She had always loved maps.
Not for the places themselves, but for the way lines could tame them. Rivers remembered their lanes, mountains sat where you drew them, and towns kept politely inside their borders. On paper, the world made sense. You could fold it, pocket it, take it out again, and it was still yours.
Diana touched the oilcloth bundle inside her satchel and felt the small comfort of graphite and rolled parchment. Bondrea did not fit in any of those lines tonight. The rain had turned streets into veins, the fog into a lung. Everything breathed where it shouldn't.
A sound slid through the mist, soft at first, like wet cloth dragged over stone. Then the rhythm fixed itself: many feet, moving together, too steady to be alive. She flattened behind a broken wall and lifted her head just enough to see a mouth of alley opening into a drowned courtyard. Figures stood there in a loose cluster, faces pale, clothes ragged. Their eyes were open and empty. When a blade glinted at the far end of the lane, all their heads tilted toward it at once, as if the metal had spoken.
Hollow.
A rebel skidded past her, teeth bared. "Positions, now." Avos's voice carried through the rain. "Protect the civilians. Soldiers on the flanks, move."
Diana rose into a half crouch and bolted, counting corners as she went. Two lefts, a short stair, the old cooper's yard. In the blur of bodies a Hollow broke toward her, arms lifting too late for a living thing, a bad pantomime of attack. She stepped inside its reach and cut low. The blade met meat, but there was no blood, only a sigh from somewhere that had nothing to do with lungs. It folded, not from pain, but because the sword had instructed it to.
She ran on. Smoke braided with mist. Somewhere behind a shutter a woman whispered prayers in a voice collapsed by fear. Diana vaulted a toppled cart and felt the street tilt beneath her. The city was fatter here, streets opening like mouths into a narrow plaza with a shrine at its center, a stone sun eaten by moss.
"Diana, left," someone shouted.
She pivoted, brought her knife up in time to parry a spear thrust. The Custodian on the other end was young, the kind of young that believes he is immortal because someone told him he serves eternity. She feinted, slid past, and cut his hamstring. He went down with a sound like a chair breaking. Another came, and another, pushing her sideways, further from Avos's line.
"Civilians through the arch," Avos called, then again, nearer a scream, "Keep them moving."
Diana risked a look over her shoulder. A thin chain of people shuffled toward the covered walkway: an old woman with a blue scarf, two boys carrying a child between them, a man with a split scalp blinking rain out of his eyes like sleep. She started to cut back toward them and stopped.
Gemma stood in the mouth of the opposite alley, cloak plastered to her small frame, hair dark with rain. She was not running. Her hands were half raised, as if deciding whether to ask for something or refuse it. The air around her trembled, the kind of trembling you feel in your teeth.
"Gemma," Diana called, and her voice came out smaller than she meant.
The girl didn't seem to hear. She closed her eyes. The tremor spread outward in a thin ring that touched the stones and the walls and the wet faces of the Hollow and came back changed. Light rose from the puddles as if remembered, not created. For a breath, the square brightened to a pale, sourceless day. The Hollow nearest to her paused. Their fingers shook. Their mouths opened like doors to empty rooms.
Diana moved. She cut through a Custodian who thought he was the center of the scene, shoulder to stomach, let him fall away, and sprinted the last yards. A gauntleted hand caught her sleeve. She spun free and slammed her knife into the visor gap. The body folded. Gemma took half a step backward, lips pressed white.
"Not your day to die, sweetheart," Diana said, reaching her. She grabbed Gemma's arm and dragged her toward the shadow of the shrine. "Breathe. Eyes on me."
Gemma's gaze fixed for an instant, as if finding a map. "I can hear it," she said. "I can't make it stop."
"You don't need to stop it. You need to live through it."
Another wave of soldiers poured in from the western lane, banners wet against their poles, the sun of the Light deforming with the rain. Behind them, the Hollow drifted like algae torn free, drawn by the gleam of swords. Avos's voice cracked across stone, closer now. "Form on me. Shield the girl. Diana, fall back."
"I'm here," she shouted, though she wasn't sure to whom.
Three soldiers broke from the pack and came low, triplets of motion. Diana shoved Gemma behind the shrine's base and met the first with steel. Sparks, the metal tasting of salt. She rocked him off balance and cut his wrist. The second's blade scraped her shoulder, a line of heat that did not yet feel like pain. She feinted high, stabbed low. The third bellowed and rushed, and she sidestepped him into the shrine. He hit stone, the carved sun ringing. She ended it quick, almost tender.
