He doesn’t understand what it means to walk beside someone who sees the rot and still chooses to stay.
My old friend Elmira lives in the bones of a burnt-out tannery, tucked behind a butcher’s stall where the meat looks more like mystery than muscle. The air’s rank with blood and salt-fat, and the flies hum loud enough to drown out thought. I duck through a hanging flap of hide and lead Kragna into the shadows.
The smell doesn’t get better inside. Mold, char, old fire. But there’s warmth at least. A small brazier glows dim in the corner, and a ratty curtain blocks out the worst of the wind.
“Mira?” I call.
Something shifts behind the curtain. Footsteps drag. A creak of wood. Then she appears—thinner, grayer, hunched at the shoulders like life’s been chewing on her spine. Her eyes narrow the moment she sees me. Then widen. Then narrow again.
“Well I’ll be damned,” she mutters. “Or maybe I already am.”
Her voice is raspier than I remember. Smoked out and tired. She looks like someone scraped her out of a nightmare and left the rest behind.
“Hello, Mira,” I say.
She doesn’t smile. Just eyes me like I might be another ghost come back to collect.
“Didn’t think I’d ever see your face again,” she says. “Especially not withthatbehind you.”
She jerks her chin toward Kragna. He doesn’t move. Just watches, quiet as a mountain.
I step forward. “He’s with me.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“And I didn’t give a damn.”
That earns me the closest thing to a smirk I’ve seen from her in years.
“You always had mouth on you,” she says. “Even when it got you whipped.”
I wince. Not at the memory. At how easily it still slips from her mouth.
Elmira doesn’t invite us to sit. Doesn’t offer water or warmth. Just folds her arms across her chest and leans against the wall like she’s been waiting for this reckoning.
“You look older,” I say, regretting it the second it’s out.
She barks a laugh. “Time’s a bitch, River. And Kyrdonis ain't kind to survivors.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not.”
Dust swirls in the brazier light. Kragna doesn’t speak, but I can feel him bristling beside me. Watching Elmira like he’s trying to see through the crusted-over armor she’s wrapped around herself.
“You didn’t come back just to say hi,” she says at last. “So spit it.”
I glance around the room—walls patched with cloth and old wood, floor swept clean out of habit, not pride. No signs of listening ears, but paranoia’s a religion in Lowtown.
“I need information,” I say. “On Laertiez. On his movements. On anyone looking to move against him.”
Elmira snorts. “You planning a funeral?”
“Not yet.”
She pushes off the wall, limps toward a crate, and yanks up a false lid. From inside, she pulls a scrap of parchment and something sealed in wax.
“Your timing’s shit, but maybe that’s fate.”
She hands me the note.
