Smoke poured through the opening, thick and gray.
She stepped outside into dawn light the color of old rust.
Bodies surrounded the temple entrance. They knelt in concentric rings facing the doors, hands reaching toward the threshold like supplicants frozen mid-prayer. Pilgrims in scorched robes. Guards still gripping useless weapons. Civilians who'd run here thinking the temple meant safety.
All of them dead.
Yara's stomach turned.
Their skin had dried and tightened until it clung to bone. Faces sunken, cheeks hollow, eyes half-open and glazed. Mouths slack. They looked like they'd starved to death over months, not hours. Like something had reached inside them and drunk them empty from the inside out, leaving only husks behind.
The Gem had drained them. Every spark of life, every breath of vitality, pulled out through the green light while they knelt paralyzed, unable to run, unable to look away.
She'd stopped it. Swallowed it whole so it couldn't keep feeding on anyone who wandered too close.
But the hunger hadn't gone away. It had just moved. Now it lived in her chest, patient and waiting, and feeding it was her problem.
The plaza sloped down toward what had been Market Rise. The vines that had crawled everywhere the night before were gone—withered to brittle brown stems that crumbled to powder when the wind touched them. Where they'd wrapped thickest around bodies and buildings, gray ash marked their paths. The cobblestones beneath looked porous and fragile, like touching them too hard would make them collapse.
The wind smelled like a crypt that had been sealed too long.
Runewick wasn’t dying anymore. It was simply broken.
"How long?" she asked. Her voice came out hoarse and cracked.
No answer. No clocks left running. No bells to mark the hours.
By the double-pulse in her chest and the exhaustion in her bones, maybe a day since the blast. Twenty hours since she'd been stealing bread at the baker's stall. Less than a day since the world ended.
“I need to rest,” she told the doorway, the empty square, and the small pulse behind her breastbone.
Feed me first.
“Potion first,” she said, just as stubborn. “Or I’ll bleed out before I can find you dinner.”
A stillness, then a cool reply brushing the back of her thoughts.
Faster, then.
She took inventory because counting steadied her hands.
- Magic: the knot behind her knuckles—the constant source—remained. Other abilities—protection, reshaping, healing—would require real sleep, the Gem would not allow.
- Wounds: palm, reopened; flank, deep bruise under ribs; shoulder, throbbing from recoil; ankle, still a whisper of pain if she forgot herself.
- Gear: knife; ruined spear shaft; three tar-resins; two warm crystal shards; one thin ward-ring with a worn sun; one heel of bread gone to stone.
"Shops first," she told herself. "Apothecaries, guild stores, anything with red glass. After that…" She stopped. The word "survivors" stuck in her throat like a promise she couldn't keep. "After that, I'll think again."
She needed to see how far the damage spread.
She climbed to the temple roof, boots finding purchase on carved stone still warm from the night's glow. The city spread below her like a map written in ash and ruin.
She rolled to the roof's lip. Below, the ring of bodies around the temple doors lay untouched, the way a city sets an offering and the hill refuses.
Unmoved.
Unclaimed.
She swallowed hard. “You could’ve left some mercy behind,” she said to the ruin.
Mercy is a waste.
Her jaw tightened. “Spoken like something that’s never been human.”
Spoken like something that remembers what hunger costs.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she lay back, eyes tracing the washed-out sky. The quiet pressed until she could feel her own pulse counting time against the Gem’s steadier hum.
The copper-roofed herbalist on Hammers Way still stood, bowed but breathing. The metal sign above the lintel—a sprig of hammered herbs—had melted into a droplet and frozen that way.
Yara leaned her weight on the door. It gave.
Inside, glass had fallen and grown dust; a thousand small shards reflected the gray light like dull water.
The smells held longer than the walls: boiled vinegar, honey boiled to bitterness, the rot-sweet of crushed leaves. She moved shelf by shelf, sleeve over her mouth.
Dried woundwort: pale, scentless.
Waxed packets of willow and ghostmint: good for sleep, useless for blood.
