The bell finished its slow toll and left the street ringing with silence.
Cassian rose from his kneel, sword in hand. The impact of arrival still echoed in his bones, but the disorientation was gone. He'd learned long ago—he didn't remember when—that lingering on shock was an invitation to die.
"Everyone up," Maeric said, voice clipped but controlled. "Check your limbs, your weapons. Breathe."
Cassian counted.
Lyra—getting to her feet, wincing, one hand on her head. The butcher woman from before—Sade—already steady, cleaver in hand, eyes narrowed. The panicky boy with the too-long spear—Kerr, his name had been, Cassian remembered now, from the poster. The scar-knuckled man, the older woman, eight more faces he recognized but hadn't bothered to tie to names.
Fifteen had gone into the circle.
Twelve stood in the Nightmare's street.
Cassian frowned.
"Where are the others?" Lyra asked, voicing it first. Her gaze darted around, chest rising too fast. "They were right next to me in the circle—"
"Scattered," Maeric said. "Different entry points. Or the Trial split us."
"Or they didn't land at all," someone muttered.
"They landed." Cassian's eyes swept the surrounding buildings, the empty doorways, the watching windows. "Or they'll land. This place feels…" He searched for the word. "…hungry."
Lyra shot him a sidelong look. "Comforting."
The street was wider than those in the Outer Wards, cobbled, with a shallow gutter down the center. Houses leaned over it from both sides, eaves almost touching. Shutters hung crooked, some banging softly in a wind Cassian couldn't feel. Here and there, personal touches clung to the emptiness: a broken toy on a stoop, a flowerpot smashed on the ground, a door half-open with a shoe stuck in the gap.
The fog hugged the ground, thicker toward either end of the street, thinning near their feet. It didn't move like real fog. It pulsed, subtly, in time with the faint ache in Cassian's Mark.
"This isn't Virelion," Sade said.
"We're not meant to recognize it," Cassian replied. "Different façade. Same rules."
Maeric nodded once. "We stay together. First rule."
"That's a good first rule," Lyra said. "Second rule: if something starts monologuing, don't let it finish."
Kracks of nervous laughter broke the tension.
A sound came from the nearest house on the right.
Not the inhuman scrape he expected. A normal sound. A cough. Then another. Then a weak voice:
"Hello? Is someone… is someone there?"
Heads turned. The door was half-open, light seeping from within—not the purple twilight, but a warm, firelit glow. It fell across the threshold like honey, thick and inviting.
Maeric stepped toward it before anyone else could move. "Hold," he said over his shoulder. "Weapons ready. If this is a Shroud trick, we find out without getting our throats opened."
Cassian didn't argue. This would be the anchor. The Nightmare's first move. The script wanted them to go there.
He followed, blade low. Lyra came too, baton in one hand, knife in the other. A few others stayed back, spears angled toward the fog.
Maeric pushed the door fully open with his shield, keeping his body angled. The hinges creaked but didn't resist.
Inside was a small room that could have belonged in any lower-tier district: rough wooden table, two chairs, hearth with a low fire. But everything in it was… held, as if someone had pressed pause on ordinary life. A pot simmered on the coals without boiling over. A slice of bread on a plate hadn't dried out or molded. A cloak hung on a peg, sleeve half-turned, as if its owner had just shrugged it off.
A woman sat in the chair nearest the hearth. She was thin, with graying hair pulled back in a knot, lines carved deep around her eyes and mouth. Her clothes were plain. Her hands—one gripping the chair, one pressed against her chest—trembled.
She looked up as the door opened, and hope flared in her eyes so quickly and desperately that Cassian almost stepped back.
"Oh, thank the Dawn," she whispered. "You came. I prayed and prayed they'd send someone, but the bells kept ringing and no one came and…" Her voice trailed off into a fit of coughing.
Maeric relaxed a fraction. "We're here now," he said. "What's happened?"
Cassian watched.
The woman's gaze flicked to him, then to Lyra, then back to Maeric. Her pupils didn't quite track correctly, stopping just short of each of their faces. Scripted focus points. Preassigned.
