I grab my coat and go.
The square is buzzing, the market vendors selling all they could despite the weather. I cross toward the statue with no clear intention beyond getting close enough to see the runes properly. Up close, they’re worse. My fingers hover above the carved lines without touching them.
The sound of hoofbeats echoes through the square. Four glossy black horses, ridden by figures in dark traveling cloaks, canter across the cobblestones. They have the appearance of wealthy travelers, their clothes neat and new and their bodies adorned with jewels. They move through the harbor entrance like they own it.
I go still.
The man at the front pushes back his hood. His silver-black hair and pale violet eyes are all too familiar. I know that face. I have been running from that face for six weeks.
His gaze sweeps the square the way a blade sweeps a room. I turn away and force myself to walk, not run, toward the market stalls. My heart is hammering so loud I’m certain everyone within ten feet can hear it.
I make it three stalls before one of the others shouts. I run.
The cobblestones are slick with rain, and I hit a bad patch near the fishmonger’s and nearly go down. I catch myself on a wooden post hard enough to jar my bad arm. I don’t stop. Behind me, boots slap stone in a steady, unhurried rhythm that is somehow worse than if they were sprinting.
I cut left toward the statue, thinking I can loop around it and get back to the inn’s side entrance.
It’s a bad plan. It’s also the only plan I have.
I don’t make it around.
A hand catches my shoulder and spins me hard, and then there’s a blade. I get my arm up in time to keep it from being my throat but not in time to stop it from opening a clean line across my forearm.
I hit the base of the statue. My palm slaps against the stone to catch myself, and the blood runs freely now, pouring down my wrist and across the carved runes before I can do anything about it.
The stone goes warm beneath my hand, and then it shudders. A crack splits the air like a thunderclap, sharp enough that my attacker stumbles back. The runes blaze a fierce amber gold. The statue fractures from the base up, great chunks of stone grinding apart, and from somewhere deep inside it comes a sound like a living thing waking up furious.
The sword hits the cobblestones first, and then everything explodes outward.
2
DROZA
When the runes ignite beneath my feet like coal catching wind, the first thing I notice is blood. It’s the copper scent, mixed with salty sea air, that makes a century of silence tear apart at the seams.
The stone fractures outward in a violent burst, and I hit the rain-soaked square on both feet before the dust has even settled, wings spread full, instinct already ahead of thought. Three dark elves stand nearby. My eyes find the blade first, then the woman bleeding at the pedestal’s base.
An unnamed and unknowable rage fills me as it becomes clear she is being attacked.
The first one I throw into the harbor wall. The second reaches for his weapon. I catch his wrist and snap it before he can draw the blade fully free.
The third backs away slowly, hands raised and rain dripping from silver-black hair. His eyes stay fixed on me with the rigid stillness of someone recognizing a nightmare made real.
One word leaves his mouth in a hoarse whisper filled with both awe and fear.
“Warden.” The others freeze.
They know what I am. Good.
They pull back into the dark and the rain, and I let them go. Around me, the square has gone from chaos to something closer to held breath. Torchlight catches faces in doorways and windows above, pale and wide-eyed, none of them moving. A child is crying somewhere behind a shuttered window. Nobody comes forward.
The square is in chaos. Voices echo through the storm. Someone shouts from above. Torchlight flickers against unfamiliar buildings. The harbor has a scent of familiar woodsmoke and fish mixed with a chemical that smells wrong. The inn behind me is the right shape, but the sign is different, and the dock layout has changed, and the watchtower on the western bluff is gone entirely.
How long was I buried here?
I look at my hands. The rune markings carved into my skin during the binding are faded at the edges, worn the way stone wears under decades of weather. The ache in my joints isn’t the stiffness of days. It’s deeper than that. Settled into the stone of me like something that has been waiting a long time to be felt.
Everyone I knew is gone. The thought arrives quietly, stripping the noise from the square around me. This is a foreign place now, and anyone I might have known would have died long ago.
