Sena did not remember the last stone she lifted, only the moment her fingers stopped obeying her. She reached for another chunk of shattered masonry and her hand simply failed to close. Pain flared up her wrist, a bright, needling protest. The block tipped, scraping skin from her knuckles. Someone swore nearby. Dust slid in a soft sheet down the broken wall.

  “That’s enough,” Rhalir said behind her.

  She ignored him, trying again. Her breath had gone strange, shallow and quick. The ruins swam in her vision.

  Rhalir caught her elbow as her knees dipped. “Sena.”

  “I’m fine.” Her throat felt raw from shouting down holes all day. “We haven’t checked the eastern –”

  “You’re shaking.” He turned her gently, his hand warm and firm around her arm. “Look at me.”

  She did. His face was streaked with dust, the dark scales along his jaw dulled to a tired gray. There was a cut on his cheek he hadn’t bothered to clean. His eyes, though, were clear and steady.

  “We can’t stop,” she said. “If they’re still down there –”

  “If you fall into one of these cracks, who pulls you out?” His voice softened. “You aren’t doing them any favors by collapsing on top of them.”

  First rose a familiar, bright anger. He was right; that only frustrated her further. Sena bit the inside of her lip – she’d been doing it all day, worrying against the tender skin in her mouth – and looked back over the broken teeth of the Dawn Spire’s foundations. Lanterns were beginning to bloom among the ruins, lit by volunteers, small islands of light against the creeping dusk. The air was cold enough now that their breath came in faint puffs.

  She thought of those still left below, trapped in the growing cold.

  “We haven’t found her,” she whispered.

  Rhalir’s grip eased but didn’t fall away. “We’ll look again at first light.”

  “That’s too long.”

  “It’s what we have,” he said. “Come.”

  He didn’t wait for her agreement. He knew better. He simply guided her away from the main dig site, letting her lean on him as much or as little as she chose. Her legs wobbled, traitorous. He steadied her without comment.

  “You know,” she muttered, “this is becoming a habit.”

  “What is?” he asked.

  “You hauling me off collapsing things.” She gave him a slanted look. “First the harbor at Lethen Bay, now Ivath. If I didn’t know better I’d think you were doing it for attention.”

  His mouth tugged at one corner. “I seem to recall you refusing to let go of that beam. I nearly had to cut you free.”

  “It was a very reliable pillar,” she said. “Stayed exactly where I left it. Unlike certain Kelthi who disappear for years and only turn up again when there’s a city to take down.”

  “Poor planning on my part,” he said dryly. “Next time I’ll arrange the catastrophe for a more convenient hour.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” she said, and while she desperately wanted to maintain her sense of play, the thought made her choke a little. “After this I’m retiring. Quiet life.”

  “Of course,” he said. “You’ll be sensible from now on.”

  “Don’t sound so doubtful.”

  “Only managing my expectations.”

  The camp behind the shattered cloister wall had grown since morning. Someone had strung canvas between fallen columns. There were plenty of empty homes to occupy, but the Ashborn for the most part didn’t yet feel comfortable taking over a place they’d destroyed. Here, fires burned in stone circles. The smell of stew and tired bodies hung together in a limp braid. A few heads turned as they passed – Ashborn, Brighthand, Ivathi citizens with their fine cloaks ruined. They all looked the same now, Sena thought. Soot-streaked, hollow-eyed. Stripped of whatever had separated them two days ago.

  Rhalir led her to a stone basin they’d set under one of the surviving rain spouts. The water was clear, fed by redirected cisterns. It spilled in a quiet thread that sounded almost obscene after the day’s constant clatter.

  “Wash,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”

  The water was shockingly cold. Benji’s blood, that deep, rust-red smear from the boy she’d rescued, had dried into the creases of her knuckles.

  It did not wash off at first. Sena scrubbed harder. The cold bit at her skin. Her breath hitched.

  “Sena,” Rhalir said softly behind her. “Stop. You’re hurting yourself.”

  “It won’t come off,” she whispered. “Rhalir, it won’t –”

  Nausea pooled in her gut and brought tears to her eyes. She gripped the basin, as if she could anchor herself there.

  He stepped behind her and folded his arms around her, steadying her elbows with his hands. His chest pressed against her back, warm even through the layers of grit and sweat. His breath warmed the side of her neck.

  “Breathe,” he murmured.

  “I know h – how to –”

  “Then do it with me.”

  She did. A thin, trembling inhale.

