CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We walked along a dusty old road for what felt like hours, until a cart came rattling past and the driver agreed to take us.
He was middle-aged and kind, with a round face and a patchy beard, and he wouldn’t stop talking about his wife and children.
He loved them. That much was clear. The way his eyes lit up when he spoke of them, how his voice softened.
I listened, nodded when it felt polite, smiled when I had to, but the whole time, a bitter thought kept pulsing behind my ribs.
Would he be strong enough to protect them when the Eredians came?
Will had stolen clothes for me. A green dress and a pair of old boots from a laundry line behind a farmhouse.
They didn’t match, but I didn’t care. The dress was soft and loose, clinging in some places and falling in others.
It smelled like dust and sunlight and someone else’s life.
It smelled like something that wasn’t mine.
But it let me pretend I belonged. That I was just a girl on a cart with a friend, not a fugitive dragging the ashes of a ruined life behind her.
Will still had his boots. His coin. His pack.
I had nothing.
Everything I’d once owned had burned.
Everything except him.
He was the only thing left that proved the world I remembered had ever existed. And somehow, even after what I’d shown him, he’d stayed.
Later, when the driver quieted, Will asked, “Do you have family? Anyone you want to find?”
I hesitated. “An uncle,” I said. “Don’t know where he lives.”
But I did.
I just didn’t want to see him again. He drank too much. Got handsy when no one was looking. My father kicked him out with a bloodied lip and a warning. We never spoke of it again. Some things are better left buried.
Will shifted, resting his chin on his hand. “I’ve got an aunt,” he said after a pause. “She’s nearby. Kind. I think she’d let us stay.”
I nodded but didn’t reply. Just hoped he was right.
The cart rattled over a rut and jolted beneath us. Will gripped the side rail and said, “We get what we need. Then we leave.”
“Leave?” I looked at him, brow furrowing.
He gave a short nod. Still didn’t meet my gaze. “Leave Vestance.”
A bitter laugh slipped out before I could stop it. “We can’t just leave. We can’t just let them—”
“We tried, Kera.” His jaw clenched as he turned to me, like the words had been simmering there for days. “We did fight. Look what happened.”
I stared at him, the heat rising behind my eyes, my throat tightening. My fingers curled into fists in my lap.
“Vestance is a sinking ship.” He exhaled hard, ran a hand through his hair. “I get it. I want to kill them too. Every last one of them. But what are we supposed to do? Hunt them down one by one? Just us? Barehanded, against men with rifles?”
I didn’t answer.
I couldn’t.
Because he wasn’t wrong.
Will glanced sideways at me. “Then we’d just be dead too,” he said, quieter now. “And there’d be no one left to remember them. No one left to tell their story. No one left to avenge them.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Gods, I hated that he wasn’t wrong.
But knowing the truth didn’t dull the rage. It only made it heavier.
I wanted blood. I wanted fire. I wanted justice.
Leaving meant surrendering. Letting them win. It meant losing my home, my family, my whole life. It would be erasing us from history. I hated how easy it would be for the world to forget.
The cart creaked to a stop by the side of the road, gravel crunching beneath the wheels as Will leaned forward and asked the driver to let us off.
I murmured a soft thank you and climbed down, my boots landing harder than I meant them to.
The driver tipped his cap, gave a quiet nod, then flicked the reins.
I stood still, staring at the town ahead.
Askberg.
It looked so painfully ordinary. The kind of place where kids still rode wooden carts down cobblestone streets and neighbors paused to chat over garden fences.
Where someone’s mutt dozed on a stoop, tongue lolling in the sun.
Somewhere behind an open window, I heard dishes clinking together. Life. Ordinary life.
And all I could think was how dare it keep going.
I had watched the world bleed.
I had heard it scream.
And yet here we were. Still breathing.
Askberg hadn’t stopped. It hadn’t even stumbled.
I glanced at Will.
He wore his grief the way most people wore armor. Quietly. Carefully. But I saw it in the way his shoulders never relaxed, in the way his eyes flinched away from anything too still, too silent, too familiar.
Maybe I scared him now. I wasn’t the girl he remembered. But he hadn’t run. And that had to count for something.
People passed us, arms full of bread and fabric and onions tied in bundles. A woman called after a laughing child. Someone shouted from a doorway with an apron slung over one shoulder.