"The wagons left," she said. "The guards, the priests, everyone… they said there'd be room, but there wasn't. They took who they could and told us to wait, that they'd send more. That's what they said. 'Wait by your homes. The Dawn does not abandon.'"
Her fingers dug into the chair arms. "We waited."
"The Ones Left Behind," Lyra murmured, just loud enough for Cassian to hear.
Cassian filed the phrase away. Title. Theme.
"How long?" Maeric asked.
The woman shook her head. "I don't know. The bells ring and the monsters come and the houses fall and then…" Her eyes went distant. "…then we're back here. Waiting. The wagons still gone. The bells still waiting to ring."
Cassian's skin prickled.
Loop.
"How many of you are there?" he asked.
Her gaze snapped to him. The Mark on his arm throbbed as her eyes brushed over it. "A few," she said. "In the square, mostly. Families. Children. The old. The ones nobody had room for. We stay near the well. There's nowhere else to go. We can't leave. The fog…"
Her voice shook. "If you go into the fog, you never come back. Or you come back wrong."
"Square, well, survivors," Maeric said briskly. "We're to escort you there? Or hold the square?"
"Please," the woman whispered. "Just… stay with us. Until the bells stop."
"And if they don't?" Cassian asked quietly.
She didn't seem to hear.
The script wasn't written for that question.
Her gaze unfocused. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. For a moment, Cassian thought he saw shadows flickering where her eyes should be, as if something behind them were rotating through responses, looking for the correct line and finding none.
He had his answer.
He stepped back. "We need to move," he said. "Whether she comes or not."
"She comes," Maeric said. "We don't leave people in a place like this."
Cassian almost smiled at the soft hypocrisy of it. This entire place was a "place like this."
Still, he wasn't going to argue on that point. Keeping the NPC near them meant keeping the script close. It would show them what the Nightmare wanted and where it would push.
"Lyra," he said. "Help her up."
Lyra flashed him a quick, searching look—as if wondering what game he was playing—then moved to the woman's side. "Come on," she murmured. "Up you get. The square sounds crowded; wouldn't want to miss the party."
The woman's legs shook, but she rose. Her hand brushed Lyra's shoulder. For a second, Lyra's Mark flared faintly beneath her sleeve, reacting.
Connection, Cassian thought. Anchor linking to participants. The Nightmare tying its pieces together.
When they stepped back onto the street, the air felt thicker. The fog at the ends of the road had crept closer, swelling and receding with the slow rhythm of something breathing.
"Square's that way," the woman said, pointing, fingers trembling. "Straight, then left at the old well. You'll hear the others."
They moved.
Maeric took point, shield up, sword ready. Sade walked on the opposite flank, cleaver loose in her hand, eyes scanning the windows. Kerr stayed too close behind Maeric, spear held awkwardly, the tip wavering.
Cassian threaded the group, keeping Lyra and the old woman close. As they walked, he catalogued.
Houses: narrow, leaning inward. Some doors open, some shut tight, some cracked like half-lidded eyes. Any could spill monsters. The cobbles underfoot were uneven, some cracked, some loose. Potential trip hazards—and potential controlled collapses.
His gaze caught on one building's foundation, where a thick crack spread from corner to corner. The mortar had crumbled there, leaving hairline gaps. The beam above it sagged just slightly.
Weak point.
He didn't know why it stood out among all the others, but it did. It was as if his eyes had been quietly weighting every structure, every angle, since they arrived, and that one outstripped the rest in the "useful failure" category.
Interesting.
They reached the intersection.
The square opened up ahead—a wider space ringed by more of the same houses. A dry stone well sat in its center, its rope frayed. Around it, clumps of people huddled together: a dozen forms, maybe more, wrapped in shawls and blankets, faces pale and gaunt.
They looked up as the group approached. A murmur rippled through them. Hope. Fear. Recognition of the Mark burned into their rescuers' arms.
"You came," someone said. A man with a bandage over one eye, clutching a child to his chest. "The priests promised they'd send someone."
The old woman broke from Lyra's side and stumbled toward the well. A few of the others reached for her, hands shaking.
Cassian counted again.
A handful of "survivors." Those would be their test pieces. Protect them, and the script rewarded. Fail, and it punished.
The bell tolled again.
All conversation stopped.
