The grey sand clung to my boots. The silence pressed against my ears. But the hollow feeling inside was worse. It was a void where my past was supposed to be.
I looked at my hands. They were strong. Scars woven between the knuckles like a map to battles I couldn't read. This body wasn't a stranger's. It was a monument to a life I couldn't remember.
I had to start somewhere. The city. The place of whispers. This time, the psychic static was still a headache, but it didn't break me. My body knew how to weather it. My feet knew the way.
I walked into the capital of solidified sorrow, and this time, something was different.
It wasn't me. It was them.
The anxious spirits darting through the streets? They flinched as I passed, pressing themselves against walls of frozen anguish. The hulking, angry spirits? Their bluster died in their throats, their eyes dropping to the ground. The faded sighs of souls? They seemed to solidify for a second in something like... awe.
Whispers trailed in my wake, not the usual psychic noise, but clear, hissed words.
"...Cinder..."
"...is that him?..."
"I thought the Matriarch..."
"...walking right out of the Tanglewoods..."
Cinder. The word meant nothing to me. But it meant something to them.
I stopped a spirit who looked more solid than the others—a merchant of sorts, selling shards of broken mirrors that reflected regrets.
"You,"
I said, my voice rough from disuse but carrying a weight I didn't understand.
The merchant flinched, nearly dropping his wares.
"L-Lord Cinder! I paid my tithe to the Guild! I swear!"
"I'm not here for tithes,"
I said, the words feeling foreign.
"Do you know me?"
The merchant stared, his face a mask of confusion and terror.
"K-know you? Everyone knows you, my lord. You and Lord Zay... you... you cleansed the Screaming Galleries."
He said it like it was obvious.
I moved on. I grabbed the arm of a hulking spirit covered in spectral bruises.
"Do you know me?"
The brute tensed, his muscles coiling, but he didn't swing. A flicker of fear in his eyes overpowered his anger.
"Cinder,"
he grunted, pulling his arm away.
"The Hellfire. Yeah. I know you. You burned my crew to ash for poaching on your route, you... freak."
I let him go. He practically fled.
I was a ghost haunting a city that was terrified of me. I was a king without a crown, without a history, ruling a kingdom of fear I didn't understand.
I walked deeper into the city, a lone figure parting a sea of the dead. My expression was blank, but inside, the void was churning. Who was I? What had I done to make an entire city of lost souls flinch at my shadow?
I needed answers. And I knew, with a certainty that came from the same place my fighting instincts did, that I wouldn't find them on the streets.
I needed to find the source of the fear. I needed to find this "Guild."
And most of all, I needed to find the one name everyone kept whispering alongside mine.
Zay.
The chapter ends with Leith, armed with nothing but his reputation and a terrifying emptiness, purposefully walking towards the most powerful and dangerous part of the city, ready to demand answers from the very organization he supposedly worked for. The hunter is now the mystery, and the prey might just be his own past.