The smell reached them before the screams.

  It wasn’t blood alone.

  It was rot layered over smoke, sweat soaked into old stone, something sour and wrong clinging to the air like it had been there long before the fighting ended.

  Sei slowed.

  Eva noticed instantly.

  “We’re close,” she said, voice low. “Greymark’s outer ward.”

  That was all she said — and all she needed to.

  The road bent downward, stone giving way to broken earth, wagon ruts churned into mud by too many boots moving too fast. The walls ahead weren’t breached, not fully, but the gate stood open. Not welcoming. Not guarded.

  Abandoned.

  Sei’s stomach tightened.

  “No,” he whispered, before he knew why.

  They passed through the gate.

  And the world broke open.

  People lay everywhere.

  Not arranged. Not triaged. Not even moved aside.

  Bodies slumped against walls, sprawled in the street, curled in doorways like they had tried to crawl home and failed halfway there. Some breathed. Some didn’t. Some… shouldn’t have been alive at all, the way their chests stuttered instead of rose.

  A woman screamed somewhere to the left — a thin, tearing sound that cut off too abruptly.

  Eva was already moving.

  “Containment failed,” she said sharply. “Not a siege. Something internal.”

  Her eyes swept the scene with a soldier’s precision, cataloging threats, exits, angles—

  Sei wasn’t looking at any of that.

  He dropped to his knees beside the nearest figure.

  A boy. Maybe twelve.

  Skin clammy. Lips blue. Pulse fluttering so weak it barely existed.

  Sei’s hands hovered.

  This wasn’t a battlefield.

  This wasn’t training.

  This was wrong in a way no armor could stop.

  “I—” His breath hitched. “Hey. Hey, stay with me, okay?”

  The boy didn’t respond.

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  Sei pressed two fingers to the neck again. Slower. More careful.

  There was no wound to close. No bleeding to stop.

  Something had burned him from the inside.

  “Eva,” Sei said, too quickly. “There are too many. We need— we need people, supplies—”

  “I know.” Her voice was strained now. “Greymark tried to isolate it. Whatever it was.”

  A cough tore from the boy’s chest. Wet. Wrong.

  Sei flinched.

  This was the part he hated.

  The moment where knowledge wasn’t enough.

  Where doing everything right still ended the same way.

  His jaw tightened.

  “No,” he muttered. “Not like this.”

  He pressed his palm flat against the boy’s chest.

  Not to heal.

  Just to feel.

  The heartbeat stumbled beneath his hand — and then something answered back.

  Warmth bloomed.

  Soft at first. Almost shy.

  Sei froze.

  The air around his hand shimmered.

  A faint glow leaked between his fingers, pale and steady, like breath made visible in winter. It wasn’t blinding. It wasn’t dramatic.

  It was intimate.

  The boy gasped.

  A real breath this time.

  Sei’s eyes widened.

  “No— wait—” Panic spiked. “I didn’t— I’m not—”

  The glow intensified.

  Not exploding outward.

  Pulling inward.

  The boy’s breathing steadied. Color crept back into his lips. The tremor beneath Sei’s palm smoothed into something dangerously close to stable.

  Sei yanked his hand back like he’d been burned.

  The glow vanished.

  Silence fell around them — not because the world had gone quiet, but because Eva had stopped moving.

  She stared at Sei.

  At his hand.

  At the boy, who was now very much alive.

  “…Sei,” she said slowly.

  He backed away, chest heaving.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to— I don’t know what that was.”

  The boy coughed again, weak but present.

  A man nearby saw it.

  Then another.

  Whispers rippled outward like a struck nerve.

  “He touched him—”“Did you see the light—”“That one was dead—”

  Sei stood there, shaking.

  This wasn’t power.

  This was responsibility crashing down all at once.

  More hands reached for him.

  More voices.

  “Please—”“My wife—”“My daughter—”

  He stepped back again.

  “I can’t,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know how. I don’t—”

  A scream cut him off.

  Eva spun.

  Across the square, a man convulsed violently, veins blackening beneath his skin. Whatever had burned the others from the inside was still active — still spreading.

  And there were dozens like him.

  Eva’s jaw clenched.

  She looked at Sei — really looked at him — and for the first time, there was something like fear in her eyes.

  Not of him.

  For him.

  “This is why the council was afraid,” she said quietly. “This is why summoning is a last resort.”

  Sei swallowed.

  His hands trembled.

  He looked down at them — at the memory of warmth still lingering in his palms.

  Then at the people.

  At Greymark.

  At the impossible choice pressing in from every side.

  “…If I do this,” he said, voice barely holding together, “it won’t stop. They won’t let it stop.”

  Eva didn’t lie.

  “No.”

  The man across the square screamed again.

  Something inside Sei cracked.

  He stepped forward.

  Then another step.

  The air shifted.

  Not green.

  Not forbidden.

  Just light.

  Pure. Relentless. Unforgiving in its gentleness.

  Sei raised his hands.

  And this time—

  He let it happen.