He didn't see the first shadow.
Only the cord, choking forward. Then another. A knee. A boot.
They didn't speak. Just moved with purpose—measured, brutal. Two from the north gate, one from the gutter-latch tunnel. Shackles clinked before he hit the ground. One cracked his ribs with a blunt grip. Another twisted his wrist behind him, grinding iron into skin already slick with drying fight-blood. A third drove a boot into his thigh until his leg went numb.
He hadn't resisted.
They didn't ask.
They didn't need to.
They dragged him up Cradlecliff's corpse-throat—no victory fanfare, no proclamation. Just rough hands and steps slick with marrow-wash. The pit behind him still murmured with the crowd's breath, but it faded quickly. Replaced by footsteps. Stone. Echo.
Above, the tribunal stood cloaked in soot and silent judgment. They didn't speak his name. Just gestured.
"Clause-bound irregular. Dormant state confirmed. Marked for conditional observation."
Then nothing.
Not exonerated. Not condemned.
Just... released.
Like a knife set back on a table.
Now he walked. Alone. Eelgrave underfoot. Its bones familiar—but changed.
Some part of him had climbed the stone stairs. Passed the rust-marked faces watching from above. But his mind hadn't followed. It lagged behind—still somewhere in that blood-soaked hollow, turning over the sound of his own stillness.
Now he moved through Eelgrave's skeleton with the same calm steps he'd used in the pit. But the city felt different. Tilted. Like it no longer held him the way it once had.
People saw him.
And un-saw him.
A child, barefoot and rag-draped, looked up from a gutter game with bone dice. She met his eyes—and bolted, scattering the dice like teeth. Her brother followed. Neither spoke.
Two cutboys whispered behind a collapsed shrine, their knives dull but twitch-ready. One started toward him—then stopped. The other grabbed his arm and shook his head.
Adults turned, glanced once, then acted as though he wasn't there. Their gazes slid off him like oil from stone.
Ivar didn't hurry.
He moved along corroded railings and down half-buried stairwells, past murals covered in mildew and bone-char. Rain had fallen sometime during the trial. The gutters still wept black water that stank of iron and ash.
On a wall near a boarded firedoor, a phrase had been chalked in ragged, angular strokes:
CLARITY DOESN'T BLEED. IT BLINDS.
He paused.
The words didn't feel like a warning.
They felt like an accusation.
Something shifted in his chest. Not quite guilt. Not quite understanding. Just... recognition.
The city had always whispered its fears. Now, it seemed to whisper him.
He passed a sagging tenement. Faces watched from cracks in boarded windows. A thin boy with one milky eye stared without blinking. Another pulled him back inside. The door shut like a held breath.
Farther down, a scatter of broken charms marked a burned-out walkway. Tooth and bone arranged in forgotten symbols. One still had dried blood on it.
He stepped around it. Carefully.
Iron-pocked grates whined under his boots. The city's edge loomed closer. Buildings gave way to blackened stone. Prayer flags hung in tatters from forgotten spires. Above, clouds thickened into a bruise.
Wind picked up. Bitter and sharp.
And then—
He smelled it.
Rot.
No—not rot. Not decay. Something sharper. Like rust soaked in bile.
He looked up.
A dead Warden pigeon strung to the crumbling ribs of an old pipeframe above a stairwell. Its wings were pinned open with bone needles. Eyes missing. Neck twisted, but mouth agape—frozen in something between a caw and a scream.
It hadn't died by accident.
It had been displayed.
A message.
Ivar approached slowly. No note beneath it. No glyph at first glance. Just silence.
Then the wall behind it spoke in red:
The EMPTYFANG mark.
But reversed.
The snout still toothless. Still open.
Now turned inward.
Devouring itself.
Fresh blood ran from its edges, still wet enough to trail in drips. Above it, scrawled in broken Lowglyph:
FIND WHAT DOESN'T ROT.
He stared at it.
Not to decode. Not to understand. Just to register. As if the meaning wasn't written in letters, but in something deeper. Something stitched into the world itself.
Behind him, a dog barked once, then fell silent.
He followed the direction the blood pointed.
East.
Toward the ashfields.
No one stopped him. No one called out. Even the ghosts stayed quiet in this part of Eelgrave.
He walked through a collapsed marketplace where dust lay like old snow. Past shattered carts and prayer-bells that hadn't rung in years. A lone boot hung from a cracked post. No foot inside.
Every step upward, the city quieted further.
He passed a mural of beasts in mid-transformation. One face caught his eye—half-human, half lost. Mouth stretched. Eyes cracked. A line scrawled beneath it in soot:
Stillness lies.
The wind sighed.
He climbed a flight of steps covered in moss and mildew, where prayer strips fluttered from rusted poles like torn skin. Each step was a question, unanswered.
He stopped once, beneath a broken arch.
The names of the dead scratched deep.
Beneath them, fresh chalk:
THEY BLEED. HE WAITS.
He touched one of the names. The stone was warm.
Farther on, he passed a rusted drain where the water had turned black. Flies circled nothing. Nearby, an old woman sat with her back to a wall, stringing teeth on a line. She didn't look up.
"I saw you in the pit," she murmured.
Ivar didn't stop.
"He didn't twitch," she whispered. "He didn't twitch at all."
His fingers closed—just once—then relaxed again.
The ashfields spread below him—charcoal plains where soot buried even memory. The sky above thickened, smeared with smoke and low cloud. No birds.
Only wind.
He climbed a final stair. One carved not by masons but time. Shards of mirrorglass embedded in the stone caught bits of the cloudlight, blinking like blind eyes.
At the top, the plateau leveled. Nothing ahead but broken soil and jagged ridgelines. Eelgrave had stopped following.
He turned once.
The city was behind him now. Smaller. Quieter.
Less like a city.
More like a wound.
And still—
She was there.
Lysa stood barefoot at the mouth of a cave. Smoke-black hair. One eye rimmed with soot. The other—piercing.
Her arms hung loose at her sides. No pose. No drama.
As if she'd always been here.
As if he'd been walking toward her without knowing.
Ivar slowed.
The wind rose behind him, stirring the ash across the stones. A gust tugged at his coat. A thread tore loose from the hem, dancing before falling dead.
He recognized her—but not completely. Just a flicker of rooftops, a mirror glint, a shape that lingered longer than logic allowed.
She didn't speak until he was close.
Didn't smile.
Didn't blink.
"You don't smell like grief or anger," she said.
He paused.
Her voice wasn't surprised. It wasn't questioning.
"You smell like a locked door."
A beat passed.
She tilted her head slightly. "Clarity makes people look away."
Her words were observation. Not praise. Not fear.
Ivar looked past her, into the cave. The rock yawned open behind her like a lung that had forgotten how to breathe.
"Come," she said.
No question.
No command.
Just truth.
He followed her into the dark.
Behind them, the wind swept the ash clean.
And the last thing it touched before the cave's mouth swallowed him whole—
was the blood mark, still dripping. Still fresh.