"Open it," the senior guard instructed, sword drawn, heart pounding.
The junior guard hesitated, then reached for the lid.
He lifted it.
It was empty.
They looked up.
Ragnar dropped from the ceiling.He landed behind the junior guard, his arm already wrapping around the man's throat, and twisted.
The crack that followed was short and sweet.
The senior guard spun, raising his sword but to no avail.
Ragnar's hand caught his wrist and squeezed, and the blade clattered to the floor.His other hand found the guard's throat, lifted him from his feet, and held him there while he choked and kicked and died.
He dropped the body without looking at it.
He was naked, his scarred skin gleaming in the torchlight, his eyes blazing with a fury that had no bottom.
The door opened behind him.He turned to Nyraxa, who stepped through with a bundle of cloth and some metal in her arms.She took in the scene and smirked.
"She really did a number on you."
Ragnar's gaze snapped to her.All good-natured amusement had left him.Then he looked at his wrist, where her antidote-coated needle pricked him just before he drank her wine.
"Where is my wife?"
Chinedu ran as fast as his small legs could carry. Corridors he had known his entire life—corridors that now felt foreign, drenched in shadows and the distant echoes of screams.The world had become a nightmare.One moment he had been in his chambers, practising his letters, awaiting news of the Akwaugo’s death.The next, servants were screaming, guards were running, and the sky itself had turned to blood.
He didn't understand what was happening.He only knew that chaos had erupted amongst the people, and the deafening roar outside the wall had been the indication to leave.
The archways blurred past him—the eastern wing, the garden courtyard, the hall of ancestors.Bodies lay where they had fallen.Some wore the armour of palace guards.Others were servants.Chinedu's stomach lurched, but he kept running.He couldn't stop.If he stopped, the nightmare would catch him.
He rounded a corner and froze.
His sisters.
Three of them—the younger ones, the ones who had played with him in the garden just yesterday—lay crumpled against the wall.Their eyes were open, staring at nothing.Their fine clothes were torn and bloody.
Chinedu's breath came in short, sharp gasps.He wanted to run to them, to shake them until they woke up.But some deeper instinct—the same instinct that had kept him alive through the weeks without his mother’s protection—commanded him to keep running.
They're gone, a voice whispered in his mind.Keep moving.
He tore his gaze away and ran on.
Something stopped him.
A pull, like a thread tugging at his chest, drawing his gaze toward a different path.
The shrine.
It was deep into the palace; surely, he shouldn’t—but he did.Without understanding why, Chinedu turned and ran in the opposite direction, towards Azul's old residence.
As always, the shrine was small and quiet, tucked away in a corner of the palace that few visited.
Chinedu burst into the stone structure, his small body trembling with fear and exertion.
