
The pyramid owned the horizon. Up close, it wasn't smooth; the stone was scored with hairline cuts, each one packed with some dull-gold resin that caught the torchlight. It looked less like a monument and more like something stitched together to keep it from splitting apart.
Rin didn't look at it. She was busy not looking at something else — a section of shadow at the base where no torch had been placed.
Ezra's eyes went there instinctively.
Bad choice.
There was movement inside.
Not a person. Not an animal. More like a slow rearranging of the dark itself, as if the shadow was folding in and out of its own edges. Every blink changed it — too wide, too narrow, too close to the ground.
He caught himself staring and dragged his gaze away. The air here was different, heavier, as if the whole square was holding its breath.
The crowd began to kneel. No word was given, no signal — they just went down in the same slow ripple, each person bowing until their foreheads brushed stone.
Ezra didn't move.
Neither did Rin.
Somewhere ahead, a deep, hollow drumbeat rolled across the square.
One strike.
Silence.
Another.
Then a figure stepped into the torchlight. Robes heavy with gold thread, patterns so dense they almost shimmered. In their hands — no, offered in their hands — was something long, wrapped in cloth stained with shapes the fire couldn't quite reveal.
The robed figure stopped short of the dark arch. The shadows inside leaned toward them. Not metaphorical — the darkness itself stretched forward, the edge between light and black bending like it wanted to touch what they carried.
A sound moved through the crowd. Not speech. Not chant.
A breath, drawn and held as one.
Ezra felt it in his ribs, a pressure that told him the wrongness here wasn't just in the air — it was in the people.
Rin's voice was barely audible over the torches. "Don't try to see it. They'll know."
He didn't ask how.
He just stepped back with her, letting the crowd's weight push them toward the edge of the square.
Behind them, the shadows met the gold-threaded cloth, and whatever was inside the wrapping was drawn into the dark without a sound.
Only when the drumbeat stopped did the crowd breathe again.
Rin didn't look at him. "It'll be someone next time."
Her tone made it sound less like a warning, more like a schedule.
Ezra didn't notice when Rin started moving again. One moment they were on the edge of the square, the pyramid's shadow swallowing the front rows, the next her shoulder brushed his and she was already turning away.
No words. Just that slight tilt of her head.
He followed.
The crowd swallowed them easily, its tide pulling inward while they slipped out along the current's edge. The air was thicker here, heavy with incense that clung to his tongue. Every few steps he caught something that didn't belong — a child crouched in the gutter, tracing spirals in the dust with a finger stained red; a woman standing motionless in a doorway, lips moving soundlessly; a string of bone charms that clicked in the exact same rhythm as the drums.
No one looked at them twice. But no one looked for long, either.
By the time the sound of the drums had thinned to a dull echo, the streets had narrowed. Rin ducked through a low arch half-hidden by hanging cloth, and the noise dropped away entirely. The air here smelled of stone and something faintly metallic.
The chamber beyond was small, half-collapsed on one side. Dust drifted from the cracked ceiling. Someone — probably Rin — had dragged a woven mat into the corner and built a low barricade of loose bricks near the entrance.
"This is yours?" Ezra asked.
"Temporary." She stepped past him, checking the small alcove in the back before leaning her spear against the wall. "No one comes here unless they're lost."
He scanned the carvings etched into the stone — faint serpent coils, their eyes worn smooth by time. The place had been here longer than the city above it. Longer than the Trial? He didn't know, but Rin's earlier words made him think so.
"How long?" he asked.
She glanced up. "Since I woke here? Weeks. Since this place existed? Longer than anything you've seen in the Trial."
Ezra leaned against the opposite wall. "And you've just been… what? Blending in?"
"They tolerate me," she said. "I trade when I can. Keep my head down. Listen more than I talk."
"And what have you heard?"
Rin's expression shifted — not quite guarded, but measuring. "They don't call themselves anything we'd recognize. But they talk about 'Her.' Not as a ruler you see, but as something above all of this. Everything moves for Her. The drums. The ceremonies. The vanishings."
Ezra's jaw tightened. "The vanishings — people taken?"
She nodded once. "The next one is soon. I don't know how they choose."
Silence stretched.
Then, almost as an afterthought, Rin added, "I've also heard… rumors. Traders speak of an outsider being kept in the inner courts. Tall. Young. Hair like sunlight."
Ezra's attention sharpened. "One of ours?"
"Maybe. They don't say a name. But they treat him like a prize. A sign. Some think he's touched by Her."
He thought of Silas — but the Trial scattered people across impossible distances. This city felt a world away from where they'd been pulled in. Still…
Rin broke the thought. "If it is one of us, he won't last long in there. Not if the choosing comes before we reach him."
Ezra looked back at the cracked archway. "Then we find him before they do."
Rin didn't answer right away. She just sat down on the mat, her back to the wall, watching him like she was weighing the cost of agreeing.