Droza
When the runes ignite beneath my feet like coal catching wind, the first thing I notice is blood. It’s the copper scent, mixed with salty sea air, that makes a century of silence tear apart at the seams.
The stone fractures outward in a violent burst, and I hit the rain-soaked square on both feet before the dust has even settled, wings spread full, instinct already ahead of thought. Three dark elves stand nearby. My eyes find the blade first, then the woman bleeding at the pedestal’s base.
An unnamed and unknowable rage fills me as it becomes clear she is being attacked.
The first one I throw into the harbor wall. The second reaches for his weapon. I catch his wrist and snap it before he can draw the blade fully free.
The third backs away slowly, hands raised and rain dripping from silver-black hair. His eyes stay fixed on me with the rigid stillness of someone recognizing a nightmare made real.
One word leaves his mouth in a hoarse whisper filled with both awe and fear.
“Warden.” The others freeze.
They know what I am. Good.
They pull back into the dark and the rain, and I let them go.
Around me, the square has gone from chaos to something closer to held breath.
Torchlight catches faces in doorways and windows above, pale and wide-eyed, none of them moving.
A child is crying somewhere behind a shuttered window. Nobody comes forward.
The square is in chaos. Voices echo through the storm.
Someone shouts from above. Torchlight flickers against unfamiliar buildings.
The harbor has a scent of familiar woodsmoke and fish mixed with a chemical that smells wrong.
The inn behind me is the right shape, but the sign is different, and the dock layout has changed, and the watchtower on the western bluff is gone entirely.
How long was I buried here?
I look at my hands. The rune markings carved into my skin during the binding are faded at the edges, worn the way stone wears under decades of weather.
The ache in my joints isn’t the stiffness of days.
It’s deeper than that. Settled into the stone of me like something that has been waiting a long time to be felt.
Everyone I knew is gone. The thought arrives quietly, stripping the noise from the square around me. This is a foreign place now, and anyone I might have known would have died long ago.
My somber quiet slowly boils into rage. I had never wanted this. Everything I ever knew was gone, and for what?
I turn my gaze to the woman fallen against the cobblestones. Is this her fault?
A man steps forward from the inn’s doorway. Broad-shouldered, dark-haired, moving with careful deliberateness. He doesn’t reach for a weapon. He doesn’t look at my wings.
He looks at my face.
“Come inside,” he says. “Before they come back with more.”
Something else is already pressing against the edge of my awareness.
A heartbeat, fast and frightened, is threaded through my chest. When I turn to the source, I see the slumped over figure of the woman again.
Fear hits me a second later, sharp enough to steal the air from my lungs. It’s not mine, but hers.
“Hurry now,” says the man. The woman struggles to stand. Before she falls, I step forward and lift her into my arms. She stiffens in surprise, but she’s too weak to fight me. I follow the man into the inn, carrying her all the way.
Inside, the inn is warm and loud and too small for someone built like me.
I set the woman down on a bench near the fire and step back. The man from the doorway moves quickly, barking orders for water and clean cloth, while the remaining patrons scatter toward the exits. The room empties fast.
I should feel relief at the quiet. Instead, I’m only more aware of the second heartbeat in my chest.
When she shifts on the bench, I feel the pull of it sharpen. When the man presses a cloth against the cut on her arm, and she hisses through her teeth, the pain twists between my ribs.
I press two fingers against my sternum and stare at her.
Her blood woke me. That much I understand. What I don’t understand is why I can still feel her, why the distance between us registers as discomfort, and why every flicker of her fear lands in my body like it belongs there.
“What did you do?” I ask.
Her sharp green eyes focus on me, dark curls plastered flat with rain. The cut on her arm still seeps blood through the cloth. She is small and soaked through and bleeding on the inn’s bench, and she thinks I’m the problem.
“I didn’t do anything,” she says. “Your runes did something to me.”
“My runes respond to gargoyle blood. You are not a gargoyle.”
“Clearly.” She holds my gaze. “So maybe you should start asking better questions.”
The man clears his throat from across the room. “Whatever she is or isn’t, she needs that wound closed before we sort out the rest.”
I don’t look at him. I keep my eyes on her.
“The dark elves,” I say. “Why are they after you?”
She glances at the innkeeper. Something silent passes between them, quick and cautious.
“That’s a long answer,” she says.
“I have been asleep for what feels like a century. I have time.”
Something shifts in her expression. The defiance doesn’t leave, but something behind it recalibrates. She looks at the fire for a moment, then back at me.
“They want something I took from them,” she says. “Something they were using to hurt people.”
“What did you take?”
Her hand moves slightly toward her coat, then stills. She is deciding how much to give me.
I feel her heartbeat tick upward. I feel it the way I feel the rain still drying on my wings, immediate and impossible to ignore.
“Don’t lie to me.” I hold her gaze. “Whatever your blood did to mine tonight, I will know.”
She stares at me for a long moment. Her jaw tightens, and she pulls a gold emblem from beneath her coat and sets it on the bench beside her. The ruby at its center catches the firelight and holds it, burning steady in the dim room like something that has been waiting to be seen.
Neither of us speaks. The fire pops and settles. Her heartbeat is loud in my chest.
I still don’t know her name.