The upper city looked worse in daylight.

  Cobblestones had heaved and cracked from the blast, creating ankle-breaking gaps every few feet. Gutters were clogged with ash and debris. The mansions that lined the street showed their damage clearly now—shattered windows, scorched doorframes, roofs collapsed inward. Looters had been through already. Doors hung open. Furniture sat broken in the streets where people had dragged it out, taken what they wanted, burned the rest.

  Yara walked slowly, leaning on the broken spear shaft. Her ankle throbbed with each step, that injury from the initial blast still not healed. Something had struck her leg when the when the wall fell on her. It had swollen, turned purple, then settled into this constant ache that flared every time she put weight on it.

  The city smelled like smoke and rot. Sweet-sick, like meat left too long in the sun. Under her ribs, the Gem hummed. Counting. Always counting.

  Two rats fought over something in the gutter. Yara looked closer. A finger. Human. She looked away.

  The Gem noticed heartbeats. It pulled her attention toward them whether she wanted it to or not. A cellar beneath a collapsed shop—two people breathing down there. A boarded window three buildings down—someone moving behind it. A dog whimpering under a staircase, injured or trapped.

  Each life registered like a pulse in her chest. Each one the Gem wanted her to take.

  She'd thought the hunger would have some pattern to it. Something she could predict. It didn't. Sometimes it came back after an hour. Sometimes she could go half a day. She never knew when it would hit.

  The Scion padded beside her, claws clicking on broken stone. The first Horror limped behind, watching the upper windows with his ruined face.

  Two monsters following one monster. Hunting through a dead city.

  A shutter creaked above. Yara looked up. Someone watching from a third-floor window, just a shadow behind warped glass. The shadow pulled back when she looked.

  Smart. Staying hidden. Staying quiet.

  The Gem pulsed. There. Third floor. Adult male. Healthy.

  "I know."

  Feed.

  "Not yet."

  Why wait?

  Because she was tired. Because her ankle hurt. Because she'd already killed too many people today and her hands still shook from the last one.

  Because she wanted to pretend, she had some control over this. Some choice.

  "I'm looking for someone dying," she said. "Someone who'd choose—"

  You said that last time. And the time before. You still feed on whoever is easiest.

  The Gem was right. She'd told herself she'd find better targets. Scavengers. Looters. People who'd done something to deserve it. But when the hunger came, she took whoever was close. Whoever was weak. Whoever couldn't run fast enough.

  And she killed them. Quickly. Cleanly.

  Because the alternative was worse.

  She'd tried transforming three times. Made two broken things that suffered and one corpse. The boy's face still haunted her—skin crawling like wax, clawing at himself until the Scion ended it. The girl in the stall, crying with too many joints in her leg, left to suffer because Yara couldn't finish what she'd started.

  The Gem wanted her to try again. To practice. To figure out what worked.

  Yara was terrified of what she'd make next.

  So she killed instead. Fast deaths. No transformation. No binding. No more monsters.

  It was the only mercy she had left to give.

  They found the scavenger stand on the broad merchant road, the burned carriages like ribs along the curb, and men in scavenged armor crouched with patched helms and haphazard standards. Someone painted stripes of ash across his face and bellowed a command. Arrows came from the haze, sharp, fast, and two found her before she understood where the sky had split.

  The first buried itself across her shoulder; the second struck in the thigh. Pain arrived late and hard, a bright star behind the fog. She turned, saw the men, and the confusion on their faces when their volley hit. “Hold fire!” someone shouted. “Take her alive!”

  The Scion’s head rose. It had been nicked; that taste of hurt was new. The roar it answered with split the street. Stone trembled. Men ran. One older guard did not; he planted a halberd and dared the thing. The Scion moved like a weather crash, root, ruin. When the motion settled, there were bodies and a heat that smelled of singed hair and iron.

  Yara stepped forward, the mark on her palm a hot coin. One man crawled, still moving. The Gem tightened an insistence through bone. She put her hand near his throat and pulled a single, sharp pulse of the light she had learned to summon. He stilled. The relief in her side eased like a tide pulling back; the hollow quieted enough to think.

