The journey to the Northern Cities was a slow, arduous descent into a landscape being actively unmade, a suffocating progression into a gloom far heavier and more disheartening than Eira had allowed her hope-hardened heart to imagine. Each mile north was a mile further into the master's domain, where the very air grew thick and hostile. The mist was the primary aggressor—no longer a passive veil but a voracious, physical presence. It clung to the blackened skeletons of pine trees like spectral moss, swallowing sound and sight until the world beyond ten paces was a formless, swirling grey. The cold was a predatory chill, a dampness that bypassed wool and leather to sink needle-teeth into the bone, leaving their cheeks raw and their breath pluming in ghostly, quickly-devoured clouds.
The path was a funeral march through a gallery of loss. They did not pass mere abandoned villages; they witnessed monuments to systematic eradication. Huts were not just empty but pulverized, their charred timbers jutting from the frozen earth like the ribs of a fallen giant. Fields, once fertile, were now choked by a sickly, grey-purple weed that seemed to feed on sorrow itself. The most haunting exhibits were the small, poignant relics of shattered lives: a hand-carved wooden horse lying on its side, a cracked ceramic doll staring with one remaining eye from the dirt—artifacts too imbued with love for even despair to fully erase. As they trudged on, Mara's amber shard became their lifeline. It glowed with a soft, stubborn light, and she focused its energy not to push the mist back, but to weave a thin, shimmering membrane around them. This fragile shield could not restore vision, but it held the mist's most soul-numbing chill at bay, creating a small, mobile pocket of habitable air, a temporary sanctuary in the suffocating gloom.
On the seventh day, the Northern Cities did not appear so much as they condensed from the fog, a sudden, grim imposition on the horizon. It was not a beacon of civilization but a fortress under a silent, perpetual siege. A cluster of grim, granite towers, their peaks lost in the low cloud, were crammed behind a monstrously high wall of blackened iron that seemed to sweat condensation. The main gate was a yawning mouth, left open not in welcome but in ominous invitation, with no guards in sight. Instead, a rough-hewn plank was nailed above the entrance, the words scrawled in a defiant, hurried hand with charcoal: Beware the Shadow's Thief. He steals from the master's men. He helps the weak.
"Thorne's calling card," Mara said, a hint of pride cutting through the grimness as she pointed. "He uses these signs as much for hope as for warning. They are messages wrapped in myth, telling people where to find food, which paths the Wraiths avoid."
Passing through the gate was like stepping into a held breath. The city was not devoid of life, but the life that remained was furtive, hunted. Pale faces flickered at cracked doorways, eyes wide in the shadows, their expressions a complex map of fear and a desperate, fragile hope as they registered the unearthly glimmer of Kael's armor and the soft, righteous glow of Eira's sword. A boy—all sharp angles, with a bird's-nest of hair and clothes hanging in tatters—darted from an alleyway, his movements quick and furtive.
"You're seekin' Thorne, ain'tcha?" he whispered, his voice a threadbare scrap of sound. "The old market. By the dry fountain. Said to tell the ones with the shining stones." And then he was gone, melted back into the labyrinth of stone and shadow.
They followed his directions through a claustrophobic maze of alleyways strewn with the debris of a broken economy, past shops whose shattered windows gaped like sightless eyes. They emerged into the vast, empty expanse of the old market square, a desolate space where the wind whistled mournfully. At its center stood a great stone fountain, a relic of prosperity now filled with stagnant water and the skeletons of dead leaves, its central statue of a forgotten hero shrouded in a green cloak of lichen. A lone figure leaned against the fountain's edge, shrouded in a dark, hooded cloak, the hilt of a wicked-looking dagger visible at his belt. He was casually tossing a small object from hand to hand—an amber shard, its light flickering like a guarded secret.
"You're late," he said, his voice a low, smooth murmur that seemed to weave itself into the silence of the square. As they approached, he pushed back his hood, revealing sharp, intelligent features, dark hair that fell carelessly over his brow, and eyes of such a deep, starless night that they seemed to hold their own gravity. His smile was swift, a flash of white in the gloom, edged with a teasing irony. "I've been expecting the illustrious Lightbearer. And her… decidedly noticeable entourage. Hard to miss the walking lighthouse," he added with a glance at Kael.
"Thorne," Mara said, her tone a blend of neutrality and long-standing recognition. "This is Eira. And the 'lighthouse' is Kael."
