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It was just for one second. And then it was gone.

A fresh tear tumbled off her face, hitting the stone floor between her splayed fingers. Her hand slapped against her chest where throbbing formed. It wasn’t just because of the Abandoned Temple she’d lost, or because she’d lost the comfort of the palace, or her family name. It was because she’d lost El.

For a moment as she knelt there, she wondered if all those days and nights spent in this terrible prison wouldn’t have been so awful if she’d stayed in his presence the whole time.

“I’m so tired,” she admitted. She swiped her tears with the back of her muddy hand, craving that resting place in the temple, those moments every morning she’d been restored. Her bed in the palace had been a soft mattress with silk sheets instead of a hard stone floor. Her food had been sugared bread and jam instead of musty rice. But none of that compared to how her heart had been able to rest and restore itself in the silence of the Abandoned Temple. She’d thought she was in a cage while living in the palace, but she had no idea what a real cage was until she came to the caves. “I know what I said all those months ago, but… I don’t really want to be alone.”

“Then open your eyes, Adassah.”

“You’re pathetic, little girl!” the man taunted. “Why do you deserve a second chance?” He scoffed at the Fall Order board where Heva’s name had been replaced with Ryn’s. And now Heva was watching Ryn on the ground, giving up their only chance at winning.

The man was right. Why did Ryn, of all people, deserve a second chance?

A warm breeze sailed into her hair, fluttering along her cheeks, and Ryn lifted her eyes. There was no reason for breeze down here in this stale, isolated place. The moment she sat up, the breeze turned into a wind, rippling down her flesh like a warm kiss and making all those around the circle blink in surprise as their clothes ruffled, their skin pebbled, their hair shivered.

“What was that?” the man behind Ryn asked.

Ryn stood and turned in the same motion. A hot buzz flowed down her fingertips with a sound like music, an old symphony she’d forgotten, one that belonged to a sword she’d lost, sweeping in now and crying out from deep within her soul.

A shadow flickered over the man’s face like a mask. Ryn had almost forgotten the shadows’ true appearance, how dark and empty they were, how haunting they could be. The man snarled and stepped toward her, raising his fist to strike her down for the third and final time. The shadow slithered down and coiled over the man’s stomach as he advanced.

Ryn kicked him—aiming right for the shadow, her heel colliding with spirit and bone, an ocean of heat and power coursing into her foot.

The man choked as he flew backward, grabbing his stomach. Ryn followed, eyeing the shadow. Before the man had time to regain his balance, she shoved him out of the circle. He tumbled into a stack of chairs, tipping the whole thing over with a clatter that echoed into the heights of the cave.

Ryn fell to her knees, her hands shaking, her lashes fluttering. She hardly believed it had really happened, even though she’d performed the kick herself.

No… Not by herself.

She looked over her shoulder, wondering why the entire prison was quiet.

Inmates stared, some scowling, some gaping at the man she defeated. Even soldiers’ mouths hung open. And as Ryn’s spirit eyes adjusted, flickering back to the way they were meant to be, she beheld shadows crawling out from their hiding places, peeking over heads, curling around bodies, observing Ryn there in the circle. One or two tried to wave her toward them, others whispered indecipherable things.

Then, like a horn blasting into the silence, Heva threw a fist into the air and roared, “YES!”

Prisoners in the Mother City prison claimed victories and suffered losses in the Fall Order for the rest of the day. Ryn fought a man from cave two and a man from cave eight, and at the end of it all, the soldier with the crescent scar on his chin stepped into the circle. Ryn lowered her fists.

“I’d like to see if you can beat me,” he said. Ryn studied his cropped light brown hair, taking in the gold flute dangling from his neck and a name in Weylin letters stitched across his dark blue war leathers. He’d abandoned his armour, cape, and sword for this. “You’ve only been fighting common criminals after all. How would you do against a real soldier?” He lifted a brow, and the hint of a smile danced across his lips, his frown finally dissolving.

The prison screamed her name when she sent him rolling out of the ring and into a table.

Whispers fluttered through the caves at night from inmates speculating about how ‘Adassah’ was able to endure against men twice her size. Some claimed she was a witch or a peri, others claimed she had the favour of Nyx or Boreas. The most absurd theory was that Ryn had escaped the prison on the first night, met a mystical Jinn in the streets, and had been granted a wish to win the Fall Order. Ryn shook her head when Heva told her that one. If she’d really managed to escape the prison, why would she have come back?

The Fall Order went on for two more days. Heva brought her extra bowls of rice and kept back the crowds from approaching with questions or accusations of cheating. Ryn spent the mornings in silence with her eyes closed, her legs crossed, her heart quiet. She said nothing to El. He didn’t speak to her again, but he was there; a constant trickle along her flesh, a gentle wind along the back of her neck, a quiet, buzzing song of strength in her bones.

She didn’t even realize it was the last fight until she sent a large, muscular man reeling out of the circle, and the inmates began shouting, “Commander Adassah!” in a chant, like a song in itself, echoing through the tunnels so loud it might have made its way up to the streets of the Mother City.

The four soldiers at the table in the entrance cave twisted their smooth lips and narrowed their eyes as Ryn approached. Two of them crossed their arms over their chests with a creak of leather and armor, their gazes crawling from her mud-caked heels to her tangled hair. The jagged ceiling of this particular cave stretched three times higher than any other in the prison, and the muffled sounds of inmates rolling yellowed dice, tossing mancala stones, or snoring from where they wedged their skeletal frames into the holes in the walls made an ugly sort of echoing music. Ryn's footsteps slowed as she reached the table, avoiding looking at the large doors with rusted hinges at the end of the room, tightly sealed shut by locks only accessible from the outside.

There was a reason she hadn’t set foot in this cave since the day she arrived—the cave that had first swallowed her in and had never let her go again.

“Are you here to retrieve the signet for your leader?” the first soldier asked strangely, his fingers inching toward three round signets evenly spaced apart on the tabletop. He glanced toward the tunnels, searching. “Who sent you? We can only hand off the signet to the winners of the three Fall Orders. The Division leaders.”

“I am the leader of my division,” Ryn said.

Four sets of eyes dragged back. Their doubt was unspoken but loud enough to be yelling through the vast space. One with a bent nose broke out in snickers, another bit his lips together over a smile.

Ryn didn’t bother to explain. If she was in their shoes, she’d probably laugh too.