Abandoned

Table of Contents

She’s not alone here, on what was once the most holy of streets. People have gathered from all around the city, some carrying their belongings stuffed into sacks or tied in rolls of blankets, others empty-handed. A few of the watch’s broken barricades have been cleared away, but the street is still littered with them, and no one has touched the bodies. An old man sits beside a fire on the side of the road, and sharpened points emerge from the embers. Whatever drove him to build the fire has since departed, and he stares with burning light in his eyes, his lips moving without a sound. 

Isra’s temple has acquired a huge gathering, pressing up against the main doors, surging around both sides, and smothering the kitchen door as well. They’re common folk, mostly, dressed in plain clothes. If there are any green-clad nuns among them, Isabel can’t see them. Two men support a third between them at the bottom of the stairs; the injured one’s head hangs down to his chest, and a festering wound on his shoulder leaks blood and pus into what’s left of his shirt. The wound still has the shape of the rotting, dead teeth that made it. 

Across the street, a priest in a red robe stands on a box in the doorway of the temple of Alcos. He stretches his arms wide, as if he can quell the clamor around him by pressing it down. “Good people,” he calls out, “let us pray. We will seek the Father’s guidance.”

The crowd ripples. A few have taken to their knees, following his instructions. Others wander, restless, as much as the press of people allows. “Have the gods abandoned us?” someone shouts, but even the priest cannot answer. 

Weathered

Table of Contents

It isn’t until Isabel has passed through the iron village once more that the eerie dirge her following of ghosts is singing begins to form words. “It’s coming,” they chant. “Stone crumbles and bone turns to dust.”

They repeat this in rising and falling cadences, their hollow eyes wide with fear. They’ve abandoned their more or less orderly queue and now crowd around her in a semicircular mass, their mist-colored shoulders overlapping and their feet an indistinguishable mass a few inches above the rutted, metal road. 

Isabel wraps her coat tighter around her and puts her hands over her ears. They’ve become so loud, her ghosts, and there are more of them than ever. Somewhere, people are dying, and their spirits are making their way here. Flashes of tortured, twisting motion tell her that a few of them are broken from contact with the thing beyond the wall. 

“Why are you following me?” she asks again. 

“It’s coming,” is their only answer. “It’s coming.”

Thankful

Table of Contents

The upper half of the University District, as Berend has taken to calling it, is more or less intact—surprising, considering the earth beneath it can’t be stable anymore. On the street leading up to Emryn Marner’s red-brick house, the cobbles are loose, sitting in hollows too large for them and shifting under Berend’s feet. He could be imagining things, but each house looks a little farther from its neighbors than he remembers. 

A crack splits the steps leading up to the painted door. Berend places one foot on the first stair, lowering his weight slowly. It’s sturdy enough. He won’t have to be here long.