They sealed the gates before the bodies were cold.
Roots were burned from the stone. Blood was washed into the gutters. The bells stopped ringing, but the sound stayed in my head.
I couldn't sleep.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Bell on the wall.
Not the fight.
Not the roots coming over the edge.
Just the moment after.
A root had punched through her and pinned her there, straight through the middle, holding her up like the wall had decided she belonged to it. Her boots hung above the stone, not quite touching. One of her arms was caught between the root and the battlement. The other dangled loose, fingers brushing the brick as if she might still feel it.
There was a sound I couldn't forget.
Not her voice.
The blood.
It dripped from her onto the stone below in slow, hollow taps.
Wet.
Soft.
Too loud.
Each drop sounded like something breaking.
Fog curled around her legs and spilled over the edge of the wall. I breathed it in without meaning to. It burned cold in my chest, like I was swallowing winter. My lungs filled with it and wouldn't let go.
She tried to look at me.
Her head turned just a little, chin tipping toward the street. Toward the city. Not toward the roots.
Toward home.
I don't remember what she said.
I don't even know if she spoke.
I only remember the way her eyes found mine.
And the way something inside me tore loose when they did.
It wasn't fear.
It was the feeling of losing something that had been holding me together without me knowing it.
And the man in the fog.
He didn't belong in the same memory.
Not with her held there by the wall.
Not with the sound of blood still hitting stone.
Not together.
Never together.
If I let myself see them in the same moment, then Bell had died so he could walk.
And I couldn't live with that.
By morning, the wall looked whole again.
No stain.
No mark.
No place where she had been.
Like the city had swallowed her overnight and decided she had never stood there at all.
That felt wrong.
I packed light. Knife. Coat. A strip of cloth I tore from Bell's sleeve because I didn't know what else to take.
No one stopped me when I went down to the outer yard.
They were too busy patching stone and pretending the night hadn't changed anything.
The fog waited beyond the gate.
Not thick.
Not thin.
Patient.
I slipped out when a supply cart was let through.
The sound of the citadel died behind me almost at once.
Out here, the world didn't echo.
It listened.
Fog clung low to the road, hiding where stone ended and dirt began. The trees leaned in ways trees shouldn't, their shapes blurred by drifting gray.
Then the fog shifted.
Not into bodies.
Into faces.
Rell's eyes surfaced first, pale and hollow.
Tamsin's mouth followed, half-formed like she was trying to speak.
Kade's jaw took shape and blurred again, swallowed by mist.
My legs locked.
"No," I whispered.
Their faces slid forward without sound, carried on fog instead of feet. Beneath them, their shapes thickened—mist gathering into arms and torsos that looked almost solid.
Shadow hunters.
Echoes of the past, walking in borrowed faces.
One lunged.
My blade passed through fog and met resistance only when it struck something denser inside it. The shape broke apart and reformed a step away, moving the way Rell used to—low and fast.
I stumbled back.
Another came from the side. Its movements were wrong, too smooth, like memory without weight. I felt cold brush my coat where Bell's face should have been.
I screamed and shoved essence into my legs, slashing wildly, cutting through mist and shape and something that still looked like her hands.
The fog thickened.
The faces pressed closer.
I ran.
The road dipped and the fog thinned.
Then they stopped.
The bodies unraveled first.
The faces came apart last.
Bell was the final one to fade.
I lay in the dirt shaking until my lungs remembered how to work.
I understood then what the scouts had become.
Not dead.
Taken.
The fog hadn't just killed them.
It had remembered them.
I walked until my legs burned and the mist thickened enough to make the world feel small.
That's when I saw the path.
Not a road.
A space where the fog didn't cling.
Like something had passed through and the world hadn't closed behind it yet.
I followed it.
The mist thinned.
Two figures moved ahead of me.
A man with white eyes.
A woman with a bow.
They weren't hurrying.
They weren't hiding.
They were walking.
The fog parted for them.
I stopped at the edge of the thinning mist, afraid to step into it.
Not of them.
Of what following them meant.
Behind me was stone and walls and faces in the fog.
Ahead of me was the road.
I stepped forward.
(Next chapter: What Follows)