Thecityswallowedmewhole.
I'd never seen so many people in one place. The lower district streets packed with morning workers—men and women in practical clothes, moving with purpose, talking freely.
The noise was overwhelming. Cart wheels on cobblestones. Merchants shouting prices. A child laughing somewhere. Metal clanging from a smithy. Conversations happening everywhere at once, overlapping, no one asking permission to speak. The Sunken Palace had been silent except for chanting. This was chaos. Beautiful, terrifying chaos.
I forced myself to move, to not stand frozen like the provincial cultist I was. My torn robes drew stares. A woman with a basket of eggs looked at me with concern. A man in a leather apron frowned. I ducked my head and pushed deeper into the crowd, trying to remember how normal people moved. Not the gliding walk they'd trained into me. Something more natural. Less controlled.
The streets opened into a square. Copperwheel Square, according to a sign posted near a fountain where water flowed freely, unblessed, just for drinking. People filled containers without ritual purification. Without prayer. Without permission.
That's when I saw them.
Three hunters from the cult, dressed in civilian clothes. Simple tunics and trousers, farmer's caps pulled low. But I knew them. Sister Vesla by the way she held her left shoulder—an old training injury that never healed right. Brother Kayne by his walk, that slight limp from the time we'd spent three days inmeditation poses. And of course Brother Torum by the way he scanned faces, the patient thoroughness that made him the best tracker in the order.
They wore obsidian pendants under their shirts. I could see the outline against the fabric. Blessed obsidian, keyed to my tracking shards. They were triangulating. Narrowing down my position in the crowd.
I pressed myself against a fruit vendor's stall, heart hammering so hard I was sure everyone could hear it. The vendor—a massive man with a scarred face and forearms like tree trunks—was arranging apples in neat pyramids, his movements surprisingly delicate for someone his size.
Brother Torum's head turned in my direction.
I looked away, scanning desperately for a side street, an alley, anywhere to run—
The girl couldn't have been more than ten years old. Thin. Dirty. Wearing a dress that was more hole than fabric. She approached the apple barrel from the vendor's blind side, her movements quick and practiced. Her hand darted out for a bruised apple near the bottom.
The vendor's hand shot out faster. His fingers locked around her wrist like a vice.
"Filthy little thief!"
The girl's face went white. She tried to pull away but he held her, raising his other hand high. His scarred knuckles caught the morning light.
I didn't think. Didn't calculate. Didn't consider that I needed to stay hidden, needed to save my strength, needed to reach the Storm Lord before the hunters reached me.
I lunged forward. My exhausted legs tangled. I crashed into the vendor's side, all momentum and no grace. The impact sent the apple flying from the girl's hand. It rolled across the cobblestones.
The vendor's shove caught me in the chest. I went down hard, cobblestones slamming into my back right where the carved intelligence was. The pain was exquisite. White-hot. The kind that makes the world disappear for a moment.
When I could see again, the vendor was looming over me. "What the hell do you think—"
"Please, sir!" The words came out desperate. I'd heard enough beggars in the marketplace near the temple to know how they sounded. "She's my sister—our mother is ill, we haven't eaten in two days—"
"Your sister?" He looked between us. The girl was dark-haired and brown-skinned. I was pale as temple stone. "Dressed like a beggar yourself. Half-starved by the look of you."
He wasn't wrong. My priestess robes were torn and filthy. I probably looked like exactly what I was—someone running for their life.
My fingers found the three copper coins in my pocket. My entire savings from six years of service. The cult fed us, housed us, gave us everything we needed for our holy work. These coins were from Solmar himself, pressed into my hand after I'd performed a particularly difficult harvest ritual. "For your dedication," he'd said.
I held them out to the vendor. "Please. For the apple and two more. For my sister."
The vendor stared at the coins. They weren't much. Maybe enough for five good apples at market rate. But the look in his eyes said he knew desperation when he saw it.
He snatched the coins from my palm. Pocketed them. Grabbed three apples from the discard barrel—bruised things that wouldn't sell anyway—and threw them at my feet.
"Take them and get out of my sight."
I gathered the apples with shaking hands. The girl stood frozen, staring at me with eyes too old for her face. Eyes that knew exactly what hunger felt like. What desperation tasted like.
I pressed all three apples into her hands. "Go. Run. Find somewhere safe."
She looked at the apples. At me. Her mouth opened like she wanted to say something.