  Rhalir guided her hands back into the water, holding her wrists gently in his larger palms. His chin brushed her temple as he leaned close to keep her upright.

  “It will come off,” he said. The gentle rumble of his voice at her back secured her like a locked and warming room. “Let the water do the work.”

  She felt the heat of her tears as the cold water diluted the last traces of blood. Rhalir stayed with her through the sob that tore loose from her throat, holding fast through the terrible, bone-deep grief that broke at last.

  He helped her turn her palms. He rinsed between each finger, the gesture practical, gentle. She stared down at their hands tangled in the water, his callused fingers firm around her own.

  When the blood washed clean, he loosened his hold but did not step away. His quiet settled around her, warm as a hand on the small of her back. She leaned toward the warmth before she could stop it. Rhalir had always been steady, but tonight wasn’t the same. Too much had happened. Too much had changed.

  “You did everything you could,” he said.

  Sena leaned forward over the basin. “It’s not enough.”

  “It was enough for Benji.”

  His words held her like a hand closing over her heart, unbearably tender. She hated how easily he did that, how one quiet truth from him could steady her more than a dozen shouted reassurances from anyone else. She shouldn’t have been thinking of him this way – not now, not here. But grief had carved her open, and through the crack she saw it plainly: she wanted him near. He felt like a place she could rest.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The urge to keep moving, to go back to the rubble, flickered and dimmed.

  “I should check the western wall again,” she began.

  “You should sleep,” he countered.

  “You’re very bossy for someone who claims not to want to lead.”

  He huffed a breath against her ear that might have been a laugh. “If you insist on trying to dig the whole Spire out with your bare hands, someone has to play the boring one.”

  She turned her head just enough to catch him in the corner of her eye. His expression had softened, some line of habitual distance eased.

  “Stay,” he said quietly. “Rest. I’ll wake you before dawn.”

  His hand lifted as if he meant to touch her face, then hesitated. Instead, he smoothed a lock of her hair back from her damp cheek, an oddly careful gesture for someone with hands more used to swords and shields.

  She relented. “Alright.”

  When he pushed their two pallets together along the sheltered wall, Sena expected to lie awake listening to the camp’s restless noises. Instead, sleep bore her off.

  She dreamed of water.

  First it was the sea, the way it had roared through her village when the redirected quake sent the harbor walls crumbling, the cold shock of it closing over her head. Then it was narrower, a black river threading beneath the city, its current thick with silt. Lantern light floated along its surface.

  Captain Ren stood on the far bank.

  Mallow. Lain had called him Mallow.

  He was as she remembered him the night they parted at the city gates: cloak thrown over one shoulder, jaw shadowed with stubble. He had that half-crooked, infuriating smile on his face, the one that always made it seem as if he knew some joke she didn’t.

  “You’re late,” he called.

  “There was a little earthquake,” she said, or thought she did. The words didn’t move the air. Dream-speech. “You look alive.”

  “For the moment.”

  He held out his hand to her. The river between them glowed faintly, a dull green light welling up from beneath the water.

  “Come on then,” he said. “You’re good at getting people out of impossible places. I’d rather it be you.”

  When she stepped toward him, the bank crumbled. Stone and earth slid beneath her hooves. She grabbed for purchase, fingers scrabbling on slick rock.

  The glow intensified. It emerged out of the river and climbed, slowly, up his legs, his ribs, his throat. It sheathed him in wet light.

  “Mallow,” she said. “What did you do?”

  He looked down at himself with mild surprise.

  “Bled, mostly. Strange, that,” he admitted. “The wyrm has its ways.”

  The light flared.

  She woke with her heart pounding and the taste of river mud in her mouth. Dawn had just begun to gray the sky. The camp lay in a hush broken only by the crackle of low fires and the occasional cough. Sena pushed herself up, heart still racing.

  Rhalir sat not far away, back against a toppled pillar. His eyes were closed, but she could tell by the set of his shoulders he wasn’t asleep.

  “You said you’d wake me,” she said.

  His eyes opened. “I was about to. How do you feel?”

  She flexed her hands. They stung. Her head felt thick and oddly light. “Like I’ve been climbed over by a herd of goats. And then kicked down a hill.”

  “So, the usual.”

  She smiled. “I had a dream. About Captain Ren.”

  Rhalir’s expression sharpened. “Good or bad?”

  “I’m not sure.” She wrapped her arms around her legs. “He was by an underground river. There was a green light. It… climbed him.”

