The sound above her had stopped echoing.
Not gone. Just faded. Pushed so far up it barely reached the basement anymore. The world felt stacked in layers now, stone and snow and wood and everything that separated her from whatever was happening outside. Every thud was distant. Every scream sounded muffled, like someone calling her name from underwater.
Anna sat at the foot of the stairs with her knees tucked under her chin. Her scarf was bunched too tight around her neck, and she couldn't decide whether it was too cold or too hot. Her breath fogged faintly in the stale air.
"Ilya..."
Her voice didn't sound like hers. She didn't like how small it was. How thin.
She waited.
No answer. Not even the echo of one.
She tightened her arms around her knees and pressed her forehead down into the wool of her coat. It still smelled like the tavern hearth. That was the last normal thing, she thought. That moment when Ilya cleaned up the tavern while Yula made fun of him.
Then the bell rang.
Then everything broke.
She closed her eyes.
And Ilya had forced her to stay here.
He didn't hug her. Didn't even say goodbye. He just pushed her down the steps and shut the door.
Anna drew in a shaky breath.
She tried to count the seconds. The minutes. Tried to remember how long he'd been gone. But the dark twisted time. Her thoughts looped back on themselves, questions turning into fears, fears turning into pictures, ones she didn't want to see. Ones she couldn't stop.
What if he wasn't coming back?
What if he left her here?
What if he couldn't help it?
She clenched her fists in the fabric of her sleeves. She hated these thoughts. Hated how they crept in. Hated how loud they got when she couldn't hear his footsteps.
He always came back. That was the rule.
But what if he didn't this time?
What if the silence wasn't just silence?
Her throat tightened.
She curled in tighter, shifting her weight until her back pressed against the wall. The stones were damp with cold. She could feel it through the lining of her coat. It should've been comforting. Something real. Something she could hold onto. But all it did was remind her that she was alone down here.
She didn't want to cry.
But her eyes itched.
Anna sniffed hard and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. She told herself it was just smoke making her eyes sting. Nothing else.
She wasn't scared.
Not really.
She just needed to wait a little longer.
Ilya was coming back. He had to.
He was Ilya.
He didn't leave.
Not when things got scary. Not when the roof rattled. Not when the sky turned wrong.
He was the one who held her coat when she cried. Who found her when she got lost in the alley. Who stood in the doorway when people shouted.
He always came back.
He didn't break promises.
Not to her.
Not even when he wanted to.
She buried her face deeper in her scarf and repeated the words again and again, so softly she couldn't tell if they were whispers or thoughts.
"He's coming back," she muttered.
"He's coming back."
"He's coming back."
"He's coming back."
"He's coming back."
"He's coming back."
"He's coming back."
It didn't sound like her voice anymore. Just a dry rasp scraping out of her throat, too cracked, too empty to carry the rest of the words.
Anna curled in tighter at the bottom of the basement steps, arms wrapped around her knees, face buried in the crook of her sleeves. Her body shook. Not from cold, though the frost had crept into the cracks of the walls, but from something deeper. Something that scraped behind her ribs and made her legs feel too far away.
The quiet didn't feel safe.
At first, Anna had flinched at every crash and boom that thundered above her. Every shout, every crack of glass, every low rumble that rolled through the tavern's bones. They'd made her curl tighter in the corner, arms over her head, counting between each one like she could map out the chaos through numbers alone. But now, the noise had changed.
It wasn't gone.
Not really.
But it had pulled away. Like the world above had drifted farther than sound could travel.
And that was worse.
Anna pressed herself upright, the stiffness in her back already forgotten. Her fingers found the wooden crate near the far wall and pulled it closer beneath the trapdoor. Each motion scraped against the dark, too loud in the stillness. She climbed slowly, not because of the height, but because something deep inside her wasn't ready to know what came next.
She knelt on the crate, leaned forward, and pressed her ear against the wood.
Silence.
No, not silence. Her own breath. Her own heart. A faint rattle from the pipes above. But no footsteps. No rifle shots. No voices.
