The roads south of the Concordium were wrong.
Not broken. Not abandoned.
Wrong.
Lys felt it in her bones by the second night: the distances stretched too thin, the paths curved back on themselves when no hills rose to force them. Towns appeared where none had been. Villages she remembered burned years ago now stood untouched, windows watching her with empty faces.
None bore crests.
None spoke her name.
By the third night, she understood.
"This isn't the world beyond," she whispered.
"This is something beneath."
Not Sevrien's doing.
Not the Severance.
Something older.
Something hungrier.
Something that had been waiting for the Concordium to fall.
In the inn at Crooklight Hollow, a girl with no tongue brought her water.
Not because she was mute.
Because to speak here was dangerous.
Words hung too long in the air.
Names gathered weight they weren't meant to carry.
Lys drank without thanks.
Gratitude might be mistaken for debt.
And debts… lingered.
The old woman in the corner watched her.
One eye white. The other missing.
Hands folded over a book bound shut with iron clasps.
"You're walking into it, girl," the crone rasped.
"You know that, don't you?"
Lys didn't answer.
Silence was safer.
But the woman smiled like someone who had lived long enough to bleed rules dry.
"The Unspoken City doesn't care for silence."
"Only for the things we try not to say."
That night, beneath a moonless sky, Lys left the hollow.
No one stopped her.
No one followed.
The roads had ceased pretending to be roads.
Stone became bone beneath her boots.
Signs hung from trees with no writing, only hooks where names had been hung once.
And ahead, through the mist:
Light.
Not firelight.
Not torches.
The pale, cold glow of streets that had never been built.
Streets that grew.
The Unspoken City wasn't a place.
It was a wound.
A gap in the world where everything forgotten crawled to nest.
Buildings leaned at wrong angles.
Doors opened into stairwells without walls.
Windows watched with shutters nailed open like mouths unable to close.
And in the center, rising through fog and hunger alike:
The Tower Without Steps.
The heart of the city.
The reason she had been called.
She passed no people.
Only shapes.
Once-men.
Once-women.
Things that had walked here long ago and couldn't remember how to stop.
They didn't see her.
Not yet.
But they would.
At the Tower's threshold, her mark burned.
Not the Severance.
Not Sevrien's brand.
The first scar.
The one Calia gave her.
The one she thought forgotten.
The one that had never stopped bleeding beneath moonlight.
"You shouldn't be here."
The voice came from nowhere.
From everywhere.
Soft.
Sad.
Like a mother's warning before the storm breaks.
"You carry a dead name."
"You wear a dead god's touch."
"And you think the City will forget that?"
Lys didn't speak.
She stepped forward.
And the Tower swallowed her whole.
Inside, there was no floor.
No ceiling.
Only space.
And voices.
"Keiran."
"Auren."
"Vayne."
"Sevrien."
Names peeled from her skin like bark from a dying tree.
None belonged to her.
But still they burned.
Still they weighed.
Still they waited to be claimed.
At the heart of the hollow space, something sat.
Not a throne.
Not a god.
A mirror.
Cracked. Clouded. Turning slowly in air that wasn't air.
In its depths: not her reflection.
A city.
Endless.
Nameless.
Hungry.
Waiting.
"You sought answers," the voice said.
Lys reached out.
Her fingertips touched glass.
And her mark screamed.
"Not for you," the voice said.
"For him."
"You walked into this place for his sake."
"You bled for a name that isn't yours."
"You burned for a boy who burned you back."
The mirror cracked deeper.
"So… what will you leave behind?"
Lys pulled the mark from her skin.
It came away screaming.
A thread of light. A thread of ash.
Her debt. Her name. Her place.
"Nothing," she said.
"I leave nothing."
"And I take nothing."
"Not from this city."
"Not from him."
The mirror shattered.
Not into shards.
Into silence.
And where the Tower had stood, where the City had grown, there was only mist.
Only road.
Only sky.
And Lys, standing free.
Unmarked.
Unnamed.
Unchained.