Runewick had fallen quiet, but not still. The hum she’d felt in her bones was stronger now, carrying through the ground like the pulse of a distant forge. Every time it rose, the green shimmer on the clouds brightened.

  She turned toward it. The temple hill was visible even from here, rising above the roofs like a dark tooth crowned in emerald. The glow was steady now, breathing in rhythm with the hum.

  Her chest tightened. She remembered the old sermons about how the temple was built over the oldest rune chamber in the city, the one the priests claimed was carved by the gods themselves. Whatever had been buried there had survived a hundred generations of worship and war. If that was where the light came from…

  Her thoughts stumbled. The voice had warned her—the cultists weren’t finished. What if they had done it in the temple?

  She didn’t want to go. She also couldn’t look away.

  The whisper came again, faint as a breeze stirring the smoke.

  You’ll die in the open. Protect yourself.

  Her pulse jumped. “You again,” she said quietly. “You can hear me?”

  Always. You called once. You can call again.

  The air around her cooled, the taste of iron sharp on her tongue. A tingling began along her arms, the same sensation that had come before each blast, pressure building under her skin, waiting. This time it didn’t feel violent. It felt curious.

  “Protect myself,” she repeated. “How?”

  You know how. You already did.

  Light shimmered faintly over her forearms, not violet now but soft and colorless, bending the air. The warmth in her chest spread outward, threading through her shoulders, her ribs, her skin. It settled around her like invisible cloth, weightless but sure.

  A shield. Not from stone or spellbooks, but from her.

  The voice, or whatever it was, hummed with approval.

  Better. Now walk.

  She let out a long breath and looked again toward the temple hill. The glow painted the undersides of the clouds, and the wind carried the smell of ozone and burned oil. She wanted to tell herself she was heading there to help, to find survivors, to do something good. But the truth was simpler. She was drawn to it. To the color, the hum, the steady promise that something alive was still moving in the ruin of Runewick.

  The armor around her flickered once, then steadied. She pulled her hood low, gripped her spear, and began to climb.

  The climb toward the upper wards was slower than she wanted. Every few streets, the way was blocked by fallen stone or the rib cages of overturned carts, turned into barricades. Fires smoldered in the gaps, throwing more shadow than light. The temple’s glow bled through the haze, pulsing against the smoke like a heartbeat too large for the city.

  Yara’s boots slid on dust that had once been roof tile. Each breath scraped her throat; she could taste old brick and char on her tongue. The hum in the air grew steadier the higher she climbed. It wasn’t from the sky; it rose through the stone itself, thrumming into the bones of her feet until her teeth hurt.

  She passed houses that had belonged to merchants and minor lords—colored glass windows slumped into bubbled tongues, brass lintels gone green and soft. Family crests had been scored through with knives. Over doors, someone had chalked circles and lines in a hurry, crude wardings that forgot their endings. She recognized pieces of the language of light, the old patterns drilled into her by a hedge-priest when she was small, but every circle was broken, each line dragged wrong. A perversion, not a prayer.

  At a cross street, she paused. A shattered cistern still held water clean enough to reflect the sky. The surface rippled in time with the hum. When she lifted her head, she noticed the vines along the walls. Their leaves had gone too-green, not the tired olive of city growth but a lit-from-under color, veins pulsing faintly as if they had remembered a different kind of sun. They climbed thicker as the street led upward toward the temple, wrapping around lampposts, sliding through window frames, coiling around a dead Guard's ankle like they'd grown there overnight. Where they touched stone, the mortar looked pale and crumbling, as if something had drunk the strength from it. The sight tightened something in her chest. She stepped wide to keep from brushing them.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  She took a breath to steady herself and kept going.

  The switchbacks narrowed into stone stairs carved long ago, edges cupped from centuries of feet. Soot had settled in the hollows, black powder that puffed at each step. Twice she stopped to listen when a pebble skittered somewhere above. Once she froze as a faint, fast patter moved across a roofline and was gone too quick for a man, too light for armor. She waited until the silence reknit itself, then moved again.

  The wind shifted. The smell changed with it: less ash now, more metal—a sweetness lingering, like after a lightning strike.

  Closer, the voice breathed, pleased. Good.

  She swallowed. “Don’t tell me ‘good’ like you know me.”