Behind the counter, a wall-mounted safe had its protective seal broken. She pried it open with a drawer chisel. No red vials waited inside. One cloudy green potion—over-steeped in copper—remained. It would heal, but also poison. She put it back.
A strip of boiled bandage under oiled paper caught her eye. She took it. She could make it kind again with steam if she found any.
She sat on the counter’s edge, the empty shelves accusing her.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“I’m not ready,” she said to the dust.
You are dying, the Gem replied, matter-of-fact.
“I know.”
Then feed.
“On people.” Not a question. A line drawn in ash.
On energy. Living energy is energy.
She pressed her palm to her side where the bruise throbbed. If she faced a real fight now—standing her ground rather than running—one blow would finish her. She had survived the brute by luck. The goblins by desperation. The cultists had barely been alive to fight.
But the survivors hiding in cellars? The scavengers with knives and numbers?
“I need the potion,” she said. “Or I’m dead before I can feed you anything.”
A pause, then something almost like understanding.
Find it, then. Quickly.
She exhaled, long and shaking, and slid down from the counter.
The tinker’s shed two lanes over had folded in on itself. The air inside was metallic, close. She dug anyway and found a bottle of spirits sharp enough to clean wounds—or strip paint—and a blue sleeping draught that shimmered faintly under the dust. She held it to the light. The liquid moved too thickly, like syrup. Poison now. She set it down slowly, deliberately.
“See?” she told the Gem. “Learning restraint.”
Your blood says otherwise.
She looked down. The palm she’d wrapped earlier had soaked through. “Fine,” she muttered. “One point to you.”
The guild’s canvas tent, two lanes further, was half gone, the rest flapping like a wounded lung. Blood had dried on straw in shapes that remembered hands.
An apprentice lay nearby, chest open, empty.
A smaller lockbox had rolled beneath a cot. She dragged it out with the spear’s broken socket, pried it open, and found one packet of coagulant leaf—old and bitter—and a bent needle. She chewed the leaf until her mouth numbed and tied her palm tighter.
Her hands were shaking. Not from cold.
She’d killed before. Guards who’d chased her for stealing. A man who’d cornered her in an alley with hands that reached. You did what you had to, and you didn’t call it murder if you were the one who walked away.
But this was different.
This was hunting. Planned. Purposeful. She’d wake someone from sleep or pull them from their hiding place, and she’d take them because the thing under her ribs said mine.
“There has to be another way,” she whispered to the empty tent.
The Gem didn’t answer.
It didn’t need to.
There wasn’t.
She stood still in the ruin until the weight of failure settled somewhere she could carry it.
The ache inside sharpened until it felt like direction.
Now, the whisper said again, almost gently. We feed.
The Scion waited at the lane’s mouth.
Not moving—simply existing there, vast and wrong-shaped.
Its scales caught what little light remained, each rimmed faintly in fire. Heat rolled off it in slow waves that cracked the nearest stones. Its breath stirred ash in lazy eddies.
Yara’s throat went dry. It wasn’t looking at her, not exactly, but when it turned its head toward the higher wards and drew breath, she felt it inside her chest, like an echo through the ribs. The mark on her palm pulsed in answer.
“I hear you,” she said, voice low. “But I need more than ache to keep walking.”
No answer came, but the air grew warmer, a breath like a waiting animal.
She adjusted the bandage again. “If you understand me, blink.”
The Scion’s jaw flexed. Not a blink, more like a shrug of the air itself.
“Right,” she said. “We’ll call that a maybe.”
She looked at the city with the same hard practicality that had kept her alive.
Where is height? Where is the cover? Where can I stand and not be killed for it?
A fallen cider sign had lodged against a low awning. Two quick steps, a jump, an arm over the beam—wood complained, but held. She hauled herself onto the roof and lay flat until her pulse caught up to her.
Below, the Scion shifted, its body sliding through shadow with deliberate care. For all its size, it made less noise than she did.
From the rooftop, Runewick lay in patient ruin.
Chimneys stood like teeth, cold and gray.
No threads of cooking smoke.
Only the thin trails of buildings still burning from the night before.