  But the arrows did not seal as well as they had on briefer hunts. She expected the familiar stitch, the quick close, and sour relief that let her fold into a short sleep. There had been short sleeps before; they had been paper-thin, but each had knit a little more into her than the last. This time, the stitching the Gem offered was thin, impatient, not the slow mending she needed. When she gripped the shaft in her thigh and wrenched it free, blood welled anew around the wound and ran hot over her fingers. The hole remembered the rope tying it; it did not forget.

  Her breath hitched. When the voice finally came from the hollow, it sounded less like a guide than a reproach.

  You fed poorly. You let them hurt us.

  The words landed cold and blunt. The Gem had been a partner; now it read the ledger and found arithmetic wanting.

  Find what calls below, it said next, the command sharpening. Feed me power. Then rest.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  She pressed her hand to the wound in her thigh and felt the slow, exact thrum of other people’s lives threads tugging under her skin, but the domestic stitches of a short rest would not hold this time. The body required more than the quick, bright lives she’d been taking. The shallow feeds had kept her moving; they had not healed the root of the damage. The short rests were no longer enough to properly stitch bone and muscle. Each hour of borrowed sleep bought her breadth but not mending.

  “Below,” she murmured, tasting the word as if it were a map. “Under the mansions.”

  The Gem pulsed once, like a ledger’s stamp: Confirmed.

  She felt exhausted in a way that would not be cured by another quick nap. The hunger hummed low and patient; the voice that had guided her slipped back into a calculation of needs.

  They moved on. The Scion’s heat pressed against her shoulder when she leaned into it; its flank was a warm slope that made standing easier. The Horror drew close and nudged her hand with a knobby forehead as if to say: You’re not alone. The touch steadied more than any bandage.

  She wrapped what she could in linen soaked in bitter coagulant, knots that would hold until the real thing was found. Each small act costs the ledger: feed, stitch, feed. The Scion’s eyes watched the white panes above as if reading which houses kept their heat well. Where ward-crystals still clung to lintels, the Gem hummed with interest; old protections still thrummed faintly with accidental spells left to rot.

  We are not picky, the Gem said once in her ribs, flat and bright. We are efficient.

  Her laugh was a brittle thing. “Efficiency is winning.”

  They pressed further into the upper district. The streets grew narrower and the gates heavier. Windows looked down with a kind of offended surprise, panes catching light and throwing it back hard. Behind some gates, there lingered the careful jewelry of wards, rods of glass threaded with wax and prayers, locks that hummed faint and sweet. The Gem marked them like coins.

  She sat on a low wall while the Scion drooped its head and the Horror nosed at a scrap of cloth. For a moment, she let the ash in her hair cool. She closed her eyes for a moment, not asleep but in a dream, still there - She dreamed in green shards, flashes of wards and of children’s faces—then woke with the taste of copper and the memory of wrong joints.

  When she stood, it was worse. The thigh still throbbed, the shoulder smarted. The quick stitches had held only to the surface. She had had enough to stop fainting in the streets, but not enough to make her whole. The ledger in her mind moved toward a single conclusion: more depth, more steadiness, something older than quick life.

  She shouldered the satchel. The knot behind her knuckles thrummed; the small blasts came back to her in measured pockets, but the deep wells remained empty. The Gem’s tones shifted; where once it was a companion, it now read like a taskmaster.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” she said, voice split and small.

  Then go where the drum is loudest, it answered cold and certain. Below. Power there. Depth. Rest after.

  She wanted to bargain for another apothecary or a miracle vial. There was none. Only the pull of something older vibrating under noble foundations.

  For a long beat, she let herself lean on the Scion’s flank. The creature’s heat felt almost tender, and the Horror pressed its weight against her thigh in a clumsy, human way. They helped her up as if they understood the cost of standing: one monstrous flank and one malformed companion giving support.

  She moved with them, staggering a little, the ankle protesting, breath shallow, but she moved. Ash spiraled down around them as they headed toward the row of mansions where white glass still held and ward-crystals chimed faintly. The pulse below tugged again, deeper and older, and she let it, not in hope so much as in necessity.

  The last rows stayed whole as if someone had pulled a blanket over them and smoothed the edges. Marble facades still caught the light beneath a thin film of soot; balconies hung with silk banners stiffened by ash. Maybe spells kept away the lowest looters, or maybe the people who lived here left something that made thieves turn away. Yara’s boots left gray prints on a road that had never known proper dirt. Even the dead looked different here, cleaner, their blood dried in neat, dark lines like careful signatures.

