The next dawn stumbled into the city like a drunk at a sermon — late, uncertain, and pretending nothing had gone wrong the night before. The haze hung heavier than usual, the air tasting faintly of iron. People noticed, but in Nareth, noticing was the same as ignoring.
The bell from the clock tower struck seven. One beat too long. Someone in the crowd laughed awkwardly, muttering about the timing stutter. But a few of the older traders glanced toward the tower's slanted shadow and exchanged looks that didn't hold jokes.
Cralin was already awake, fixing the loose hinge on his stall door with a strip of scavenged steel. His fingers were steady, deliberate — they always were — but his eyes kept darting toward the rooftops. A chill current rippled through the wires overhead; static whispered down, brushing against the fine hairs at the back of his neck.
Across the main street, an argument broke out. A cloth vendor accused a scavenger of theft — ordinary enough. But then someone said, quietly, almost conversationally:
"They found blood near the drainage gates last night. Black, not red."
The words crawled faster than smoke. Within minutes, whispers threaded through the market lanes.
"Black blood."
"Same as before."
"Can't be. They burned it all out."
An old woman at the tea stall tapped her cup against the counter, her voice low and rasped with memory. "They said that last time too. Then the fever took half the lower wards before the purifiers failed."
"Stories," someone muttered. "Ash Fever's just a myth for drifters."
"Tell that to the bones under West Canal," she said, sipping without blinking. By midday, the mood had changed — not louder, just tighter. Trades slowed. Jokes landed strange. The smell of disinfectant burned through one alley, where militia techs sprayed stubborn corners with blue fog.
They didn't explain why. They never explained anything. Iven arrived late, her boots leaving fine tracks of gray dust. She waved as she passed Cralin's stall. "You look like you slept under the generator again."
"Better than sleeping anywhere else," he replied, not looking up. "You hear it too?"
"The rumor? Half the district's humming with it."
"Not the rumor. The bell."She paused. The clock tower bell had rung again — one tone lower than morning. It kept ringing, like the city's heartbeat was stuttering.
"Probably a miscalibration," she said, too quickly.
A small group gathered by the well near the center plaza. A body had been found — motionless, wrapped in cloth strips like some vendor's leftover packing. A militiaman and two scrubbers handled it carefully, but not carefully enough; when one of them slipped, something dark oozed from the cloth and hit the ground with a hiss. The smell that rose was bitter and wrong, like metal burnt through water.
People backed away without speaking. From the rooftops, pigeons startled and took flight, their wings cutting clean through the haze, scattering metallic dust through the air like dull glitter. The preacher from yesterday dropped his tin cup when the third bell rang, louder than before, trembling through the market's lattice of steel and rust.
Nobody said the word famine. Nobody said fever either. But every glance that met another carried both. Cralin closed his stall latch and looked east, toward the refinery. Smoke still bled into the sky there, darker now — maybe drift from the industrial fires, maybe something else. Iven, two stalls away, folded her copper charms tight in her hand. The air thrummed like a pulse about to skip.
Suddenly, silence took the plaza — a drone of stillness so sharp it made the ears ring. Everyone seemed to know it couldn't last. And then, from the outskirts of the market, beyond the tarpaulin walls and half-buried freight crates, came a sound that cut through it all.
A scream — raw, human, and too close to stop.....