The sound didn't come from a tower or visible structure. It rose from the fog itself, vibrating through cobble and bone, slow and heavy. With each strike, the fog at the edges of the square thickened, roiling like the surface of a pot just before it boils over.
Cassian's Mark burned.
"Positions!" Maeric called, moving without waiting for orders. "Form around the well! Shields and blades outward, spears behind! Keep them away from the civilians!"
For all his arrogance, he had decent instincts.
Sade took a flank without argument. The scar-knuckled man slid into place on another side, knuckles whitening on his cudgel. Kerr wavered until Cassian grabbed his shoulder and physically dragged him to a gap.
"Here," Cassian said. "Spear there. Thrust, don't swing. If you back up, you'll trip over them"—he jerked his chin at the hunched figures by the well—"and we'll all die messily."
Kerr swallowed. Nodded. His hands still shook, but his feet planted.
Lyra slipped into a space between Sade and Cassian, baton ready. "We're really doing the whole 'protect the helpless in the square' thing," she muttered. "Classic."
"It's how you separate the ones who think ahead from the ones who don't," Cassian said. He lifted his sword. "We'll see which we are."
The fog spilled into the square.
It didn't flow like air. It crawled, slow and deliberate, tendrils reaching along the cobbles, up the walls, between the survivors' legs. The temperature dropped. Breath plumed white from mouths.
Shapes moved within the gray.
They emerged step by step, as if someone's hand slipped out of a curtain. Human-shaped, mostly. Their limbs were too long, joints bent at wrong angles, fingers stretched like lengths of rope. Their skin—what little could be seen beneath ragged, clinging tatters—was not skin at all but a shifting collage of faces, half-formed, mouths stretching soundlessly.
Eyes, where they existed, were empty sockets. Some had none. Some had too many.
They were quiet.
That unnerved Cassian more than any roar would have.
"Monsters of abandonment," Lyra whispered. "Of being left."
"One good clean cut will still put them down," Sade said, voice flat. "Or it won't and we die. Same as any creature."
The first of the creatures reached the edge of the ring.
Maeric moved first, stepping out from the well's lip just enough to meet it, shield leading, sword thrusting. His blade sank into the thing's chest with a wet sound somewhere between meat and mud. It staggered, mouthless head tipping back.
No blood spilled from the wound. Instead, a thin stream of gray smoke hissed out, curling around the blade. Maeric grunted, twisting, then slammed his shield forward. The thing fell backwards into the fog and dissolved, its borrowed faces smearing into streaks of shadow.
The fog shivered. More shapes moved closer.
"Good to know they can die," Maeric said tightly. "Hold firm!"
The next came at Sade's arc.
She didn't bother with elegance. She stepped into its reach, cleaver rising, and chopped down at its extended arm. The limb severed cleanly, hitting the cobbles and writhing like a beheaded snake before dissolving. The thing lunged with its other hand, fingers grasping. Sade took another step forward and split its head in two.
Cassian blocked, parried, and cut.
The creatures were quick, but not clever. They reached and grabbed with the singlemindedness of hunger. A spear to the chest staggered them. A slash at the knees dropped them. A thrust through the head slowed them, though some still writhed a moment longer before unraveling.
They weren't the threat.
Not yet.
The threat was what the Nightmare would do after the simple test.
Cassian knew it as certainly as he knew how to shift his weight to absorb a blow. The Shroud didn't waste space on Trials that were only about numbers. The first wave was always instruction. The second was examination.
A scream cut through the clash.
Cassian's head snapped toward the sound.
One of the creatures had changed tactics. Instead of lunging for the ring of fighters, it had dropped low, extending its arms under a gap between legs, reaching past the front line.
Its hands closed—not on Kerr, who had stepped back without realizing, but on one of the hunched survivors by the well. A child, maybe eight, with wide eyes and a ragged blanket.
Tiny fingers clawed at the beast's slick, ropey wrists. The mouths on its body opened, soundless, as it began to pull the child toward the fog.
Two things happened at once.
Maeric swore and moved, pivoting to chase. Sade lunged, but she'd committed to a swing in the opposite direction and couldn't correct in time.
Cassian saw the path. The angle. The distance. The way his own feet were planted.
