The river runs slow, its silvered surface catching the moonlight in restless fragments. Ira paces its edge, feet sinking into damp moss, her breath clouding the damp air. Hours have passed since she woke in the clearing, but time feels strange here—elastic, as if it's waiting for her to decide something before it moves on.
Drum is gone. Not a ripple left in his wake, not a glimmer of scaled body in the current. She almost calls out for him, but bites it back. Maybe he was never meant to linger. Maybe he was only meant to remind her that she wasn't alone.
But she is alone. That truth cuts through her now, sharp and steady as the river's chill. It's a familiar wound—like a gash that reopens just before it can fully heal.
Her eyes sting when she remembers the warmth, the belonging, the hope she felt not even forty‑eight hours ago with Cobalt in Noctreign. It feels so far away now she can't even recall the feeling of it.
She presses her hands to her face, palms rough against skin hot from pacing while she tries to regroup from the rollercoaster of her life's recent events.
What the fuck am I doing?
The answer comes in fragments, tumbling through her like stones in a ravine. She'd fallen too fast. Too far. For him.
Cobalt.
His name alone stings like something she can't touch. She closes her eyes and sees his—deep, vibrant, lapis‑lazuli blue. A steady gaze that looked at her like he saw more than she wanted him to. Eyes that didn't look away. And she mistook that for truth. For something permanent.
It isn't his fault, not really. It's hers. She's been starved of connection for so long, so hollowed out by loneliness that the first sign of understanding had cracked her wide open. She hadn't been able to help it—it had happened so fast. She'd made him into the answer to a question she'd been asking her whole life.
Her heart had run away with itself, her body following with its own type of desperate hunger. For touch, for heat, for togetherness. For someone—finally—when she shared her pain. When she showed her teeth.
The thought makes her groan in pain, a pain radiating from deep within her chest. She doesn't blame herself for reacting in the way she did. Wanting wasn't a sin. Wanting was human. But she knows now: what she let herself believe hadn't been reality. It never was.
Ira exhales, long and slow, watching her breath curl into mist. Her reflection flickers on the water: eyes red as embers, hair hanging in dark tangles. For a moment she almost doesn't recognize the woman looking back.
Fine, she thinks. Looks like it's just me. Again.
The realization settles in shakily and without resolve: she has to find her own purpose. Her own reasons for living—even if it's the last thing she feels like doing.
Kludde, not Kludde, demon, monster, human—whatever she is, whatever she's becoming, it will happen whether she wants it to or not. Her bones are twinging. Her blood sings in a language she doesn't understand. It feels enormous and distant at the same time, like storm clouds gathering beyond a ridge. She can't stop it and she realizes that she doesn't really care. It can do what it wants. It feels inconsequential. She has more important work to do.
She sifts through the tangle that her mind has become—scrambled images, jabs of memory—and searches for something that holds. Something that will anchor her.
In time, it lays out before her, barely within her react: the sense of certainty that arrived in a diner booth and poured out of her like hot broth, truth unspooling as she spoke to Cobalt.
The Pouuer District. The Bone Collector.
The names rot in her memory, sour and heavy. She sees Pouuer when she closes her eyes—damp corridors, shadow‑fed alleys, faces that vanish without even a whisper of mourning. The Bone Collector thrives because no one fights back, because fear chokes the throat before the name can rise.
Her jaw sets. She could be the one. She should be the one. She won't stand by anymore while men like him grow fat on the city's silence.
But how?
She crouches at the river's edge and dips her hands into the cold until her fingers burn. She stares at her reflection again, at the faint glow behind her eyes. She cups icy water into her palms and splashes it on her swollen face. The shock does little to clear the leftover fog, but it's enough.
She straightens, breath deep, heart heavy. Her path isn't clear—not even close—but at least now she's chosen a direction. An idea. Something to move toward, even if it's just her. Even if that's it ever will be.
The forest breathes quietly around her. Night presses close. The river hums on, steady.
She pulls her hoodie tighter and walks the bank, letting her feet find rhythm. Each step, she names what she knows.
I fell too fast for a stranger. Step.
I trusted too quickly. Step.
I wanted safety so badly I mistook secrecy for trust. Step.
The words sting, but they feel cathartic. She picks up a flat stone and thumbs its edge until heat builds under her nail. Her talon wants to pierce through; but she wills it to stay. "Not now," she whispers—to the claw, but also to everything that surges within her.
The claw slides back. Small victory. Okay.
She walks on.
The path away from the river is uneven, tangled with roots slick with moss. Branches claw at her sleeves, scratching shallow lines her skin. The forest presses in, alive with small movements—skittering paws, the trill of insects, the flutter of wings. Every sound makes her shoulders tighten. Alone feels louder here.
A moth the size of her hand lifts from the reeds and spirals toward her face, then banks away at the last second, dusting the air with a shimmer of scales. She watches it vanish—soft, foolishly brave—and thinks of the first night she met Cobalt, the way his presence had drawn her in like a honing device. She felt chosen. Seen. Saved.
