Zeyr Vol emerged into dusk like a sickness rising through the soil.
The tunnels beneath the capital spat him out in the outer shanty markets, where smoke clung to every wall and nothing bore a name. The stalls here sold counterfeit gods, broken charms, withered charms, and charms that worked but only once—always once too late. Lanterns burned red with crushed beetle oil, and the streets smelled like sweet rot, vinegar, and boot sweat.
He moved among them silently, his cowl drawn, hood dipped. The air buzzed with flies and quiet desperation. He passed beggars with faces wrapped in parchment prayers, and vendors who whispered prices without moving their lips.
They would forget him. They always did.
He needed a new face.
And a reason to wear it.
The rebellion offered both.
Two days ago, Eila had passed him a name: Captain Irzan Vell, a minor tactician aligned with the Red Petal Front—an anti-imperial faction active in the southern provinces. Vell had gone missing during a supply raid on the coastal blood mines. No body was recovered. Perfect. Zeyr had already harvested the man's memory from a captured courier using a neurotoxin brewed from dream-snails and bone lichen. It wasn't perfect, but the man's speech rhythms, handwriting, and martial record were mostly intact.
The hard part would be the heart.
Every identity was a mask—but masks only worked if you wore the breath of the man who owned it.
So he found a weaverwoman in the shanties who sold him a memory veil—hand-woven from silkworms fed on grave moss. He dipped it in his own blood and tied it over his eyes.
The transformation began.
Captain Vell blinked out of the alley and into the firelight of the rebel convoy, a half-day's walk beyond the city gates.
The camp was set along the base of a broken aqueduct. Tarps and torn banners flapped in the wind. Men and women in patchwork armor sat sharpening spears, playing knives-in-hands, and whispering stories about the ghost who had killed the Briarwood house.
Zeyr—Vell—walked in without ceremony. His boots left no sound. He passed the checkpoint like a shadow and approached the fire circle, where the officers met.
There she was.
Aeryn.
Again.
Not robed in light, not glowing, not divine.
Just a woman this time.
A scarred leather vest covered her chest. Her hair was tied back in a warrior's knot. She sat crouched over a map, arguing softly with two other captains about where to move the next food drop.
He stopped just outside the ring of firelight.
She didn't see him yet.
Her voice was real.
No harmonics. No divine echo. Just Aeryn's old tone: clipped, stubborn, thoughtful.
It winded him.
He inhaled through his teeth—so soft it could've been the wind.
Then he stepped into the firelight.
The younger captain looked up first.
"Vell?" he blinked. "By the gods. We thought you were—"
"Dead," Zeyr said, letting the voice slip rough, lower than his own. "I got better."
The man laughed and lunged forward to clasp his hand. Zeyr gripped his forearm hard enough to feel pulse but not bruise.
Aeryn turned.
Her eyes locked on his.
They did not recognize him.
Not in this light. Not in this body.
She gave a slight nod, a soldier's measure of acknowledgment. "Captain Vell. Back from the mines?"
Zeyr nodded. "Lost twenty. Gained intelligence."
She gestured for him to sit.
He did.
She pushed a tin cup toward him. "Pearroot liquor. Bad, but warm."
Zeyr took it. It tasted like mildew and iron.
He looked at her hands. Rougher now. Calloused. Her fingers bore faint runes—wards, self-carved, probably to suppress visions or divine interference. Smart.
He said nothing for a while.
She returned to the map.
"This line of trade runs through the old aqueduct tunnel. If we set charges here"—she tapped—"and time the collapse with a decoy raid, the Emperor will think we're pulling back."
Zeyr nodded. "Buy us a month. Maybe two."
Aeryn glanced at him again. "You sound different."
He tensed.
Then shrugged. "Got my throat slit in the mines. Healed bad."
She looked down at his throat. The illusion spell shimmered under her gaze but held.
She nodded.
"Don't die again," she said. "We can't afford it."
That night, the campfire hissed with wet wood, and wind howled through the cracks in the aqueduct wall. Zeyr—Vell—sat sharpening a stolen dagger, watching her from the shadows of the makeshift barracks.
Aeryn paced, slowly, in a rhythm that suggested a mind too full to sleep. She muttered sometimes. Not prayers. Equations. Tactical theories. Sometimes poetry.
Once, she turned and met his eyes again.
"You're not sleeping either," she said.
"Not tonight."
She crossed the gap.
"Mind if I sit?"
Zeyr gestured. "Camp's free land."
She sat, legs folded.
"You fought at Briarwood, didn't you?" she asked.
Zeyr froze.
Then: "I passed near it."
"They say a ghost killed the whole house."
"Ghosts don't use poison."
"Don't they?"
Zeyr said nothing.
Aeryn leaned closer to the fire, face haloed in orange light.
"I've been having dreams," she said.
He waited.
"In them, there's a man. Green-scaled. Eyes like broken glass. He speaks in languages I don't know but understand anyway."
Zeyr swallowed slowly.
"Does he say anything useful?"
"Sometimes," she whispered. "Sometimes he says I'm not real."
He turned his face slightly from her.
"And are you?"
She didn't answer for a long time.
Then: "I don't know."
The silence that followed was heavier than the wind.
Zeyr wanted to reach out. To touch her cheek. To say her name.
But he didn't.
Instead, he said:
"If he speaks again… tell him to wait."
She gave him a strange look.
And then, for a moment too long to be casual, she smiled.
The next morning, before dawn, the camp prepared for the raid.
Zeyr helped Aeryn tie her armor straps.
Her fingers brushed his once. Just once.
Neither pulled away.
But they didn't speak.
Not yet.
They would ride into battle together that day.
And kill imperial loyalists side by side.
But this chapter ends here:
With hands lingering half a second too long.
And silence burning hotter than any flame.
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