He could reach them.
He also saw—clearly, with a cold clarity that felt older than this body—what would happen if he did.
He stepped away from his own position to reach the child, leaving a gap in the ring. The creature pressing at his section would pour through, straight into the cluster of survivors. Lyra would have to cover two spaces at once. Kerr would panic and retreat fully, tangling with the people behind him. The ring would collapse.
He had half a heartbeat to choose.
He did not think of the child's name. He didn't know it.
He thought of the Trial, of the likely future "waves," of his own chances if the ring broke now.
Cassian pivoted—not toward the monster grabbing the child, but toward the creature pushing into his section.
His sword speared through its chest, driving it back. He kicked its collapsing body into the fog, creating a momentary barrier.
Beside him, Lyra darted forward with a wordless cry and swung her baton at the grasping arms. Bone cracked. The creature's grip faltered, and the child tumbled free—only to skid on the damp cobbles and slam into Kerr's legs.
Kerr's spear jerked sideways.
The creature used the opening. It surged forward, half-crawling, fingers lengthening into strands that whipped around Kerr's ankle. Kerr screamed, high and raw, and toppled. His spear flew from his hands.
The creature dragged him.
Cassian saw the Shroud gather at the square's edges like a crowd holding its breath.
He could still reach Kerr. If he abandoned his section now. If he trusted the others to hold.
He didn't.
He killed the next creature reaching for his gap instead.
Kerr's scream rose in pitch as he was dragged across the stones, fingernails scraping uselessly. Another candidate lunged for him and caught his hand. For a second, the chain held—boy, fighter, monster.
Then the thing jerked, and the candidate lost her balance and let go to keep from being pulled herself.
The fog swallowed Kerr.
His scream cut off as if a knife had sliced the sound.
For a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then the fog at that point thickened and bulged. Something small and bright pushed free—a crystalline shard, the size of a thumb joint, spinning slowly in the air where Kerr had disappeared.
It was a dirty white shot through with streaks of gray, like bone veined with smoke. Faces flickered under its surface, mouths open in silent, looping cries.
Shard.
Cassian felt its weight in the Nightmare. Not physical weight—conceptual weight. [Fear]. [Abandonment]. [Despair]. A first piece of the Trial's payment.
"Back!" Maeric shouted, voice hoarse. "Hold the line!"
No one moved for the Shard. No one dared break formation now, not with creatures still pressing in from all sides.
Cassian filed its position away. It would fall soon, he knew, becoming something they could pick up. If they survived this wave, he intended to.
"You cold bastard," Lyra muttered under her breath as she parried a swipe and slammed her baton across a creature's wrist. "You saw that coming."
"Yes," he said.
"And you didn't move."
He cut through a reaching arm, feeling the phantom sting of Kerr's scream in his ears. "If the ring broke, more would have died."
"Convenient that you're the one who gets to decide that."
"I am the one who decided it," Cassian said. "Convenience doesn't enter into it."
Something in his tone made her look at him again, really look. Whatever she saw, she filed it away for later, because another creature lunged at her and there was no more space for argument.
They fought on.
The first wave broke like a tide against rock—relentless, grinding, shaving away bits of strength with every crash. The ring held. Barely. Cuts opened. Breath grew ragged. Arms shook.
One by one, the creatures dissolved into fog and shadow.
Then, suddenly, there were none left.
The fog at the edges of the square retreated a few paces, seething like something frustrated. The air eased, but only slightly.
The Shard that had formed where Kerr vanished spun once more and dropped, tinkling faintly as it hit the cobbles.
Silence fell, broken only by panting and the soft sobbing of the survivors at the well.
Sade wiped her cleaver on a rag that had been her sleeve. "If that was 'Minor,' I'd hate to see 'Major,'" she said.
"Check injuries," Maeric said, breathing hard. A cut bled along his forearm where a grasping hand had caught him. "Then we regroup. The bell hasn't rung again yet. That was a test, not the whole Trial."
Cassian stepped forward.
He ignored the tremble in his own muscles, the sting of a shallow cut along his ribs where a grasping finger had found a seam in his coat. His eyes were on the Shard.