Below, thin groups of scavengers moved restlessly through lanes, knives drawn, stripping both the living and the dead.
Easy targets. Alone or in pairs. Already doing harm.
“Them first,” she said, testing the words. “The ones hurting people. That’s still justice, isn’t it?”
It is survival, the Gem said. Justice is for those who can afford it.
She closed her eyes. “I was going to help them.”
You will. After you help yourself.
“By killing them.”
By living.
Below, something mewled like a cat or a broken hinge.
Her mouth flooded with copper before her brain caught up. She pressed her forehead to her arm, breathing through the ache. The Gem’s hum pushed against her heartbeat, measuring it, matching it, urging.
“I said no,” she whispered.
The Scion shifted below, a slow roll of heat. Its tail brushed stone.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said down to it. “You think I don’t know you feel it too?”
No reply. Just the faint tremor of its breath.
When she finally raised her head, the light had brightened—thin gold fighting its way through the gray. Color felt like a mercy she hadn’t earned.
She climbed to her feet again and kept working because stillness was surrender.
Bread from an overturned stall that hadn’t molded.
A dented kettle.
A satchel whose seam she could stitch later.
A length of twine.
A cracked cup that would still hold water.
She found a public pump that groaned like an old man but gave water slowly. Boiled it over a half-collapsed brazier, used the steam to soften the bandage, tied it again—kinder this time.
She sat there for a while, letting her breathing settle. The Scion crouched at the street’s edge, its gaze fixed somewhere beyond her—patient, alien, impossible to read. It didn’t need to eat, yet she could feel its hunger humming through the bond. Her hunger. Their hunger.
“You’re not quiet company,” she said.
It shifted, the faint scrape of scale on stone.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Didn’t think so.”
She tried closing her eyes—just for a dozen breaths—but her body slid too easily toward sleep, and the hum inside her caught her jaw and pulled her back.
Not cruel. Just certain.
She could go without sleep. She could not rest until the Gem was full.
“All right,” she said softly, and the word didn’t break her. “I hear the bargain.”
Feed me, the whisper said, patient as stone. Then you may sleep.
She looked to the horizon. The only smoke left was ruin-smoke—thin and dirty, pulsing thicker when a beam fell, thinning again when the wind remembered its work.
No cooking fires. No hearths. Just breath and ash.
Then came the rhythm again—shutter, answer, shutter, answer—followed by the drag of a crate and the click of a lock.
A pattern she recognized. Watch cadence.
“Scribe’s Row,” she murmured. “Old barracks, near the ledger-men. If there’s any red draught left in this city, it’ll be there.”
The Scion turned its head, the light along its neck shifting like slow lightning.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going.”
She rose, slung the satchel, and leaned on the broken spear. The sure knot behind her knuckles hummed, the one part of her that never tired.
She traced a route through height and shadow, rooftop to rooftop. When she reached the parapet and looked down into the narrow street, a shard of shop glass caught her.
Ash smeared across the orange skin. Pupils blown wide. A faint, wrong brightness banked behind her eyes like coals.
She turned her hand and hid it against her side.
Then she started moving again, across the roofs, the Scion pacing below like heat given form, the city breathing in ragged, stubborn pulls.
The vines hung dead.
The green had gone out of the stone.
The hunger had found a new home.
She would feed it well enough to buy sleep.
Then sleep long enough to mend.
Then, she makes herself worthy of having been chosen at all.
The Scion waited below, patient as stone.
Somewhere in the ruins, someone was hiding. Someone was hurt. Someone was barely breathing.
She would find them.
She had to.
The fact that she’d spent the last three hours trying not to—that she’d searched empty shops and boiled water and told herself stories about potions and preparation—didn’t change what came next.
“Scribe’s Row,” she said again, and this time she meant it.
Not for red glass. The barracks would be picked clean by now—survivors always found the stores first.
For whoever was still alive when she got there.
She started walking before she could stop herself again.
herself stories about preparation. But the Gem won't let her rest until she
feeds it—and it doesn't feed on bread or bandages.
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