  There was an almost-smile in the hum.

  You know me. That’s enough.

  “Do I?” she whispered, but let it go. Questions could trip you faster than broken stairs.

  The last stair widened onto a half-moon-shaped landing. From there, she finally saw the base of the spire and the plaza before the temple gates. Bodies lay in a broken ring around the doors, some in the cracked leather of city guard, some in scorched robes. Vines had spread across the plaza like veins in an eye, thick as her wrist in places, splitting into thinner runners that wound between the fallen. They wrapped wrists, threaded through armor buckles, coiled around throats with the patient grip of something that had all the time it needed. The green glow had pooled here, thick as water. It gathered in the grout lines of the marble and crawled in thin veins toward the threshold like moss finding a seam. Where the vines grew densest, the cobblestones looked brittle, almost translucent, as if the stone itself was being hollowed from within.

  She crouched behind the thigh of a toppled statue, some saint whose name had burned away, and counted. Six by the steps. Two against the wall. Three more half-swallowed by the glow and completely wrapped in green, bodies cocooned so thoroughly only the shape of them remained. A staff lay near one outstretched hand, its runes still flickering like embers refusing to die. In the space between pulses, the plaza looked normal. In the breath after, every edge sharpened and every shadow tilted the wrong direction.

  A faint sound floated through the air. Voices—a handful of people kneeling where the nave would be, chanting wordless syllables. The tone was desperate, not reverent. At the end of each phrase, the hum answered louder, then drained away. It fed and was fed in return.

  “Fools,” Yara murmured, though she didn’t put any heat into it. Heat was for people with energy to spare.

  She slid along the statue’s base to the far side of the landing. The doors themselves looked like bread left too long in an oven, cracked wide, their faces warped into a slow wave by heat that had somehow chosen to remain. Through the gap, she saw green fire reflected in broken tile, the pale shine of marble gone sickly under the light.

  Something moved past the opening.

  A robed figure crossed her slice of view, bent under the weight of a staff carved up and over with runes. The light traced each stroke of the symbols and fed from them, lines brightening as the figure breathed. Yara pressed back into the shadows. When the figure’s footfalls faded, she slid into its wake, a hand on the floor, moving when the hum rose to cover her steps.

  The closer she came, the more the air vibrated. The stair she knelt on hummed. The spear hummed where her palm rested. Her breath felt like it belonged to someone else, and she was borrowing it.

  At the base of the doors, she almost tripped over a body—a robed man with his face hidden, his fingers fused around a shard of crystal as if he’d gripped it while it was soft and it cooled around him. The light inside the shard burned with a frozen green hue. She pried it free, hissed when it seared her skin, and let it fall. The crystal struck the stone and chimed like a glass bell.

  “Not doing that again,” she muttered.

  Don’t. The whisper skimmed her thoughts with a cool edge. Not yours.

  She set her jaw and peered through the narrowest crack between the doors.

  The nave lay in ruin, but lived. Green fire ran in threads under the marble, a net of light that swelled and thinned as the chant changed. The altar at the far end had split down the middle. Light bled from the crack, knotting into a slow whirl like smoke rising in water. Five figures knelt around it. Their bodies swayed with their voices. At each drawn breath, the glow retreated a finger’s width. At each exhale, it surged back and over, farther than before.

  Her heartbeat tried to keep pace and stumbled. She counted the robed backs five. The one outside was six. If this was all of them, the rest of the city’s trouble had different hands.

  Her first instinct rose quick and clean: don’t. Turn away. Leave this to someone who wore a badge or a sun-seal or the kind of calm people earned by not needing to eat from other people’s pockets.

  Then she saw the walls.

  The same thin veins that had spidered across the merchant quarter were spreading from the altar into the very stone, live-lines of green slipping under marble to climb toward the roof. The city wasn’t simply dying. It was being eaten.

  Her jaw tightened. She had already killed because something reached for her throat. Maybe this was the same thing, simply larger. If the light stopped, maybe the city would have enough air to breathe. Maybe—

  Decide, the whisper pressed, not unkind. Not later. Now.

  “I am,” she breathed.

  that's eating the city. She has to decide: turn away and survive, or go in

  and face whatever's behind that green light.

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