For a moment too long, time forgot to move.
Lendro stood at the edge of nowhere.
The air was dry and old, filled with the quiet ache of things left unsaid for centuries. Wind slithered across the plains, dragging with it whispers that weren't words, just the rustling of grass that had long since died, brittle and hollow like the bones of a forgotten saint. Every breath tasted like rust. Every shadow seemed wrong.
Above him, the sky stretched too wide, too quiet, as though even the stars were holding their breath.
He felt it again, the presence. That slow, silent pressure at the base of his skull. Watching. Weighing. A thing without name or shape, but older than the soil beneath his boots. It pressed into him like gravity in reverse, pulling the soul outward instead of in.
He didn't move.
Because somehow, some part of him believed if he did, the world would notice and punish him for being here.
A trespasser in his own fate.
He remembered the look in Graiden's eyes. That hollow, exhausted stare. The way a man might look at the last match in a rainstorm. Not with hope. With apology.
This wasn't destiny. This was a sentence.
And behind his ribs, something began to curl inward, a thought that didn't quite belong to him.
You were not meant to survive this place. Only witness it.
Then, footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Like a question being asked again and again.
Kaighy.
He didn't speak at first. He didn't need to. His presence did the talking. His shadow arrived before he did, stretching unnaturally long across the dirt, drawn not by the sun, but by something deeper, darker.
Dinner's ready, Kaighy said.
The words were mechanical. Rehearsed. Not offered, just said. Like a line carved into a wall for the thousandth time.
Lendro didn't turn. I'm not hungry.
A silence followed, thick, unnatural. Not empty. Expectant.
Kaighy didn't move. His breath was steady. Too steady. As if it were borrowed.
He was watching Lendro's spine, dissecting it. Not with hatred. That would have been comforting. This was the silence of a butcher who didn't need to rush. Cold, precise. Certain.
Lendro swallowed the dryness in his throat. Where's Hitomi?
For a flicker of a second, almost imperceptible, Kaighy's mask slipped. Something dead moved behind his eyes. Not pain. Not sorrow.
Just fatigue.
The fatigue of someone who'd already buried the living.
He gestured toward the shoreline, if it could still be called that. Just the skeleton of water, long drained and dry.
Somewhere out there, he said. Go look if it matters.
And then he walked away. No emphasis. No closing remark.
As if Lendro was already gone.
The wind howled behind him, not like air, but like memory. It scoured his skin like teeth.
And Lendro stood in the hollowed-out silence, feeling himself vanish just a little more.
That night, even the stars felt like they were lying.
They burned, yes. But not with light. With warning.
He wandered.
The compound felt abandoned, not physically, but spiritually. Every step he took echoed too loud. Every corner seemed to hide the breath of someone who didn't want to be seen.
It wasn't sleep that wrapped this place. It was avoidance.
People weren't resting. They were withdrawing, folding into themselves like corpses trying to hide from death's second glance.
Eventually, a door. The one that hummed with static when passed. The one that always seemed colder.
Lendro opened it.
Inside, dim light swayed from a dying bulb, its pulse irregular like a heartbeat on the edge. The air was heavier. Damp, but not with water.
With thought.
Hitomi stood with his back to the room, eyes locked on the wall. Not reading. Not moving. Just existing. As if something had rooted him there.
Hitomi, Lendro's voice was a whisper.
The boy turned.
Recognition flickered, but hollow, as though filtered through layers of glass. His eyes, once full of that fiery, reckless spark, now held something else. Something far more dangerous.
Stillness.
A smile cut across Hitomi's face. Brief. Crooked. Not joy. Not welcome.
Something closer to superiority.
I figured you'd show up, he said.
The voice was familiar. But warped. Balanced from a height Lendro hadn't seen before. A place above empathy. Above consequence.
Above him.
Lendro didn't reply. There was no need.
The silence between them didn't crackle with conflict. It drowned. It suffocated.
A silence not of anger, but of disinterest.
He left before the silence killed him.
Sleep did not come. Only absence.
And when he awoke, the dawn felt wrong. Too bright. Too warm. Like makeup on a corpse.
He walked toward Graiden's quarters. But it didn't feel like walking. It felt like submitting. Each step carved into the ground by someone else, a marionette pulled forward by strings woven from old nightmares.
The fire was burning low.
Graiden sat beside it, hunched over a map scarred with lines that made no sense. Lines through places that no longer existed, or never had.
He didn't look up. Not at first.
Lendro stood in the threshold, half there. I need to understand.
Graiden finally raised his eyes.
No surprise.
No pity.
Only the tired gaze of a man who had seen this scene before, too many times, with too many faces, all of them eventually gone.
Understanding, he said slowly, is a luxury of the uneaten. We deal in instinct here. And damage.
Lendro stepped closer. What is this place, really? Shenzo? Nayrah? The Veil? You throw words like stones, expecting me to bleed meaning from them.
Graiden didn't answer at first. He reached out instead, lifted a single charred pawn from the map. Blackened. Twisted.
Once, he said, we were something. A kingdom, yes. But more than that, a resistance against an idea. A wall against infection.
Lendro frowned. Infection?
Graiden nodded. Not one of the body. One of form. An intelligence without shape. A thought that learns. That spreads. That erases.
He let the pawn fall. It clicked against the floor like a knuckle being cracked.
We called it many names. The Rot. The Hint. The Deep Wound. We tried to wall it in. Time laughed.
Silence returned. Like a breath held too long.
Lendro spoke quietly. Why me?
Graiden shook his head. I don't know. No one ever does. But nothing comes here by accident. Things arrive to rot, or to reshape. Either way… they bleed.
He stood, slowly. His body was made of aches.
I'm not asking you to fight. Not yet. But you've already entered the room. That's enough. It sees you now.
Lendro's hands clenched. So what, I just wait until it decides to unmake me?
You decide how deep you go before you stop pretending you can leave.
Lendro's jaw tensed. You want me to join you?
Graiden looked at him, not with hope, but with inevitability.
I want you to decide. Before doing something dumb.
Lendro met his gaze, hard. Like what's the worst that could happen? Dying?
Graiden's voice dropped.
It's not about you anymore. If you break wrong...
He looked away, toward the map where cities had been replaced with scars.
The kingdom falls with you.