Thorne's teasing demeanor evaporated the moment his gaze landed on the Thorned Locket against Eira's tunic. His own shard pulsed in his palm, its light brightening in instant, sympathetic rhythm. "So it's true," he said, the smile fading into something grave and deeply genuine. "My grandfather's stories… He said Lirael forged this with her own hands, that it was a seed waiting for the right soil. He was the first Thorne—the Weaver who turned shadow into a weapon. He slipped into the master's war-camp at Luminara not as a warrior, but as a rumour, and stole the plans that saved thousands."
He pushed himself off the fountain with a fluid, silent motion. "You're here for your sister. Lila." His expression darkened. "The dungeons… they're not just guarded by Wraiths. The master's most loyal jailers are the Corrupted. Lightweavers who broke. Their power is still there, but it's been twisted into something vile—a light that burns and cripples. They hate us most of all because we are a reflection of their former selves."
Kael's massive hand went to the hilt of his greatsword, the sound a soft, metallic promise of violence. "Can your… art… get us past them? Past the entire menagerie of nightmares guarding that spire?"
Thorne's grin returned, sharp and confident. He twirled the shard between his fingers, and the light around him seemed to bend and warp, making his outline waver like a mirage. "This isn't a mere trick. It's an art of perception. My shard doesn't just hide us; it convinces the world we are not there. It weaves a cloak of 'un-being.' The Wraiths will pass through the space we occupy and sense nothing. The Vorn will look directly at us and see empty air. The Corrupted… their connection to the light is a frayed wire, spitting static. They might feel an echo, a wrongness. But by the time they understand what it is," he said, his night-dark eyes locking with Eira's, "we will have your sister, and the fight will be on our terms."
He paused, and the persona of the flippant thief fell away, revealing the man beneath—a man weighted by heritage and loss. "I'm not in this for the thrill. My grandfather died creating a diversion for fleeing scouts. My parents were killed defending a grain silo from Wraiths. This is for them. This is redemption."
Eira felt the conviction in his words resonate with the locket's warmth against her chest. "When do we leave?"
"At first light," Thorne said. "I need a few hours to gather my tools—for locks that have rusted shut and doors that have forgotten how to open. And I must leave instructions for the people here. There's a cellar… they'll need its contents to see through the winter."
That night, they sheltered in Thorne's hideout: a cramped, secret room buried beneath the market square, a space that smelled of dry earth, old wood, and hope. The walls were lined not with gold, but with the true treasures of a broken world—sacks of flour, neat stacks of blankets, jars of medicine, and a small, precious cache of books. Thorne distributed coarse blankets and tough dried meat, then settled by the door, meticulously cleaning his dagger, the glow from his shard creating a small island of light in the darkness.
Eira sat on the hard-packed earth floor, cradling the Thorned Locket in her palm. She watched the light within the amber dance, a miniature, captive dawn. "Thorne," she asked, her voice barely a whisper in the safe stillness, "do you truly believe we can win?"
He looked up from his blade, his sharp features softened by the shard's glow. The smirk was entirely absent. "Yes," he said, the word simple and solid. "Not because our swords are sharper or our magic brighter. But because we are fighting for the echoes of laughter in a silent square. For the memory of a warm hearth. For every small, kind thing the shadow has tried to extinguish. We are fighting with the weight of memory. And that," he finished, his gaze dropping to the locket in her hand, "is a weapon that the darkness, for all its power, can never comprehend."
A knot of cold fear in Eira's chest loosened, replaced by a steady, determined warmth. She tucked the locket away, its heat spreading through her like a sacred oath. Outside, the wind screamed its fury, and the oppressive mist pressed with tangible weight against their hidden sanctuary. But inside, bathed in the combined, gentle light of their shards, surrounded by this strange, steadfast family forged in loss, Eira felt a profound safety—a feeling she had not known since the last happy night in Bramble's End.
The next morning, they slipped from the Northern Cities as dawn bled a thin, grey light into the sky. Thorne took the lead, his shard pulsing softly, weaving a complex, shimmering bubble of misdirection and silence around them. The mist remained a solid, grey wall, but they moved through it like thoughts, their footsteps making no sound, their forms mere smudges in the periphery of vision. Before them, the Shadowspire dominated the horizon, a jagged black tear in the fabric of the world, its peaks like claws raking the belly of the sky.
With every silent, determined step, Eira felt the truth in her core. They were getting closer.
Closer to Lila.
Closer to the precipice—and to whatever lay beyond the fall.