The next day . . .
The clan's old pipes rattled, carrying warmth and the smell of broth through the narrow burrows. Kaylah's sisters chased each other under the hanging blankets. Lisei giggled when Myrah pretended to be a tunnel ghost. Kaylah hissed for them to hush before they woke the sleeping scavengers nearby; but she was smiling, just a flicker.
She handed Myrah a scrap of dried meat. Lisei snatched it before Myrah could squeal. Myrah tackled her, and for a moment, the tunnel seemed to breathe like a real home.
Kaylah pretended not to watch Eris as he settled by the pipe mouth, quiet, but not alone. She sat beside him, shoulder brushing his. She felt the warmth under his skin, the faint tremor in his wrist where the comet's silver still dreamed. Her gaze drifted over Myrah's fierce, possessive hold on the meat, a familiar ache twisting in Kaylah's gut. It was a memory not of hunger, but of a deeper, older emptiness – the kind that settled in when you understood that some things, once gone, never truly returned.
She had never told Eris the full truth of that night the tunnels nearly swallowed them whole. She didn't need to; it clung to her like the thin scars at her collarbone, the way her jaw stayed tight even when she laughed at Lisei's pranks. It was the night she couldn't forget; the terror that she and Aris met before they were saved by Elder Ruvio from the glass-back.
The past was still vivid in her mind . . .
She'd been eleven when the comet's storms tore through their old settlement aboveground—a scattered outpost too close to the poisoned rivers. Their parents had sealed them in a cellar before going out to fix a broken barricade.
They never came back.
Days later, when the air ran thin and the world fell silent, Kaylah clawed the door open herself, dragging Lisei and Myrah down into the dark tunnels where others whispered about Elder Ruvio's clan. It's the last safe pocket under the old city's bones. Haven Below, they called it. More myth than place, stitched together from rusted scaffolds, half-collapsed rails, and hydro-tunnels that dripped clean water only when storms were kind. Families lived in clusters; twenty, maybe thirty if you counted strays who drifted in with rumors and half-rotten gear. Elder Ruvio's clan had no crown, no banners, only a leader who'd survived long enough to matter, staff in hand, secrets hoarded behind watchful eyes.
Their shelter was little more than a hollow dug into the old subway walls. Blankets patched from scavenged coats. A single battered stove. Pipes overhead that rattled every time the wind above changed. But to Kaylah and her sisters, it was warmth. A promise that monsters wouldn't claw through the dark tonight.
Eris had shared that warmth since Elder Ruvio pulled him from the beast's jaws. And every night after, Kaylah made sure Lisei and Myrah ate first; even if it meant she went hungry, even if it meant Eris pretended that he'd already eaten when he hadn't.
Tonight, the sisters clung to his sides like pups after bread scraps. Myrah boasted she'd caught a rat (she hadn't). Lisei demanded Eris carve her a knife from scrap bone (Kaylah snorted - "Over my dead body").
Over it all, the tunnels breathed. A shiver in the pipes. The soft thunder of far-off storms clawing at the city's corpse.
And far back, where the dim lamplight finally died, Elder Ruvio leaned on his staff, his eyes half-shadowed beneath his battered, dust-laden hood. He said nothing as he watched Kaylah gently tug Lisei into her lap, a small, protective gesture, and flick Myrah's ear when the younger girl's chatter grew too loud. He said nothing when Eris, looking up, caught him staring—his ancient gaze fixed somewhere beyond them, distant and unreadable. Elder Ruvio simply tapped his staff once on the cold stone, the runes at its tip flickering like lightning sealed in iron.
"If the blood remembers," Elder Ruvio rasped, his voice rough as gravel, cutting through the silence. "Then the shadows do too "Eris opened his mouth, a question forming on his tongue, but the lingering echo of the tap seemed to swallow his words whole.
And somewhere, beyond Haven's makeshift walls, past the dripping tunnels and scrap-metal barricades, something else listened. Breathless. Waiting.
Elder Ruvio's staff tapped the stone once more, a sound that seemed to echo too far down the dark, sinking into the earth itself. He murmured something then, a whisper only the deepest shadows heard. A promise, maybe. Or a warning.
Far beyond, in the black tunnels that even Elder Ruvio's ancient eyes did not pierce, something else listened. Something that remembered the name whispered into blood: Celestia.
* * *