It lay on the cobbles, edges catching the dim light in a way that was less reflection and more consumption. Looking at it too long made his stomach tighten, as if he were leaning over a cliff.
"Don't touch it," someone said nervously. "It came from him."
"That's the point," Cassian said.
He crouched.
Up close, the Shard was colder than the air around it. Not physically, again; his fingers hovered a hair's breadth above it and felt no chill. But some part of his mind shivered anyway.
Faces moved within the crystal's depths. Not Kerr's. Or maybe Kerr's among many others. Children. Adults. All of them wearing the same expression.
Left behind.
Cassian picked it up.
For a second, his vision contracted. The world narrowed to the contact point between his skin and the Shard. It was like pressing his hand into ice water and fire at once, like touching raw nerve.
[Shard Acquired], his mind supplied, in words that were not words. [Concept Tags: Fear / Abandonment. Tier: Common. Stability: Unstable.]
He inhaled once, steady, and forced his fingers to close.
The Shard's presence slotted against something inside him that he hadn't known was there—a faint, smoldering cavity, like a coal waiting for more fuel. It didn't merge. Not yet. It just… leaned, as if recognizing a compatible shape.
"Cassian," Maeric said. "We don't know what that will do."
"We know what it's worth," Cassian said, standing. "Shards are the only reason the Church runs Trials like this. I don't intend to walk out empty-handed if I walk out at all."
Lyra watched his face. "How does it feel?"
"Like a bad idea," Cassian said. "A useful one."
The bell tolled again.
The fog swelled.
This time, the sound carried a different weight. Heavier. The hairs on Cassian's arms rose. The survivors huddled closer to the well, whimpering. One started to pray, voice high and thin.
The fog at the far side of the square bulged.
The creatures that emerged now were not the same as before.
One stepped forward—if it could be called a step when its legs bent backward at the knees and its feet dragged, toes scraping grooves in the stone. It was taller than the others had been, twice the height of a man. Its body was a mass of fused forms, limbs and torsos and faces all pressed together and stretched thin, like wax warmed and pulled. Arms sprouted and retracted along its sides in slow, rippling waves.
At its center, in the place where a chest might be, a single, human-sized figure protruded outward, head bowed, arms spread as if nailed to an invisible cross. Its face was featureless, smooth as blank plaster. Its chest rose and fell in slow, labored breaths.
Behind it, more shapes moved. Smaller than it, larger than the earlier ones. Second wave.
The old woman from the house sank to her knees, clutching at her shawl. "They come when the bells ring," she whispered. "Every time. They take more of us. Every time."
Maeric lifted his sword. His jaw was clenched tight, eyes on the towering thing.
"Fall back closer to the well," he said. "Tighten the ring. We can't let that thing break us."
Cassian's attention snagged on the buildings again.
Every crack. Every sag. Every misaligned stone.
They stood out more now. Lines of stress across the façades. Weak beams ready to give. Loose cobbles that would roll under a poorly placed foot.
The building at the edge of the square—three stories, narrow, its corner leaning slightly—burned in his vision like a beacon. The crack along its base had widened. Hairline fractures climbed its wall like a spiderweb.
He knew, with a certainty that felt like memory, how it would fall if someone pushed it just right.
The bell's echo faded.
The towering creature began to move.
Each step shook the cobbles. Arms reached out, not fast, but with horrible inevitability. The faces along its body shifted, some turning toward the ring around the well, mouths stretching in silent accusation.
The Mark on Cassian's arm flared, suddenly and fiercely, pain lancing up his bones. His fingers tightened around his sword hilt.
For a heartbeat, the world… doubled.
He saw now—the square, the monster, the ring of fighters.
He saw a dozen other nows, stacked like glass panes:
The monster reaching them, arms sweeping down, bodies tossed aside like broken dolls.
Maeric standing firm and being overwhelmed, dragged into the mass.
Lyra tripping over a loose stone and vanishing under grasping hands.
Himself, lunging forward, too late.
All of them ended in the same place: the creature reaching the well, arms closing around the survivors, drawing them into its body, adding their faces to its mass.
A wordless thought throbbed at the back of his mind.
Again.
The visions shattered.
The creature's hand—if it could be called a hand—came down.
Cassian moved.