"Move," she told Gemma, pulling her up. "We have to move."
They took three steps together, and the square convulsed. Something slammed between them, not body but force, the leftover shape of a blast that hadn't yet happened. The rush separated them so cleanly it felt like a decision the city had made.
"Diana," Gemma called, voice thin, frightened, somewhere to her left now.
"I'm here," Diana answered, but another knot of Hollow drifted between them, hands lifted as if in benediction. Behind them, Custodians advanced in a staggered line, swords level, helmets beaded with rain. One of the men saw Gemma and shouted. Two more shifted to flank.
Diana pushed forward. A spear head flashed; she knocked it aside and slid past a shield edge, felt armor scrape her ribs. The rain thickened, or the light thinned, and all at once there was only Gemma again, just beyond the reach of her hand, eyes on Diana, the look of a child who trusts the map more than the road.
"Down," Diana said, already moving to put herself between the girl and whatever came next.
She never saw the man who reached her back.
There was a pressure first, sudden and deep, a hand on the center of her, as if someone had decided she should stand exactly there. Then the heat arrived, bright and specific, and the world narrowed to the width of a blade sliding through her and out the other side. She tasted iron, and rain, and the bitter skin of fear she hadn't had time to admit.
Gemma made a sound Diana had never heard from a human throat. It started as her name and became something larger, a note that belonged to stone and water and the faint, persistent ringing of bells somewhere far away. The air around the girl tightened. Light gathered without source, not rising but condensing, as if the night had decided to remember day all at once.
Diana's knees buckled. She turned her head enough to see Gemma's face, white with terror, mouth open in a sound that already hurt the bones of the world. The soldiers slowed. The Hollow lifted their faces like flowers to sun.
"Not your day," Diana tried to say again, and wasn't sure whether the words left her mouth or only her mind.
The square drew a single breath, and Gemma's grief became something with weight.
Light didn't burst, it folded. It crushed air, sound, and thought together until everything inside it became a single note. The first to die were the Hollow, their bodies twitching once, then unraveling into pale ash that spun upward instead of down. The soldiers that followed didn't even scream; their armor liquefied under the brightness, their bones glowing faintly before vanishing into the mist.
The ground itself seemed to recoil. The stones blackened, the rain hissed, and the shrine cracked down the middle. Aros would later say he saw the flash from across the district, but no one who stood close to it could describe it at all.
Diana felt herself lifted, weightless, the world bending away from her like fabric pulled too tight. The pain was gone; her body was something far away, an afterthought. She saw only Gemma: small, trembling, her face lit by something both divine and wrong. The light poured out of her as if the world was being emptied through her lungs.
Then silence.
When the brightness thinned, Diana was on her back against a wall that no longer had shape. Smoke hung in sheets. The air tasted of metal and dust. All she could hear was her heartbeat, uneven, retreating.
Gemma lay on the ground, still as a broken doll. Avos appeared through the fog, his armor scorched, his face streaked with soot. He gathered the girl into his arms and shouted for the others, though his voice barely carried. "To the tunnels! Move!"
Diana tried to push herself up. Her body answered with tremors. "Wait..." she called, but the sound came out hoarse, small. Avos didn't turn. He was already disappearing into the ruins, Gemma limp against his shoulder.
She looked down. Her hands were covered in blood. She couldn't tell if it was hers.
Footsteps echoed behind her. Not the rushed chaos of battle, but something slower, deliberate. Four soldiers emerged from the smoke, armor blackened but intact. Two more followed at a distance. They advanced in formation, swords drawn, their eyes reflecting the dying light.
Diana forced her head to lift. The second pair stopped a few meters away. Between them walked a man in a dark cloak, his movements calm, practiced, out of place among the carnage.
Alexander of Dromo
She tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth. "Mister Alexander…" Her voice cracked. "Help me."
He stopped before her. For a heartbeat, she saw a flicker of something almost human cross his face, pity, maybe. Then he crouched beside her, the din of battle gone as if swallowed by the fog.
"Sorry, Miss Diana," he said quietly, almost gently. "But you're already dead."
The blade cut clean.
She fell back against the stones. Her eyes caught the pale sky above, the color of parchment wet with ink.
She thought of lines again, rivers she'd traced that never changed course, borders she'd drawn to make sense of chaos.
The last thing she saw was the curve of the ruined shrine, split in two like an unfinished circle.