Especially not his.
She pressed harder, as if the wood might give way and whisper something through the grain.
Nothing.
Her throat felt dry. She didn't know when that started. Or why she kept thinking of the look on Ilya's face, the moment he'd shut the door and disappeared above. She didn't want to cry. She wanted to scream. Not because he left, but because he didn't say goodbye. Didn't even look back.
What if something happened to him?
Her chest tightened. Not the kind of tight that comes from running, but from thinking too hard about the things no one ever wants to say out loud.
What if he left on purpose?
What if she wasn't supposed to follow?
A thought bloomed in the dark like ink in water.
Was he hurt because of me?
She pressed her forehead to the trapdoor, eyes shut. Tried to remember something softer. The smell of the tavern's stew. The sound of his voice when it wasn't quiet or angry, when it was telling her to focus, to straighten her back, to hold the pencil properly. That one time he'd taught her to draw a horse, and she ended up drawing a pig with long legs. He hadn't laughed.
He'd told her it looked like a hero's mount.
Another sound broke the memory. Faint. Distant. A crack, not sharp, but deep. She lifted her head. Then silence again, but different this time. Thicker. As if the air above had stopped moving.
And beneath that stillness, a pressure.
It didn't come from her ears, or the floor. It came from somewhere else. A place under her ribs. The way you feel thunder before it hits.
Something had shifted.
Not a battle. Not a scream. Something bigger.
She smelled smoke now. Not sharp, but low and oily, creeping through the cracks in the wood above her head. The heat touched her cheeks like breath on glass. Not enough to burn, but too strange to ignore.
Anna turned toward the crate, legs already moving before she finished thinking.
She couldn't stay.
Not if he was up there.
Not if something had changed.
She reached for the trapdoor again, hesitating only once, and pushed.
It didn't open at first.
Anna's hands pushed against the trapdoor, harder now, but it held firm. The iron latch on the other side groaned faintly, still hooked. Her breath caught, what if it really was locked forever? What if Ilya had shut it too tight, and now there was no way out? What if she stayed down here until—
CRACK.
A sound split through the wood. Sharp, metallic, like something above had struck the tavern roof, not carefully, not intentionally, but with such force the whole building seemed to exhale through the walls. The trapdoor quivered in its frame. Dust rained down. A second noise followed, not a boom, but a shearing grind of wood against rusted metal. Then silence.
She pushed again.
This time, the latch gave way.
It didn't click open so much as fall loose, like it had been cracked apart from the outside.
Anna shoved the trapdoor upward, the hinges half-stripped, splinters trailing down around her fingers. Cold air surged in immediately, sharp and biting, laced with soot and something she couldn't name.
She froze.
Halfway through the opening.
And saw it.
Not the street.
Not Ilya.
Not the tavern ruins or the people running.
But something else.
Something wrong.
The sky wasn't a sky anymore. It was a wound. A red spiral of color she didn't have words for, bleeding down through smoke and snow like someone had torn a page from the wrong book and pasted it over the sky. And in the middle of it—
She didn't understand it.
Not at first.
It filled the entire horizon, not like a bird, not like a monster, but like a mountain with wings. Its body was dark red, red like burning coals, like the glow inside a forge before it explodes. Its wings unfolded slowly, blades of lightless fire, jagged and immense. It hovered without flapping, without noise. Not because it was quiet.
But because the world had gone quiet for it.
Its head turned once, a slow, curling tilt.
And though Anna couldn't see its eyes, couldn't find a face at all, not really, she knew it saw her.
Right there, through the broken boards and warped light.
It saw her.
Every thought inside her shut off. Every memory of Ilya, every question, every fear collapsed under the weight of that thing. It wasn't a dragon. It wasn't anything from her books. It was like the storybooks had lied, and this was the real thing they'd tried to hide behind drawings.
She couldn't move.
Her fingers still gripped the trapdoor, arms half-raised, breath caught somewhere too far back in her throat to reach.
It didn't come closer.
It didn't need to.
It simply was.
And the sky above Crystalis.