Too many times to count now, I had watched helplessly as they dragged out street rats and vagrants, some of them no morethan children just trying to stay alive. Those well enough were rounded up and sent to the cells.
Those too weak to walk were killed on sight.
Each one of them was bred or bulked for the role—larger than the average citizen, because they were fed well and trained hard. They were enforcers of the King’s peace, or whatever twisted version of it he believed in. But even they weren’t the real danger.
Not even close.
The ones you had to watch for were the Shades.
Silent. Precise. Magic-born.
Where the sentinels were blunt instruments, the Shades were scalpels. They moved without sound, without pity, their eyes always too sharp, as if they could see through lies, through skin—right down to the bone.
Shades had powers—telekinesis, pyromancy, shifter forms. A select few could kill with a single thought.
They didn’t speak much. Didn’t need to.
One nod from a Shade, and you vanished.
No trial. No questions.
You became just another body in the gutter.
Magic was outlawed by decree of the king—punishable by imprisonment, torture, or death.
Except, of course, for his Shades.
Their powers were sanctioned, sharpened, and leashed to the throne like prized hunting dogs. But for the rest of us, even whispering about magic was a gamble with your life. You didn’t talk about abilities, not even in a whisper, not even inyour sleep. One slip, one accidental show of power, and you earned yourself a one-way trip to the dungeons beneath the palace.
Down there, I heard they didn’t just break bones. They broke minds.
If you were lucky, they’d kill you. If you weren’t, they’d turn you into something else entirely—another blade for the king to wield.
Another Shade.
Lucky for us, they were few and far between, though it didn’t stop the king for actively seeking them out. He who holds the Shades holds the power. We all knew that.
But the reason I, in particular, avoided their attention was a little more selfish.
My shadows.
I knew my ability to melt into the shadows wasn’t normal. Not really. Sometimes, the darkness clung to my skin like smoke—like black fire licking along my arms, flickering in ways no light ever should. It had always felt alive.
It was one more reason to keep out of sight.
The city twisted behind me as I took the back alleys, familiar as my own heartbeat. I knew these streets better than most people. I knew where the cracks in the walls would let you slip through. I knew which gutters echoed too loudly when you stepped wrong. And I knew how to disappear.
I made it back to the ruins without incident.
They had once been a school—a primary, I think. You could still see the ghosts of what it was in the crumbling murals, the bits of torn paper drawings fluttering on the walls, and theoccasional broken crayon underfoot. The laughter that had once filled this place felt like a memory long since drowned.
Finn and I had chosen it as our base because it was close to the woods. If things went south, it meant a clean escape.
That had saved us before.
Finn sat slumped against the crumbling wall, his arms wrapped around his injured leg. The sentinels had shattered his kneecap during a raid on the old warehouses a few weeks ago, because he ‘looked at them wrong’. The bones were not mending, they were crooked, twisted by time and pain. He was in agony, not that he would ever let it show.
His head lifted as I stepped into the ruins, and despite the pain etched into every line of his face, his expression lit up like a sunrise. A scruff of rusty red curled along his jaw, catching faint light like copper thread. His face was leaner than it used to be—too lean—but his hair somehow still defied the gloom, wild and untamed. And his eyes—those soft, steady brown eyes—always warmed when they landed on me.
