He grunts in response, a sound more acknowledgment than question.
“I can—” I stop.
I don’t know what I was going to say. Walk. Try. Insist. Something defiant and useless.
“I know,” he says instead.
The words are soft. Gentle. Anything but dismissive.
And that is what breaks through my defenses more than anything else could.
I press my forehead briefly against his shoulder, just long enough to feel the heat of him, then lift my head as if nothing happened. As if I haven’t just taken something I’m terrified to need.
The land ahead begins to change.
The stone grows darker, more frequent. The sand thins into something firmer. Rverre slows, head tilting, eyes unfocusing as if the horizon has begun to speak back.
“There,” she says, pointing.
At first, I don’t see it.
Then the heat shimmer shifts, and something breaks the line of the sky that shouldn’t.
Stone rises where the desert should continue. Not a structure—not yet—but a suggestion of form. Angles too deliberate to be natural.
My breath catches.
Korr stops.
Illadon does too.
A reverent silence falls over the four of us as the desert finally gives up its secret.
The city waits ahead, half-swallowed by sand and shadow.
Korr tightens his hold while I stare, and I realize with quiet certainty that whatever I thought this journey would cost—it has already taken more. But there, in those angular shadows, lies hope.
23
TALIA
As we draw closer, the shapes sharpen from suggestion into mass. Broken towers rise out of the sand like ribs, jagged and uneven, their silhouettes cutting into the lowering sky. Whatever once lived here was not small. It sprawls outward in layers—dense stone and steel at the core, thinning into fractured neighborhoods that disappear beneath dunes and time.
The suns are hanging low, their light slanting sideways, catching on edges that shouldn’t still be standing. Windows gape dark and hollow. Roads surface in fragments, then vanish again under drifted sand. This place wasn’t erased. It was buried.
Korr slows. He’s already thinking past arrival. The coming night means we’ll need shelter. He’s thinking of what changes when light fails.
Rverre’s attention sharpens the closer we get. She stops humming. Her wings tuck tighter to her back, posture drawing inward even as her gaze stretches outward.
“It’s quiet,” she says.
Illadon glances at her. “That’s good, right?”
She hesitates. “It’s… waiting.”
That sends a shiver through me that has nothing to do with the cooling air.
Korr stops at the edge of a wide break in the ground where a street that once stretched into and across the desert has collapsed inward, asphalt split and slanted into a shallow bowl. He doesn’t step onto it. He studies it. The angles. The shadows. The way the wind curls and disappears between gaps in the stone.