The word makes her flinch. No. No one is coming to save her. No one ever had. Not even her mother. Not even when she'd needed her most. She presses the heel of her hand to her sternum and breathes until the pressure loosens.
"Not now," she says aloud, and the forest listens. "Focus."
And she keeps moving. The moon slides down through the branches, widening the shadows. She tests the ground before each step with the edge of her boot, learning to trust the small parts of herself that have always kept her alive—balance, stubbornness, grit.
Hours stretch. Her calves burn from the constant drag through undergrowth. Hunger gnaws at her stomach, twisting sharp. She counts breaths to keep the pace, each exhale a small defiance against fatigue, against fear, against the voice that tells her to lie down and let the woods close over her like water. To give up.
She inventories herself the way she does before a shift: gear, cash, routes. But the list is different now.
What tools does she have in the fighter against The Bone Collector?
A body that can change—talons that grow and shrink, a mouth that can house longer teeth. A mind that has learned how to survive on not enough, that remembers paths and doors and the beat of a neighborhood's heart. A handful of potential allies—J, the waitress at the diner.
And she has anger—the kind that had only ever gnawed inward. Maybe now she can hone it, sharpen it, direct it outward.
With every step, a plan begins to form, fragile but real.
Get back home. Walk every step if she has to. Then, collect intel on the Pouuer District and the Bone Collector. Not rumors—patterns. Write it down. Names, dates, weather, who vanishes where. Next: allies. Quiet ones. Those who don't want to be heroes but don't want to keep bleeding either. Lastly—practice. Teach her body. Test her strength. Test her wings. Learn to fight. if necessary. Start standing up for those who can't do it for themselves.
And then, if she has time, learn from the Cobalt of it all. Never fall that hard, that fast, ever again.
As if to cement these words, she gazes at the ring on her finger, the blue gem faintly pulsing as if watching her. "You don't decide my steps," she tells it, swiftly putting it in her pocket and continuing her walk. "I don't build myself on someone else. Not anymore."
She says it again, louder: "I don't build myself on someone else. I find my own reasons for living."
The words lay a track inside her, and she follows it.
When the moon thins to a scythe and the cold deepens, she finds a hollow under a leaning cedar and curls there for a minute to bind her laces and rub warmth back into her toes. The earth smells wet and metallic, like old coins. Her stomach complains so loudly she laughs under her breath, a small, cracked sound that startles a nearby bird into silence.
She picks a cluster of berries she half recognizes, rolling one between finger and thumb before popping it into her mouth. Sharp and tart, almost metallic—but it dulls the ache a little. She tucks a few more into her pocket and rises, careful, deliberate.
Memories climb out of the dark as she walks. Not grand ones—small, stubborn scraps that stick. The milestone birthday she spent alone because she refuses to mention it to anyone, then pretended it doesn't matter. The apartment door that waits for her, swollen with damp and refusing to open until she throws a shoulder into it hard enough to bruise. Counting change twice because once she comes up short and the clerk tuts loud enough to burn her ears. None of it fatal. All of it cumulative.
A memory of Cobalt pops into her mind again despite herself, and she shakes her head in protest. It's of how he looked under that street lamp, waiting for her. Of the way he moves through space like the world knows him—like she knows him. She wants her gone from her head. Erased from her memories forever. She regrets having ever met him. She doesn't want to live in a world of what could be anymore. She wants to live in the now.
Dawn bleeds pale into the treetops. The birds begin, one at a time, then all at once, a ragged choir. She counts the call‑and‑response as if it is a clock she can trust. Her body feels sanded down—palms scraped, thighs sore, eyes gritty. She stumbles on a rock and nearly goes down, catching herself against a gnarled, ancient trunk. She leans there a long breath, forehead pressed to cold bark, letting the clean, sharp scent cut through the fog inside her head.
Somewhere behind, the river has already forgotten her. She marks her path as she goes: a broken twig bent into a knot, a small pile of stones, a scratch of claw against bark. Not for anyone else—for herself. Proof of progress. Proof she isn't just wandering.
When fatigue presses hardest, she repeats her vows under her breath like a metronome.
"I won't wait for him." Step.
"I'll fight the Bone Collector." Step.
"I will re-build myself." Step.
"I will find my own reason for living." Step.
A breeze lifts, and with it the faintest trace of a smell that makes her throat catch: city rain, warm stone, old oil. She slows and lifts her head. The forest thins almost imperceptibly, the undergrowth giving way to patches of bare earth and trash—foil, a crumpled receipt, the brittle skeleton of a plastic bag snagged on thorns. She could cry with relief.
She does not. She keeps moving.
By the time the trees start to spread apart for real, her whole body trembles from exhaustion. Her feet are soaked, her palms raw from clutching branches, her face streaked with dried tears of disappointment and river mud. The sky shows through in torn blue pieces.
By dusk, Noctreign rises ahead and she walks into it uncarried, unled, and exhausted, but with her vow still burning dimly but alive inside.