  Rhalir glanced toward the shattered bulk of the Dawn Spire. “You think it means something.”

  “You said you saw him die.”

  Rhalir nodded slowly. “By Morgan’s own hand. Fell into the cavern below the Underserpent’s bowl.”

  “We haven’t checked the lower cavern yet.”

  “It’s flooded,” he reminded her. “All the steps are gone, far as I could tell.”

  “Stone still has ledges,” she said.

  “And you’re better at climbing than most of us,” he admitted.

  “Exactly,” she said, pushing herself to her hooves. “So let’s go.”

  By the time the sun crested the eastern mountains, Sena, Rhalir, Elder Tanel, and Sister Hellen were picking their way across the jagged skeleton of the Spire’s inner sanctum. Hellen and Tanel had caught them on the way in, both carrying tools to prep their own excavations. Sena couldn’t admit she was following a hunch gifted by a dream, but Rhalir stepped in to say he thought they should check where the water ran deepest, wary of those who may die of cold. Tanel and Hellen were happy to take direction.

  The transformation was almost worse in daylight. Where the bowl had once rested, a vast, smooth basin at the heart of the temple, there was now a raw hollow. The stone had been scoured, not shattered, as if something had drawn itself up and out with terrible care. Chunks of carved rim lay broken like teeth around the edge.

  Water still ran. The old channels that once carried it into the bowl now funneled it down into the cavern below in a steady ribbon. The sound echoed faintly, a constant rush.

  Hellen stood at the rim with her arms folded tight around herself, cloak snapping softly in the morning wind. She looked smaller here somehow, stripped of the orderly Dagorlind Sisterhood.

  “We ran that way,” she said, nodding toward a doorway that now led into empty air, not far from where Sena had dug her and Tanel out of the rubble. “I saw… something rise, in the sky. I saw wings. But there was dust, and everything was collapsing, and – I don’t know anymore if it was real.”

  Sena watched Hellen lean almost imperceptibly toward Rhalir, who had lifted her from the earth when she’d been recovered from the collapse.

  The air above the hollow vibrated with a kind of absence that buzzed along her Kelthi nerves. The wyrm was gone, but the shape of where it had been remained, impressed on the stone and the water and the marrow of Ivath.

  She knelt at the edge, testing the first handhold.

  Rhalir crouched beside her. “We can rig a rope.”

  “You can,” she said. “But if the stone is loose I’d rather be able to move my feet freely.” She couldn’t admit that gripping a rope felt impossible to her just now.

  He frowned. “I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to. Just swear loudly if things start to shift.”

  Hellen knelt on her other side. “I’ll collect some others to help as well. If you find anyone, we’ll need a team to pull them up.”

  Sena gave a grateful nod. “Keep people back from the edge.”

  Hellen relayed the order with crisp authority. The few workers nearby retreated a safe distance, leaving the four of them at the bowl’s lip.

  Rhalir tied the rope around Sena’s waist anyway. “Humor me.”

  She let him. The knot sat snug against her hips. “If I fall and you’re not ready, you’ll just end up down there with me.”

  “Then I’ll be ready,” he said.

  She smiled, then turned her attention to the drop.

  The stone was wet, slick with seeping water, but the old carvings and maintenance scars provided enough niches for her hooves and fingers. She eased herself over the edge, moving with care. The air grew cooler as she descended, the daylight narrowing above into a bright circle. Water rushed below. The rough, granite and marble scent of the ruined city gave way to something damp and mineral, tinged with the faint metallic tang of old magic.

  Her hooves splashed when she reached the bottom.

  The cavern under the bowl was wider than she’d imagined, a great scooped-out hollow whose walls were lined with channels and sigils half worn by centuries. The light from above struck the pooling water and rebounded in thin reflections along the ceiling, just enough for her to see by.

  “Anything?” Hellen called down.

  “Rocks and water,” she called back. “Give me a moment.”

  She moved carefully, testing each step. The water reached mid-calf in places, flowing toward a lower tunnel she could not see into. Debris littered the floor, fallen chunks of the bowl, splinters of old scaffolding.

  Before her came a soft greenish light.

  It was half-buried under a tumble of stone near the far wall. It pulsed, slow and steady as scalelight.

  The light grew brighter as she approached. At first she thought it might be some fragment of the bowl’s enchantments, or even a pile of scalelights that had tumbled together into the cavern. Then the shape beneath it resolved.

  A shoulder, an arm, dark hair matted with dust.

  It was Mallow.