Not unwelcome.
I let that thought exist without examining it.
“The informant.” My voice sounds stronger now. Steadier. “He said the gods see us as potential. That separately we’re manageable, but together...”
“They fear what we might become.”
“Does that change anything? Knowing why they’re hunting us?”
He doesn’t answer for so long that I start to wonder if he’ll answer at all.
“No.” His breath stirs my hair again. “I was going to kill them anyway.”
A sound escapes me—half laugh, half disbelief. “That’s not a strategy.”
“It’s the only strategy that matters.”
I turn my head. Not enough to face him fully—he’s too close for that, our bodies still aligned in ways that should be uncomfortable and aren’t—but enough to see his profile in my peripheral vision.
His features have smoothed. The fury is gone, or at least buried deep enough that it doesn’t show. What remains is focus. Determination. The absolute certainty of someone who has identified his enemy and decided on its ending.
“You can’t kill a god.”
“I can try.”
“And if you fail?”
His arm tightens around me. A minute movement, barely perceptible, but I feel it against my ribs.
“Then I’ll die trying. But so will everything that threatens you.”
We leavethe shrine at dusk.
The informant’s body lies where it fell. There’s no time for burial, no resources for a ceremony. Another casualty in a war that started before either of us chose to fight it.
I look back once as we reach the courtyard exit. The shrine looms behind us—vaulted ceilings open to the darkening sky, altar stained with blood, old and new, echoes of forgotten worship twisted into a monument to abandonment by the very gods it once served.
Sacred space made profane.
The gods did this. Created these monsters, destroyed these places, erased anyone who might have helped us understand why.
I turn away.
Kaster walks beside me. His wounds have mostly healed. The poison I cleared is gone. His body moves with the fluid grace I’ve come to associate with safety.
I’m no longer surviving.
The thought arrives with quiet finality as we pass through the shrine’s courtyard, over shattered paving stones, into the fading light of another day we managed not to die.
I keep walking beside him.
His arm grazes mine again. Deliberate this time. A contact that speaks to awareness, to intention, to the same recognition I’m still learning to name.
I don’t pull away.
Neither does he.
We walk into the gathering darkness, and for the first time since this hunt began, I’m not calculating odds of survival.
