The woman's screams faded behind me, swallowed by the twisting alleys and the frantic hammering of my own heart. I didn't stop running. Lyra's lessons were a part of me now, a cold, hard kernel of instinct beneath the panic. Move. Don't stop. The Stillness. Be nothing.
I was a ghost in the machine of the city, my entropic cloak smothering my presence. I felt the distant, angry thrum of the Gevurah's power—a seismic shout of frustration shaking the foundations of the buildings near Lyra's safehouse. He was still there. Dealing with Lyra. The thought sent a fresh jolt of fear through me. Was she alive? Captured? I had no way of knowing. I was alone.
True aloneness was a different kind of cold. It was the emptiness inside me given form in the world. I had no destination, no safe harbor. Every face was a potential enemy. Every flicker of elemental energy—a streetlamp's eternal flame, a whispered spell to mend a cracked window—was a reminder of a world that would reject me on sight.
I found a hiding place as the first grey light of dawn bled into the sky: a forgotten ossuary beneath a minor church, a place for the bones of the common dead. The irony was not lost on me. The air was thick with dust and the profound, final silence of death. It was the one place my own power didn't feel out of place. It resonated with the stillness here.
Curling up behind a stack of anonymous skulls, I finally let the shock take me. I trembled, wrapping my arms around myself. The memory of the Air Sephirah's face, contorted in a agony I had caused, played behind my eyes. I saw the precise, brown circle of decay on the leaf. I saw the guard's withered arm. I saw the bird in the cage.
I was a monster. Lyra's cold education was working. I had traded my horror for efficiency, my remorse for survival. And the trade felt like a loss of something I could never get back.
"You don't have to become like her."
Elara's voice was a whisper in the darkness of my mind, a fragile counterpoint to Lyra's harsh lessons. But what was the alternative? To be captured? To be "purified"? To die, again, in a world that had never asked for me?
The conflict was a war inside me, as real as the one outside.
I must have slept, because the sound of footsteps jolted me awake. Not the heavy tread of guards, but light, hesitant steps. A scraping of stone on stone.
My body went rigid, the Stillness snapping into place instantly. I peered through a gap in the bone piles.
A figure was picking their way through the catacombs. Small. Hooded. Carrying a small bundle. They moved with a familiar, nervous energy, their head swiveling, listening.
My breath caught. It couldn't be.
They stopped not ten feet from my hiding spot and pushed back their hood. White hair. Violet eyes, wide with fear and determination.
Elara.
She placed the bundle—a wrapped loaf of bread and a waterskin—on the ground. She didn't call out. Instead, she closed her eyes and began to hum, very softly. It was the same sonar-like tone she'd used on me before. The sound waves pulsed through the ossuary, pinging off the stacks of bones, the walls, and me.
Her eyes snapped open and she looked directly at my hiding place.
"I know you're here," she whispered, her voice echoing faintly in the chamber. "Your silence is… really obvious in a place full of old echoes."
Slowly, cautiously, I emerged. I must have looked a fright—pale, covered in dust and cobwebs, my eyes wild.
"How did you find me?" My voice was a dry rasp.
"I told you. I listen." She took a step closer, her gaze scanning me for injuries. "After the Hounds came, it was chaos. Aunt Lyra… she got away. She's hurt, but she's alive. She's gone to ground somewhere deeper." She said it quickly, as if delivering a vital report. "The city is crawling with them. They're questioning everyone. They're calling you the 'Ashen Blight.'" She gestured to the bundle. "I thought you might be hungry."
I stared at the food, then at her. The risk she was taking was astronomical. "You shouldn't have come. If they catch you…"
"They won't," she said, with a confidence that seemed forced. "I'm good at not being heard when I don't want to be." She hugged herself, the bravado fading. "I heard what you did to the Air Sephirah. They brought her back to the temple. She's… she's broken. The healers can't fix it. They say her connection to the sound element is… corrupted. Frayed."
The hollow feeling in my stomach intensified. I had done that. I had broken a person, irrevocably.
"I didn't have a choice," I said, the words tasting like ash.
"I know," Elara said, and there was no judgment in her voice. Only a deep, weary sadness. "That's the worst part. I know you didn't. But they…" She took a shaky breath. "They're not just hunting a heretic anymore. They're hunting for the thing that hurt one of their own. It's personal now. The Malkuths have offered a bounty. A huge one."
A bounty. My face had a price on it. The reality of it was staggering.
"You have to get out of the city," Elara said, her voice urgent. "There's a way. A route the Unattuned use. A old sewer conduit that runs under the northern wall. It comes out near the Whispering Woods. You might be safe there, for a while."
She reached into her cloak and pulled out a small, rolled parchment. "This is a map. The route is marked. There's a symbol on the grate you need to look for."
I took the map, my fingers trembling. It was a lifeline. A thread of hope.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked, the question bursting from me. "You could be safe. You have a Divine Element. You could have a normal life. Why risk everything for… for me?"
Elara looked down at her hands, then back up at me, her violet eyes gleaming in the dim light. "Because I listen," she repeated softly. "And when I listen to the world, all I hear are the songs everyone is supposed to sing. The songs of Fire, Water, Earth, Air. The approved Divine harmonies. It's beautiful, but… it's a cage. Everyone is singing someone else's music."
She took a step closer, her voice dropping to a whisper filled with fierce passion. "But you… you're different. You're a rest. A silence. A new note nobody's ever heard before. You're not a blight. You're a possibility. The first new thing in a thousand years. And that… that is worth protecting. It's worth fighting for. Even if it's scary."
Her words washed over me, not as a absolution, but as a challenge. She didn't see a monster or a heretic. She saw potential. She saw a new song.
I had no answer. I could only nod, the map clutched in my hand like a holy text.
"You have to go tonight," she said. "It's not safe to wait." She hesitated, then impulsively reached out and squeezed my hand. Her touch was warm, alive, a stark contrast to the deathly cold of my own skin. "Find your own song, Kaelen. Or Leo. Whoever you are."
And then she was gone, melting back into the shadows of the ossuary, leaving me alone with a loaf of bread, a map, and a terrifying new purpose.
The war wasn't just about survival anymore. It was about what I would become. The monster Lyra was forging, or the new song Elara believed in.
I looked at the map, then at the skulls surrounding me. I had died once. I had been given a second life. This wasn't just about escaping the city.
It was about choosing what to do with it.