I stared like I was watching a memory. Or a dream.
But maybe I wasn’t looking at ghosts.
Maybe I was the ghost.
The soldiers stood at every corner here too, just as they had back home.
Same cold eyes. Same boots planted in cobblestone like they owned the ground beneath them.
Nothing about them had changed, and still, everything felt different.
There was no fire in Askberg. No smoke. No blood.
Only silence, as if the town had decided long ago that silence was safer.
Maybe that was what we could’ve had. If we had stayed quiet. If we had given in.
Or maybe that was always the plan. Maybe this was what the Eredians and King Devore had counted on. Burn a few villages. Break the resistance. Let the smoke rise high enough for the others to see, and hope the fear would do the rest.
I kept my head down. If I did not look at them, maybe they wouldn’t see me, and I wouldn’t see them. I wouldn’t remember.
But my body remembered, even when my mind tried not to. I stumbled on a loose stone, my feet sliding out from under me for half a second. And when I caught myself, my eyes lifted.
A soldier’s gaze met mine. He did not move. Did not shout.
Just looked at me. Polite. Unassuming.
But all I saw was Arche.
His belt. His breath. His hands.
"Are you alright?” Will asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, brushing it off before he could ask again. “Just slipped.”
Will didn’t question it. “We’re almost there,” he said.
The farther we walked, the quieter everything became. No more chatter. No more distant laughter. Just the hush of wind through the trees, the creak of old shutters shifting with the breeze, the hollow rhythm of our footsteps on the dirt road.
I didn’t know what to expect at his aunt’s house. I barely knew anything about his family at all. He never talked about them, not really.
I didn’t either.
What was there to say?
But I didn’t care if the house was cold, or if the woman was cruel. It would be a roof. A door to close. Maybe a meal and a warm bed.
I’d take whatever was offered.
The house rose ahead, built of gray stone, almost like a castle. Warm light flickered behind the windows, spilling into the dusk like embers.
No.
Not embers.
Stars.
The wood was dark, carved with curling vines and strange beasts that twisted through the grain like they had always lived there. It looked ancient. Like it belonged to another time.
He knocked again, this time louder. His knuckles met the door with a dull thud, and something shifted in him. He looked vulnerable in a way I wasn’t used to seeing, his posture stiff, shifting from foot to foot as if debating whether to run or stay.
I stood beside him, arms crossed against a shiver that wouldn’t leave. Summer still held the days, but the nights had begun to change.
Then came the sound of footsteps, the hinges groaned, and it creaked open. A woman appeared in the doorway. She was shorter than me, small. And tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. The kind of tired that settles deep in you and stays there.
Her hair was streaked with gray and pulled back loosely, strands falling across her lined face.
She wore a silk robe, dark purple, soft-looking, shimmering faintly in the light from inside.
Behind her, the house was still and shadowed.
Quiet in the way a home is when no one speaks above a whisper anymore.
When her eyes found Will, they widened in surprise.
“Will?”
She didn’t wait. She reached for him and pulled him close, wrapping her arms around him with a force that made it look like she might never let go.
“My dear boy,” she breathed into his shoulder, her voice trembling. “I knew you’d make it.”
Then her gaze drifted past him and landed on me.
“And who is this?” A crease formed between her brows. “Where’s your mother?”
I looked down as my chest tightened. The warmth of the moment slipped away.
I was intruding.
I had wandered into someone else’s story, a place I did not belong.
“I’m so sorry, Iria.”
That was all he said.
It was all he needed to.
Her expression crumpled.
“No, no,” she whispered, reaching for him again. Her hands trembled as she clung to him. “Oh, my boy.”
He pulled her into another hug, steadying her as she began to cry into his shoulder.
I looked away, but not fast enough. It felt like I shouldn’t be there, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.
When she finally pulled back, Will kept one hand on her arm, as if grounding them both. His voice was quiet. Almost shy.
“I thought maybe... we could stay the night,” he said. “This is my friend. Kera.”
Iria blinked. Her eyes stayed on me a moment longer than I expected. Measuring. Considering.
Then she stepped aside and held the door open.
“Of course,” she said, her voice steadier now. “Get in, quickly, love.”
We stepped over the threshold, the door shutting behind us with a thud that seemed to seal us away from the world outside.
“What was I thinking?” Iria muttered under her breath.