The streets grew steeper as Yara climbed, the stones underfoot turning from brick to pale marble streaked with soot. The fires below had burned themselves down to smoke, and the smoke drifted upward through the narrow ways, a gray tide licking at her heels. The air smelled of iron and wet plaster, a scent that clung to the back of her throat until every swallow tasted like dust.

  She moved more slowly now, not out of fear but calculation. The spear felt heavier with every step. Her side throbbed where the goblin’s spear had struck a deep bruise that pulsed with each breath. The faint ache was proof she’d lived through something she didn’t yet understand. Each time she exhaled, a fine mist of ash lifted from her coat and drifted ahead like scouts.

  Runewick’s upper wards had once been proud places with broad steps, carved lintels, and courtyards built for parades. Now every doorway had a barricade, half-fallen or a prayer scratched into it. She passed a bakery where the ovens had exploded outward; the scent of burned flour mixed with the sweetness of fruit that had burst inside its jars. A child’s shoe sat on the counter beside a lump of dough that had baked itself solid in the heat. The simple domesticity of it stung more than the sight of bodies.

  Bodies there were plenty. Not heaps, just a rhythm, every few houses: a Guard collapsed against a doorway, a merchant clutching a ledger that had turned to pulp, a creature with too many joints folded into itself as if ashamed of its own shape. The dead of both sides shared one thing: confusion etched into what was left of their faces. And where the creatures lay, fine gray powder pooled in the creases of cobblestones, drifted in small eddies when the wind found them. The same powder that coated her lungs with every breath. The same dust that clung to the back of her throat. She swallowed once, tasting chalk and ash and something that had been alive this morning, and kept climbing.

  She kept her distance. The flies didn’t care whose blood they worked, and movement drew them.

  Halfway up a switchback, she found a line of Guard shields stacked against a wall, their sigils scorched black. Someone had tried to make a stand here. The paving runes beneath the pile still pulsed faintly blue, a ward that had held for a time before fading. Beside them, a man in uniform lay with his head resting against a stair, mouth open as if he’d died mid-command.

  Yara crouched. The uniform was cleaner than most, suggesting he hadn’t lain long. When she reached for the flask at his belt, his eyes opened.

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  She jerked back, nearly losing her footing on the ash-slick step.

  He didn't move beyond that; the eyes merely rolled toward her, unfocused. His voice came in a whisper that sounded more like a memory than breath.

  "Sir?" The word came automatically, muscle memory deeper than pain. His eyes tried to focus on her face and failed. "Still...on post, sir."

  Yara crouched lower, kept her voice quiet. "Report."

  Something in him straightened at the word, old training surfacing. "Bells stopped. Was on wall duty when—" He coughed, thin trail of blood following. "When they stopped, chanting started. Couldn't tell...ours or theirs. Sound came through the stones."

  His breathing hitched. Each word cost more now.

  "Then green came. Bright as—" He blinked slowly, losing the thought, finding it again. "Forge glass. Whole hill breathing. Green."

  "The temple?" she prompted.

  A fractional nod. "Priests called it...light of mercy." His lips cracked into something bitter. "Pulled air from our lungs. Men dropped their weapons. Clutching chests like—like it had hands."

  His gaze drifted past her shoulder, seeing something else. The present and the past blurring.

  "After that I..." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "I ran, sir. Left my post. I ran."

  The confession came out like shame.

  "Understood," Yara said quietly.

  Relief flickered across his face. His eyes were going glassy now, pupils wide and dark. "If you go up there, sir...don't look at it too long." The words slurred slightly. "It looks...back."

  His next breath rattled. The one after didn't come at all.

  Yara waited until she was sure. Then she closed his eyes with the edge of her sleeve—not grief, just the small courtesy you give the dead—and unbuckled the flask from his belt. The metal was warm, still half full. She took a cautious sip before hooking it to her own pack.

  "Do the work, get paid," she murmured.

  The silence didn’t object.

  She stayed there longer than she meant to, catching her breath, letting the sting of smoke clear from her eyes. When she finally rose, the sun had shifted behind the clouds, and the upper sky had taken on a faint green sheen so faint that if she blinked, she could pretend it was only her imagination.

  The slope ahead curved toward the Temple Ward, where the spire loomed behind veils of smoke. Every few heartbeats, a dull pulse ran through the air, turning the light just slightly green, then fading. Not a flash. A breath.

  Yara felt it in her teeth. The same hum she’d heard before the blast, now steady and slow, like something vast sleeping under the hill and dreaming of her.

  She tightened her grip on the spear and looked back once toward the lower wards. The smoke covered everything she’d left behind the burned man, the broken market, the dead Guard who’d warned her not to stare. For a moment, she wanted to turn back simply to have a direction that wasn’t uphill.

  But the hill glowed again, faintly, and the pulse hummed through the stone beneath her boots.

  She set her jaw. “See it first,” she whispered. “Then decide.”

  The road ahead wound upward through the ruins, green light flickering like heartbeats through the smoke.