Blood-red flags.
Faces turning.
Someone screams when they see the bodies. Another drops to their knees in prayer. Doors slam. Shutters crash down. The Inside recoils from them like a living thing.
Elyssara pulls him into an alley, then another—sharp turns, instinctive, already mapping the streets. She doesn’t know them, but she knows how to disappear.
She skids to a stop, sweat beading at her brow. “You need to get us to the weavehouse, Kael. Now!”
Kael nods, though his vision swims.
“Eastern Districts,” he says, and he jerks his head in the opposite direction. “We need to blend in.”
Despite the circumstances, Elyssara scoffs. “You’re a six foot four warrior with blood all over your white linens, and irises that are still half-black.”
Fuck.
He stills, mind dizzy from the Decay. But Elyssara doesn’t hesitate, she grips his wrist. And she runs. He keeps pace because she does. Because her hand is still on him. Because the tether holds.
She slides to a stop on Azhareth’s dirt-sand ground beneath a row of hung washing tied between the narrow walls of two buildings.
She points up, a small smirk on her face. But Kael can feel the panic still blaring in her chest. The performance. He looks up, reaching for a white linen tunic, quickly shucking his old one and replacing it.
He breathes for the first time since the wall, but?—
A patrol rounds a corner ahead.
Elyssara doesn’t hesitate. She drags him through rows of hanging fabric, ducking beneath another laundry line heavy with white linen.
They burst out onto a narrower street still crawling with people, and they join the fray.
They slow their walk.
Shorten their gait.
Relax their posture.
“Keep walking this way—Rhaema is about six blocks from here,” Kael murmurs.
Elyssara nods once.
Kael keeps his gaze forward. Counts his steps. Matches Elyssara’s pace exactly—shorter stride, looser shoulders, head down like he belongs to the city instead of standing apart from it.
Blood darkens his cuffs, already seeping into the fabric from his hands.
He tucks his hands into the borrowed sleeves.
The bells continue to ring, but farther away now—fractured, swallowed by streets and bodies and distance. Azhareth exhales around them, already beginning to forget.
Kael does not.
Every step forward drags memory with it.
The snap of bone.
The silence after screaming.
The way he answered the Decay without hesitation.
