Instead, she drowned in screams.
Smoke.
Ash.
The acrid taste of burning blood.
Her eyes watered, and she scrambled back in panic. She wasn’t in the Jade Lattice. The portal had taken her to the Han District instead. Or what was left of it. The ground quaked beneath her. The stone and crystal at her feet were hot to the touch. When she breathed, her lungs burned as though she’d swallowed live coal.
People were running, trampling each other, tearing at each other’s clothes. Solutus horns wailed, cutting through the air like blades, so loud that Auryn had to cover her ears. All around, Reskala swarmed, ripping people off one another, trying to sign orders only to be pushed back by shrieking citizens.
Fire everywhere.
Manafire.
The air bent and howled and bled with it.
Vargrún rumbled in her thoughts.
This is not a city street. It is a place of death.
Not far from where she knelt, a Companion’s palanquin lay on its side, the wood burned to black. Once so splendid it could have drawn the eyes of all who gazed upon it in awe, the structure was now a burned corpse—gutted—its innards spilling onto the streets in bursts of bright silks and veils. And there, among the wreckage, a slender hand lay mangled, coated in blood.
In a series of low hums, the Polis lights flickered and died, leaving everything in suffocating darkness.
But the screaming didn’t stop.
The People had no words. They weren’t allowed to speak. But something had interfered with the magic of their chokers. The emeralds flickered, and so they screamed and screamed, unable to call for help, unable to say what frightened them—shrieking and crying out in a single dissonant song.
Hands grabbed at her shoulders. Auryn whirled around, her heart hammering in her chest.
Familiar hands.
“Lu’ma,” she whispered, and the grip tightened. “We need to find shelter.”
When Auryn reached for her key sigil bracelet, the portal count did not light up. She funneled mana into it, but it only pulsed once then went dead again.
The very air waswrong.
Too much mana.
Burning.
Writhing.
“An explosive,” she breathed. “Did the Solutus…?”
But no. This wasn’t just a bomb. It was somethingelse entirely.
Auryn swallowed hard and forced herself to focus. She closed her eyes, reaching not for the city’s mana, but for the golden thread that lived in her own chest—the quiet current that answered only to her. She pulled. Twined. Shaped. Light bloomed around her in a sudden halo, silver-gold and steady in the void. Smoke eddied back from it. Faces turned toward her. The first to see her whispered it—hoarse, cracked—like a prayer that had been waiting for light to take shape.
Sokâr.
The word caught and spread. One voice became ten. Ten became a mob. Hands reached through the smoke. Fingers caught at her robe, her sleeves, the hem of her hood. Nails pulled at her braid. They scrambled to capture the light as if it might cling to them, as if touching her might hold back the darkness. Praise, prayer, panic—indistinguishable in the black. The sound filled her skull until her mind rebelled against it. They begged—mouthing words.
Save us. Save them. Save me.
More pressed close. The light made her visible from blocks away, and the crowd surged toward it. Toward her. Nails scraped her arm. A hand fisted in her sleeve and shook. Someone clung to her wrist, kissing the fabric there, sobbing against her skin.
