Kragna’s big. Unmistakably not human. In Lowtown, that’s more than strange—it’s dangerous. And intriguing. The kind of thing that might draw out opportunists or guards with nothing better to do than crack skulls for fun.
I keep walking.
We pass a woman with a face like a ruin—one eye glazed white, a chunk of ear missing, a toothless mouth that opens just wide enough to murmur a blessing in a tongue I haven’t heard in years. I don’t reply. I just nod.
Behind me, Kragna’s breath catches. “How long?” he asks.
I know what he means.
“How long was I one of them?” I say, voice flat.
He doesn’t push. Smart.
Instead, he says, “You walk like you still belong here.”
“I never stopped.”
He’s quiet again. Not because he doesn’t care—but because he does. Too much. I hear it in the way his boots slow when a boy trips and scrapes his elbow on loose brick. In the way his shoulders square when he hears laughter that’s too cruel to be anything but someone getting hurt.
I stop short and whip around.
“Youcan’treact,” I say, voice low but sharp. “They’re looking for an excuse.”
“To do what?” His eyes burn beneath the shadow of his hood. “Bleed me in the street?”
“To bleed me.”
That shuts him up.
The look on his face twists something deep in my gut. Rage. Pain. Power he can’t use, not without hurting me, too.
He hates this place already.
I hated it years ago.
The alley bends again, narrowing so tight we have to turn sideways. The wall drips something slick that smells like rust. There’s a child crying somewhere close, muffled by walls too thin and hearts too tired to care.
I keep my eyes ahead.
I don’t look back.
Because if I do, I’ll see her.
The girl I used to be. Dirty. Branded. Starving for something I couldn’t name. Not food. Not even freedom.
Just... meaning.
Something to make the pain make sense.
Kragna brushes my hand as he follows me into another turn, and I flinch. Not from him. From the past clawing up through the cracks beneath our feet.
“I can’t stay here long,” I murmur.
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” he says.
But there’s something in his voice—quiet, steady—that tells me he’d stand in this filth forever if I needed him to.
He doesn’t understand what that does to me.
