The southern quarter shed the city's gilded mask with every turn—polished marble giving way to moss-slicked ruins, temple signs scraped away by those who'd lost faith in their protection. The lanterns stopped halfway down the street, like even the light knew better. Gutter water ran black between the cobblestones, and the air thickened with mildew and rot.
I strode down the streets quick enough to be shadow, slow enough to catch danger before it caught me. Three streets. Less if we cut through the tanner's yard, which smelled like death warmed over but had the advantage of no one wanting to linger there.
Fresh charcoal wards marked nearly every threshold, some complete, others smeared by hands too panicked to finish. The whole quarter reeked of people trying to protect themselves from blight they couldn't name.
Serenya slowed, her gaze snagging on the sigils scratched into the walls—each one more desperate than the last. Her Mark stirred, and her voice came out soft and certain in the way that meant she wasn't guessing.
"Mist-print on the east wall," Serenya murmured. "They're saying the Veil touched the well."
I didn't ask who "they" were. In Velmyra, dread had no source. It just moved.
We slipped down an alley barely wide enough for shoulders. The walls were slick with condensation, chilled through my sleeves where they brushed stone. Debris crunched underfoot—old plaster, or bone. Serenya stopped. So did I—our bodies had learned to speak without sound years ago.
"Step," she whispered.
I looked down. A thread thin as spider's silk stretched across the stones. It was an alarm system, meant to warn someone we were coming. Snap that line and someone deeper in the quarter would know we'd come. Smart. Paranoid. Both, probably—same thing down here.
I lifted my foot over it, and my skin prickled at the back of my neck. Two streets left.
We passed lines of laundry stretched between buildings. Past a barefoot boy with a charm made of teeth who wouldn't meet my gaze. Past three males bent over cards who fell silent the moment we appeared.
The mood had shifted in the quarter. Gazes lingered too long. Doors closed quiet but quicker. The whole street had that pre-raid tension—the kind where everyone knows but no one says.
The path split and we arrived at last. I hurried to their door and knocked on the outer brick—tap-tap, pause, tap. Rhain's code.
Then I heard children's voices, bright against the gloom. A stoop to my right, fractured and sunken, with tallow pooled in the grooves where a candle had burned down to nothing. Three girls huddled on the stoop beside it, knees dusty, bare feet tucked under them.
"Turn once for Light, turn once for Shade,Bind the thread or all shall fade..."
Two of them clapped palms in practiced rhythm. The third clutched a ragdoll with mismatched buttons.
"Touch hand to heart and heart to hand,Mend the sky, and heal the land..."
The words vibrated through me like the first note of a song I'd forgotten I knew. Power stirred within my Mark. Nestled there. Waiting.
Beside me, Serenya went rigid. Her head cocked, and her eyes narrowed with a focus that made my stomach drop. "The Mirrored Verses." Her voice dropped. "Amaria—those words are in the prophecy fragments. The ones I've been trying to piece together."
"Inside.Now," the mother bit out.
She crossed in three strides, hand closing around the eldest girl's shoulder—gentle but urgent. The grip of someone who knew what hunted when the sun retreated.
"Do not speak that rhyme," she hissed. Her eyes found me in the shadows.
For one breath, we looked at each other. Then she gathered the children and vanished inside, the door shut like a tomb.
The rhyme still hummed in my veins.
Serenya repeated the knock against the stone.
"They shouldn't know that," she said under her breath, staring at the wood grain. "That text was erased from the archives before we were born. Amaria, if they have the full verse—"
"Serenya. They’re just babes repeating a rhyme they picked up somewhere." I cut her off, my hand finding her arm. "We need to listen."
I bit back the rest.Don't let yourself want it to be true.Serenya had been chasing that prophecy for years—piecing together erased texts, burned fragments, whispers from priestesses who still had spines. And somewhere along the way, she'd gotten it into her head that I was connected to it. Thanks to mylittle problemunder my amulet. I’d catch her watching me sometimes with that look like she was reading a text she hadn't finished translating.
But those rhyme fragments were the only ones she’d managed to recover, and she clung to them like scripture. I was terrified of the moment she’d finally translate the rest and realize I wasn't a savior—just a glitch.
No one answered our knock.