  The Scion disliked the place. Its scales rasped as it moved; its claws gouged shallow furrows into the white stone. The Horror padded close behind, nosing at thresholds and muttering to himself as if naming the rooms aloud steadied him. Yara’s ankle throbbed on each step, a thin electric complaint that pulled at every tendon. She kept her weight low on the spear; walking steadily distracted her head from thinking too hard.

  The mansion district held dozens of estates, but the Gem pulled her toward one in particular.

  This one still glowed.

  Faint, almost invisible in daylight, but there was a shimmer along the windows, a hum in the foundation.

  The wards were still active. Still burning power.

  Here, the Gem said. This one.

  The Scion approached the gates. They didn't open; they simply weren't there. Another illusion, covering the entrance like fog over water. Inside, the mansion waited.

  This mansion should have felt like a prize. Instead, it felt like a thing pretending not to notice it was dying. Windows were whole; the gardens in the court were unburned and perfectly arranged as if someone still bothered. The place smelled faintly of lacquer and spilled wine, an obscene perfume among the city’s usual rot.

  She moved through rooms soft with dust and gold light. A library with half its shelves washed empty. A ballroom whose mirrors held hairline cracks. A nursery where toys had sagged and fused into lumps, but the cradle still rocked with no wind at all. Each space expected a heartbeat and returned only silence; there were no rats, no scurrying, no breath behind curtains.

  In the main hall, she paused and leaned on the blade she’d taken, feeling the cheap steel anchor her in the too-calm air. “There’s nothing here,” she said, meaning it like an accusation.

  The Gem stirred in her ribs, slow and wary.

  There is. It hides.

  “Where?” Her voice scraped.

  Everywhere. Look sideways. The answer came like a suggestion and like an itch.

  She frowned. The air shimmered at the edges as if heat rose from the stone. When she stepped forward, the shimmer slid with her. Her hand met resistance where nothing should be; the space felt like velvet stretched tight over a hollow. Her fingers stopped as if touched by an invisible lip.

  The Gem pulsed, hard enough that the pressure made her wince.

  An old ward. Illusion. Let me eat.

  “Eat… a spell?” The syllable sounded foolish when she said it aloud.

  Everything made is food.

  She hesitated because the word made her stomach twist; feeding this way felt like theft from something that had already died to make room for life. The barrier hummed beneath her skin, too pure to be a human sound, too patient to be merely wind.

  “Do it,” she said finally.

  The Gem exhaled through her veins. The air thickened. Light pooled at her fingertips, green she had come to know, then bleaching to white and blackening at the edges. The illusion quivered, and then it snapped like a struck pane.

  Sound rushed in with the shatter: a deep, resonant hum that seemed to come from below the floorboards and from the soles of her feet at once. The polished stone under her toes warped and split, and a spiral stair uncoiled downward into a column of green light that burned without flame.

  She swayed. “You could have told me it was under the floor,” she muttered.

  You would not have believed me. The Gem was almost amused.

  A laugh escaped her that hurt her ribs. The Scion growled, uneasy; the Horror dropped to his haunches and nosed the stair’s edge, nostrils flaring at whatever sighed up from below. The scent smelled metallic and charged, like a coin that still had a charge in its metal.

  Yara peered down. The light pulsed slowly, not the frantic blink of a heartbeat but the sure, ancient drum of something older and worked. This was not the quick, sharp life that the city spilled in alleys. This was steadier woven into stone, threaded through glass, held by old rules and aching craft.

  That’s what you want, isn’t it? She asked because asking it aloud made it a shape.

  What we need. Feed me truth. Feed me power. The Gem’s voice in her chest tightened like a ring.

  Her hands trembled not from fear but from a curiosity that felt dangerously like appetite. She gripped the banister until her knuckles blanched. The thought of the wards of ordered, patient stores of power was obscene and exactly the thing she had been missing.

  “Then let’s see what full feels like,” she said, and the words were both a promise and a surrender.

  She set one foot on the topmost stair. The Scion planted itself a little back, massive and watchful; the Horror tucked close, offering a clumsy shoulder to lean on. Ash drifted down the stairwell in a slow, gray rain as they began to descend into the house’s secret heart.