He didn't think. Thinking had happened already, in some other slice of time, in failures he had not yet lived. Now he simply acted on the residue.
He bolted sideways, away from the ring, toward the cracked building at the square's edge.
"Cassian!" Lyra shouted. Her voice was sharp with shock, not fear. "What are you—"
No time.
He slammed his shoulder against the building's corner as hard as he could.
Pain flared down his arm. The stone didn't budge.
He stepped back, breath hissing, eyes locking onto the fracture pattern.
Not the corner.
The middle.
He pivoted and drove his sword into a wider crack halfway along the wall, between two bowed support beams. The blade bit stone, jarring his arm. He twisted, using the hilt as a lever.
The building groaned.
Dust rained down. The crack widened with a sound like splitting bone.
The monster's shadow loomed, blotting out the false sky.
A massive limb swung down.
He didn't have time to get out of the way.
He tried anyway, throwing his weight sideways. The impact caught him partially, a glancing blow that would have crushed him outright if it had been direct.
As it was, it lifted him off his feet and flung him across the square.
Something in his side cracked.
He hit the cobbles hard, the world exploding in white pain. His sword went flying. The Shard in his hand bit into his palm, then vanished—absorbed, or dropped, he couldn't tell.
For a moment, he couldn't breathe.
He tasted copper. Warmth spread under his ribs, wet and expanding. His body refused to respond to commands. His vision pulsed, dark at the edges.
Somewhere, distant, he heard Lyra scream his name.
So this is it, he thought, with a strange detachment. Second Trial. First failure. Not bad for—
The world… folded.
Not around him. Within him.
He was standing again, though he knew his body hadn't moved. The square was gone. The monster was gone. Instead, he stood in a place that was nothing but ash and sky.
Ash underfoot. Ash falling from above in slow, lazy spirals. The sky above was a pale, empty gray, marked only by vast, faintly glowing rings turning around each other, endless and grinding.
He knew this place.
From the dream. From something older than the dream.
Around him, shadows coalesced. They were not the Nightmare creatures from the square. They were… impressions of himself.
A dozen Cassians. A hundred. A thousand. Some younger, some older, some scarred in ways he was not. All of them standing, all of them watching him with the same cool, assessing gaze.
In front of him was a circle drawn in ash.
At its center, something glowed a dull, ember red.
Not a Shard. Not exactly.
Something deeper. A seed.
The rings in the sky turned faster.
A voice spoke—not from above, not from within, but from all around. It was the same as in his dream, but clearer now.
Iteration seven-thousand three-hundred nineteen, it said. Node: Subject 7-Λ. Status: fatal event.
A second voice answered, this one not stone but whisper. Not cold but hot, like breath against a wound.
You don't get to decide that anymore.
The embers in the circle pulsed, flaring brighter.
The first voice continued, unperturbed. Protocol: erase anomaly. Reset parameters. Return to baseline—
"Decline," Cassian said.
His own voice surprised him. It sounded… older in the ash-place. Rougher. Like someone who had spoken the same word many times.
The ash around his feet stirred. Tiny coals glowed, lines forming. A sigil began to etch itself into being, drawn not with ink but with char and heat. A circle, broken. Rings, cracked.
The whisper-voice chuckled, low and pleased.
There you are.
The stone-voice paused. For the first time, it sounded… off-balance.
Error: unauthorized override.
"Not unauthorized," Cassian said. Ash swirled around him. The other Cassians watched, silent. "Unwilling."
He stepped into the circle.
As his foot crossed the line, the embers flared, searing through his vision. Pain rushed up his leg, through his body, into his skull. It was worse than the monster's blow, worse than any memory of injury his body carried.
It burned him.
It did not consume.
The ash-place fell away.
He was back in the square, lying on broken cobbles with his ribs screaming, his lungs stuttering, his skin slick with blood.
But something else was there now, layered over the pain.
A glow. A low, gray-red heat at the core of his being, like a coal dropped into his soul. He felt it reach out, not with fingers but with a sense of… adjustment.
Everything sharpened.
The monster's second swing, already descending toward the ring around the well, slowed in his perception. Not truly, but his mind snagged on every angle, every line of force, every crack in stone, in flesh, in script.
