The ash had not stopped falling since the blade sang its first cry.
Now it blanketed the city in ghost-white silence, clinging to broken lampposts and shattered rooftops like the memory of snowfall. The boy moved through it with quiet steps, his cloak trailing lines in the dust behind him. Where he walked, the wind dared not howl — only the faint, rhythmic pulse of something deeper. Beneath.
The blade on his back—still bound in cloth and warning—twitched now and then, like it remembered blood.
He hadn't slept since the alley. Not really. Every time he closed his eyes, the same vision returned:
A throne made of ribcages.
A crown of black fire.
And eyes—countless, watching, ancient.
But it wasn't the vision that disturbed him most. It was the feeling that someone else had seen it too.
He reached the edge of the district once called Emberlight. The name mocked itself now—nothing here had burned with light in years. Only smog and ruin. The buildings leaned like old men waiting to fall.
And that's where he saw her.
Standing alone beneath a bent street sign, where the ash swirled in perfect circles around her boots.
A girl in a gray scarf and a coat too large for her, her hands stained with soot. She wasn't afraid. Not of him. Not of the world. She was just staring at him, as if she'd been waiting.
> "You felt it too," she said, before he could speak.
He froze. His hand twitched toward the hilt.
> "The silence," she continued, tilting her head. "It's not empty, is it? It's full. Screaming underneath."
She walked closer, boots crunching soft through the ash. Her eyes were the same pale gray as the sky—too calm.
> "I dreamed of a crown made of silence. And you were there," she whispered. "Bleeding."
The blade on his back pulsed. Once.
He didn't ask who she was. The name would come later. The world had rules now—ones he didn't understand yet, but could feel.
And she was part of it.
> "You hear them too?" he asked.
She nodded. "Under the ash. Whispering. Telling me where to go."
> "And where's that?"
She pointed.
Past the city's edge. Toward the old ruins buried in salt and silence, where the ground cracked with breathless heat. Where something ancient had once been buried—and maybe never died.
That night, as they walked together, the ashstorm stopped.
And from beneath the earth, something laughed.