SEVEN
ARAX
Niren Hollow.
I halt at the city’s edge and survey the terrain with professional detachment. Tanith stops beside me, her breathing controlled despite the miles we’ve covered since dawn.
“This was a city.” She says it flat, without grief. Observation only.
“Forty thousand people. Primary export hub for the northern provinces.”
“When?”
“Seven months ago.”
She absorbs this information without visible reaction. I watch her scan the ruins—the impossible architecture of absence, walls that end in smooth planes—and see her making the same calculations I made when I first encountered the Choir’s handiwork. How long did it take? How many died? Did they know what was happening before they ceased to exist?
“The Choir did this.”
“Yes.”
“One ritual?”
“One ritual. Twelve hours of preparation. Forty-three willing sacrifices who surrendered their memories to powerthe framework.” I move forward, picking a path through the unstable terrain. “The city’s population provided the fuel. The sacrifices provided the ignition.”
She follows without hesitation. “Willing sacrifices.”
“The Choir doesn’t coerce. They convince. Their philosophy attracts those who have already decided that existence is suffering.” I navigate around a void that was once a fountain—the basin’s edge visible, the water and central sculpture simply gone. “The Cardinal’s theology offers a solution. An end to pain through an end to being.”
“That’s not a solution. That’s surrender.”
“To them, there’s no difference.”
We move deeper into Niren Hollow. The corruption here is dense enough that I can taste it—metallic and wrong. The ash lies thick across every surface, undisturbed by wind or weather. Nothing moves in this place. Nothing can.
I’ve been planning our route since before dawn.
The realization surfaces as I guide Tanith through a narrow passage between two truncated buildings, and I examine it with the same analytical rigor I apply to mission parameters. I planned the route. I selected rest points based on defensible positions. I identified three separate exit strategies in case of ambush, each calibrated to her movement speed rather than mine.
“We need to cut through the market district.” I indicate the path ahead—a wide avenue that was once the commercial heart of Niren Hollow, now a corridor of erasure and empty space. “The eastern gate collapsed during the ritual. The western approach is unstable. This is the fastest route to defensible shelter.”
“And the most exposed.”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t argue. Doesn’t question. She draws her magic closer—I feel the shift in the corrupted air as her Termination gift rises to readiness—and falls into step beside me.
Not behind me. Beside me.
I note the positioning and don’t comment on it.
The market district stretches before us in a nightmare of selective erasure. Some stalls remain intact, their wares still arranged as if waiting for customers who will never come. Others have been partially unmade—half a cart here, the front portion of a building there, a merchant’s booth missing its left side as cleanly as if cut by a blade.
The randomness is deliberate. The Choir’s rituals don’t target—they consume. Whatever the erasure touched, it took. Whatever it missed, it left. The result is a landscape that violates every instinct, a place where the rules of existence have been suspended.
We are halfway through the district when I sense the trap.
The ash shifts. Not from wind—there’s no wind in the dead zones—but from displaced air. Bodies moving through the ruins, disturbing the accumulated residue of seven months’ stillness.
