Pain radiated from Mira's shoulder in a steady, hot throb. She kept pressure on the gash, her other hand occasionally brushing the cold wall for balance. Night trotted ahead, his nose to the ground, attempting to sniff out a safe path for them.
Kurr's words were a poison in her mind. Grand Monarch. Tainted blood. They meant nothing, and yet they itched at the broken edges of her memory, like trying to recall a dream after waking up.
Suddenly, a low growl rumbled from Night. He stopped, his ears dropping flat, and stared down a branching corridor. It wasn't an acolyte this time. It was a shadow that moved with a familiar, heavy gait. A shape she'd seen once in the courtyard, painted in blood and rage.
The berserk tenebrim stepped into the faint light, his chest heaving from exhaustion, his eyes finding hers. They held not just rage, but a devastation so intense it stole her breath.
He spoke a single, guttural word in a tongue she should have known.
She understood none of it.
But before any of them could do anything, Night started barking loudly, but not at the man. His attention was instead on a loose conduct across the roof, steadily leaking clear but visible gas.
Mira immediately covered her mouth and nose with her free hand and backed away. She didn't have time or strength to deal with him, and by his looks – neither did he.
The man reached out his hand to her, stumbling forward as his fists closed around the air. "Why... why don't you remember me?" his voice cracked, desperation seeping through each word.
Mira stared at his outstretched, empty hand. The gas was thickening, curling around his legs like pale serpents. His eyes, bloodshot and desperate, were fixed on her, waiting for a recognition that would never come.
"I don't know you," she said, her voice muffled by her palm. It was the simple, awful truth. And it stung more than he'd imagined.
A violent cough wracked his frame as the gas took effect. His outstretched hand trembled, then fell to his side, clenching into a fist so tight the tribal marks on his knuckles stood out white. His eyes hardened back into something more familiar: a furious, protective resolve.
"Follow!" he barked, the word sharp and commanding in the common tongue. He turned and broke into a stumbling run down a side passage, gesturing wildly for her to follow.
Mira hesitated for only a moment. Night was already whimpering, pawing at her leg. She knew that the gas wasn't a weapon she could fight, and that her duty was to find Erdan. This broken, furious man seemed to know the sanctum. He was a path. Her only path.
She ran after him, with Night close behind her heels. He led them through service corridors and narrow staircases, his movements growing more sluggish with each step. She shouldered open a heavy metal door marked with a hazard icon, revealing a chamber of loud machinery and filtering contraptions.
"Intake… fans," he gasped, pointing to a giant grated shaft where air howled inward, fighting the spread of the gas. "Leads… to the lower city." He braced himself against a console, his breathing ragged. "Go. Now."
He wasn't coming. He was staying to hold the door, to ensure the gas didn't flood their escape route.
Mira stopped at the edge of the shaft, the wind whipping her silver hair. She looked back at him, this stranger who looked at her with the eyes of a family. The man had tried to kill her Master, and was now saving her life.
"Who are you?" she shouted over the commotion.
He met her gaze, and for a second, the anger was gone, replaced by a bottomless, exhausted misery sorrow. He opened his mouth, but another coughing fit stole his words. Instead, his fingers brushed against the side of his left horn, where a deep, jagged crack ran halfway down its length.
The meaning was clear. We are the same. We have been broken.
Then he grabbed a lever and shoved it, causing a section of the grating to snap open. The pull of the intake became a violent suction that threatened to pull her off her feet.
"TELL YOUR HERO…" he roared, the words ripped away by the wind, "…WHAT HIS PREDECESSOR DID TO US!"
And with that, he turned his back, planting himself in the doorway as a living barricade against the incoming poison.
Mira had no more time, the pull too strong to resist for long. She clutched Night to her chest and let the current take them, tumbling into the dark, the image of the man's solitary, defiant back seared into her mind.
The world became a roaring, spinning darkness as metal clanged and scraped past them. Mira clutched Night to her chest, pain shooting up in her wounded shoulder as she was knocked against the sides of the duct.
Just when she thought her ribs would crack, the shaft angled sharply downward. The suction vanished, replaced by weightless, gut-lurching fall. They plunged into open, cold air… and hit icy, rushing water.
They had surfaced in a foaming, filthy canal in the lower city. Gasping, Mira dragged herself and Night onto a slime-covered ledge under a bridge, leaning back against a cracked pillar. She ripped off a piece of her cloak and used it as a makeshift bandage on her wound. The distant glow of the palace towers was visible over the rundown rooftops.
She had escaped, free and safe, but as she looked at the water washing the blood from her tunic, all she could see was the man's back, holding the door against the poison, his final words echoing in the howling wind.
Tell your hero what his predecessor did to us.
Night whined in concern, nuzzling her hand. Mira simply brushed her hand against his fur and scratched under his chin, but her gaze was not on him. Her duty was still to find Erdan, and deliver the message that she herself did not fully understand.