Weaknesses lit up.
In the creature's leg—a mass of fused forms supporting more weight than it should, the joint structure wrong. In the cracked building's wall, the fissure he'd opened hanging by a thread. In the ring of defenders, the exact spot where they would break if the thing hit there.
He could see it all.
Ruin-Sight, something whispered inside him. Not in words, but in knowing. Step 9: Ember of Ruin.
His body should not have been able to move.
It moved anyway.
He pushed his hand against the cobbles. Pain lanced through his chest. The world wavered. He forced himself upright, teeth grinding.
There.
He staggered toward his fallen sword, snatched it up, and turned.
The creature was bringing its limb down. The group at the well braced. Maeric lifted his shield, eyes fixed on the inevitable impact.
Cassian didn't run for the monster.
He ran for the building again.
This time, he didn't hesitate.
He drove the sword into the exact point his new sight had highlighted—a hair's breadth to the left of his earlier strike, where a hairline crack intersected the main fracture in a perfect web of failure.
He put everything into the movement—not just muscle, but that ember in his chest, that new, smoldering core.
For a heartbeat, he felt something in him… catch.
The building groaned.
The wall split.
There was a deep, tearing sound as wood and stone surrendered. The upper stories sagged, then toppled outward in a cloud of dust and shattered brick.
The falling mass met the monster's descending limb with bone-shaking force.
The creature's arm buckled. It staggered, off-balance, its weight shifting onto its already overloaded legs. One of them snapped with a sound like a giant branch breaking.
The towering mass pitched sideways.
It crashed to the cobbles, missing the ring around the well by a narrow margin. The ground shook. Cobblestones cracked. A spray of smaller creatures, knocked loose from its body, shrieked silently as they were crushed under the falling rubble.
Faces along its bulk twisted, mouths opening in silent, contorted screams as the weight pinned them.
The survivors at the well cried out, some in terror, some in shock.
Maeric stared, eyes wide, shield still raised. Dust settled around him in a slow, gray rain.
Cassian sagged against what remained of the wall, chest heaving. Every breath sent knives of pain through his ribs. His right arm felt like it belonged to someone else. Warm wetness soaked his side.
For a moment, the world narrowed to those sensations.
Then Lyra was there, grabbing his sleeve.
"Are you insane?" she demanded. "No, wrong question. You are insane. Are you alive?"
"Apparently," he said.
His voice sounded strange even to his own ears, rough and distant.
She glanced at his side, saw the spreading blood, and hissed. "You were nearly paste. Stay still before the Nightmare decides you're a smear on the cobbles."
The monster on the ground twitched.
It wasn't dead. Not yet. Limbs writhed, trying to push against the weight of the fallen building. Smaller creatures spilled from its surface like maggots shaken from a carcass, scrabbling blindly toward the ring.
"Finish it!" Maeric yelled, snapping out of his shock. "Everything that moves, kill it! Don't let it back up!"
The ring surged.
Sade led the charge, cleaver rising and falling with brutal precision as she hacked at any limb that twitched. Others followed, stabbing and slashing. The smaller creatures were less coordinated now, their movements unsteady, like puppets whose strings had frayed.
Cassian watched their eyes—where they had eyes—and saw, for the first time, something like recognition there.
Not of him, specifically.
Of the fact that this script… had not gone quite as written.
The fog at the edges of the square seethed.
For a heartbeat, Cassian felt an attention pass over him. Vast. Impersonal. Calculating.
Anomaly detected, it murmured, not in sound but in the grinding of the world's gears.
The ember in his chest flickered, as if in answer.
He straightened as much as his ribs allowed and bared his teeth at nothing at all.
"Get used to it," he whispered.
Lyra's fingers tightened on his arm. "What?"
"Nothing," he said. "Help me stay standing. The Trial's not done."
She snorted, but she shifted her grip so that if he swayed, he'd lean into her instead of the broken wall.
"You know," she muttered, "if this is you on day one, I think I'm either very unlucky or very—"
The bell began to toll again.
Slow. Heavy.
But this time, the sound had a crack in it.
Cassian felt it like a fracture in his bones.
The Nightmare was still running its script.
He was done following it.