The wind shifted.
It always did before blood.
Zeyr stood in the field's edge beside a withered poppy cart, staring toward the Imperial caravan approaching in the distance. Six wagons. Four decoy guards. The real blades were hidden beneath tarps, dressed as livestock drivers. Sloppy formation—overconfident. The sort of detail that would get them killed.
He turned toward Aeryn, who crouched beside the broken stone wall they were using for cover.
"Archers take the rear first. Wagons stall, we break formation. Then we flank from the orchard line," she said.
Zeyr nodded. "No mercy?"
"No time."
She signaled to the others.
The small rebel unit—fifteen men and women, hardened by attrition—moved like smoke. No battle cry, no trumpet. Only motion.
Aeryn rose and sprinted ahead, two curved blades drawn, her movements precise and eerily quiet. Her silhouette cut cleanly through the light fog, her breath barely visible in the morning chill. Zeyr followed five steps behind, knife in one hand, vial in the other.
The poison was old. He had brewed it five years ago beneath the bones of a drowned priest. It tasted like bellroot and regret. He didn't need much. Just one drop in the wind.
He crushed the vial in his hand and exhaled.
The mist shifted again.
The soldiers on the lead wagon began coughing. Then choking. By the time they drew swords, they were staggering, swinging wild.
The rebels surged.
Aeryn struck the front driver cleanly across the jaw, her left blade catching the man's cry before it could form. Her second blade severed the reins. The horses screamed and bolted, crashing the lead wagon into the second. Chaos bloomed. Screams mixed with gurgles.
Zeyr slid beneath a flailing spear and drove his dagger into the side of a man's knee. As the soldier dropped, Zeyr pressed his palm against the man's face and whispered. The man stilled. No mark was left.
He turned.
Aeryn stood alone now, ringed by three soldiers. One moved first—lunging too high. She ducked low, hamstrung him with a back-blade, then pivoted—spinning upward and slashing another across the chest. The third hesitated.
Zeyr appeared behind him.
The hesitation lasted only a second.
So did the man's life.
By the time the last loyalist fell, the wagons burned and the rebels stood panting amid the smoke. Aeryn gave curt orders—salvage, regroup, bury the dead. But her eyes kept drifting to Zeyr. She was sweating. Not from exertion.
From unease.
Later, after the wounded were treated and the convoy had been stripped, she found him kneeling beside a stream.
"You fight too clean," she said.
Zeyr didn't look up. "Clean?"
"No noise. No strain. Like you already know how they'll move."
He looked at her reflection in the water instead of her face.
"I studied pattern combat. And I'm lucky."
"Lucky." She crouched beside him. "You don't believe in luck."
"No," he said. "But you do."
Their eyes met. Her pupils were not quite round. There was a shimmer in them—not divine, not yet, but something beginning to stir.
"You've killed before," she said softly.
"I'm a soldier."
"No," she whispered. "You've killed like it was a language. Like it was art."
He did not respond.
She stood slowly.
"Be careful," she said.
"I'm always careful."
"Be careful with me."
She left without waiting for an answer.
That night, Zeyr slipped away from camp.
He walked until the trees stopped whispering, until the air grew thick and the moonlight turned a sour green.
The entrance to the Root-Womb was hidden beneath a collapsed stone shrine, choked with vines and moss. He pressed his palm to the cracked altar stone and whispered the name he'd been warned never to speak in daylight.
"Yasshal."
The ground opened.
The descent was silent.
The tunnel walls breathed.
When he reached the chamber, he stripped off his shirt and knelt, arms spread, heart exposed.
The god came slowly.
Not as light. Never as light.
It came as smell first—rotting fruit, old leather, breath left too long in lungs.
Then sound—bones clicking, silk tearing.
Then form.
A mass of twisting roots and ribs, bound together by cords of vine, teeth, and whispers. It was not beautiful. It did not try to be.
But it was intimate.
It coiled around him, close.
"You left me waiting," Yasshal said. Its voice came from every surface—wet, soft, warm.
"I had to see her."
"Did she remember you?"
"She dreamed of me."
"Dreams are the last parts the light forgets. Soon even that will be gone."
Zeyr's eyes narrowed.
"Then I must move faster."
The god's tendrils stroked his back.
"You love her still."
He didn't answer.
"You can have her," Yasshal purred. "As she was. As she will be. If you take what is owed."
Zeyr looked up. "What price?"
"Obedience."
The chamber darkened.
Yasshal's body unfurled a spiral of thorns made from hardened regret.
"You must become the hand of rot. Not a man. Not a lover. Just the breath that unravels. The scream in the silk."
Zeyr stood.
"I will."
"You will die."
"Yes."
"You will be mine."
Zeyr closed his eyes.
"I already am."
The god surged forward—not to devour, but to offer.
A fruit, pale and pulsing, grew from the ceiling. It dropped into Zeyr's hands.
"This," Yasshal whispered, "is the Seed of Collapse."
Zeyr stared at it.
"It will rot whatever it is placed within. Walls. Thrones. Cities."
"What must I do?"
"Feed it to the empire."
Zeyr bowed.
"I will begin at dawn."
And the god withdrew.
When he returned to camp, hours before sunrise, Aeryn was waiting at the edge of his tent.
She didn't speak.
She just looked at him.
"You went out," she said quietly.
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
She stepped closer.
"I had a dream."
He tensed.
"In it, I was underground. The walls were made of hands. They were singing."
Zeyr's breath hitched.
"I think I knew the song," she said. "But when I woke, it was gone."
He said nothing.
"I'm scared," she said. "But not of you."
"Then what?"
"Myself."
He reached for her hand.
Their fingers touched.
Neither pulled away.
The seed pulsed silently in his coat, warm against his ribs.
And she stood so close.
So unbearably real.
He closed his eyes.
And lied.
"You'll be fine."