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“Of course I don’t.”

“Then perhaps this will be easy for you.” Atticus’ face gave nothing away, but it lacked the mystery he seemed to enjoy wielding. His next words were plain. Simple. An offer extended, not as an olive branch, but a buoy far out of Orpheus’ reach.

“You see, when our forefathers purged this world of the poison that had infected it, they did not leave their faithful to the same fate. They left us the knowledge needed to rebuild, and a fortress to protect us until the time came when we could. A fortress still standing in the long centuries since, protecting the people who would inherit this Earth and usher in an era of peaceful civilization.”

Purged? He meant…the Incident. Atticus’ forefathers were responsible for the Incident. Like the hermits who had created him, there were secrets here. Answers. And as Orpheus stared into Atticus’ proud face, he turned over the reality that whatever this man believed, it was based on a version of history Orpheus was not privy to—a miscalculation he’d already made once in his life and didn’t plan to make again.

“Sanctuary,” Atticus continued. “A safe place. A beautiful place. Where life thrives amongst a rotten world. But without the magic that sustained it, it’s dying, and that is why you’re here. That is the choice you must make. Use your magic to restore Sanctuary, save my people, and you live. Refuse, and you die.”

A city of magic? Fueled by the very thing he sealed away? An image formed in Orpheus’ mind of a city alive with the dark flame that once flowed through his veins. A place he would have bargained anything to walk the streets of. A place for people like him—mages. Except…that wasn’t him. Not anymore.

Not even if that’s exactly who he needed to be, to live.

To survive.

No. All hells, no.

“I—” can’t died on his tongue, the world slipping out from under him. A sideways tilt that nearly bent him double.

Magic. His magic, gone, yet also all that was keeping him alive. The man he once was a ghost, haunting him still. Haunting him forever—

“You’ll have some time to think it over.” Atticus slid the bit between Orpheus’ teeth before he could ask another question. “Though I’m certain you find this isn’t a true choice, it could be the closest to freedom you’ll ever see again. As you’ve already guessed, we are not much interested in peace with your precious Empire. Once, that had not been an impossibility, but too much has happened between us for that to remain the case, and something tells me that’s not what you care about, anyway.” Atticus met his eyes, dark despite their blue-gray color, mask firmly back in place. “Am I wrong?”

Orpheus breathed through his nose and grinded his teeth.

“Ah hah, I didn’t think so. I trust you’ll make the right choice.”

Two tugs at the leather straps securing his bit in place and then Orpheus was alone again, bound and muzzled at the feet of his new masters, rescue a fading dream.

You need to run. Disappear into the grass, dive into its ripples, follow the sun back to the farmland they’d left behind, the hours of hard walking no excuse when he had two perfectly good—if bound—feet. Maybe he couldn’t use his hands to forage or hunt, but a few days without food wouldn’t kill him. What would kill him was remaining here, with men who had traversed the very scar of the world in search of him. Who had, against all odds, survived a fate worse than the Wasteland’s, if what Atticus said was true.

A world beyond the Rim. A civilization rooted in the powers that had brought the Incident itself down upon all their heads, the very people who had ripped open the Earth in the pursuit of power despite the chaos they risked unleashing, because what was humanity but a means to their very specific end?

I need to run. I need to escape. I need to go back.

But what was there to return to?

He’s not dead.

Orpheus stared down at his encased hands and sucked air through his teeth.

He’s not dead. He can’t be dead.

Not even an Emperor Dragon could kill Fenrir, let alone Lore and Ohm. How could a single Myrkur hunter?

But he had you in those fights.

And it’d been Orpheus, in the end, who had abandoned Fenrir to that stage.

A sob stole his breath. A wave of tears spilled heat down his cheeks. And a fist closed over his chest where his heart somehow still beat, the camp ambling on while dawn rose over a world he hadn’t ever considered before. A world that kept asking—demanding—more of him than Orpheus could give. And what did he have to offer at all if the only thing of any worth left in his was…was dead?

He's not dead. He’s not!

But if Fenrir was alive, wouldn’t he be descending upon Orpheus’ kidnappers like the hero from his storybooks, Orpheus the damsel in distress Fenrir had been waiting his whole hells-damned life to save?

Happily ever afters aren’t for people like you.

But I’ve changed. I’m not that man anymore.