“A plan without a plan is a plan.”
The fog thickens with every heartbeat, spun from the glow of the golden moon above. Each breath I take grows slower, heavier, until it almost halts entirely. Grim, William, Amber, and I move across the rooftops, silent shadows above the world, hundreds of meters away from where Aston dives beneath the currents of his kind.
Cold air slashes against my skin, but my breath steams hot, a white ghost dissolving into the fog. My vision clouds, but I keep moving.
Our eyes meet, the four of us in sync. Amber’s gaze glints beneath her hood, her head tilting up and down like a rhythm only she hears. The moment holds, and I let the words leave my lips, heavy and deliberate.
“Aston. Aston. Aston.” Three times, without pause, without hesitation. His name is both a signal and a prayer. Yet the night gives nothing back. I cannot hear him, cannot even sense his presence. My heart hammers with a force I have not felt in years—not since Casandra and my wife, not since the first time I almost lost my daughter, and perhaps not even since the war—the Great Fall of Empire Delora. My body still remembers the searing edge of steel, the moment my left arm was nearly torn away, along with my head.
My gaze locks on Grim. His scarred, tarnished face is a reminder of mistakes I once made, yet I force myself not to drown in the past. The present is all that matters.
The blood in my veins roars like drums, my ears buzzing, and I speak again, this time pushing harder against the night. “Aston...” His name slips a fourth time from my tongue, each syllable dragging my heart deeper into the whistling wind.
“...Bad news. Their Highness has aligned with false gods—and one has just entered the banquet.”
There is no denial, no comfort—only truth. I see him as clearly as if my eyes could pierce the walls of the estate—the figure who steps into the light of chandeliers.
His hair glows like spun gold, a shade that should exist only in myths, the kind tied to gods. His eyes pierce the dark, not yellow but molten, shimmering with the cruel brightness of a star. Even from here, I can see them—those golden irises cutting through the fog of distance.
His suit gleams in yellow too, not the ordinary orange worn by attendants and nobles at such gatherings. No, this is a true mark, the kind I have dreaded for a decade.
That color. That cursed hue. I lived with it in war. I drowned in it. I killed to it, and nearly died to it. I tasted it once—drank it when triumph demanded it—and the memory burns my tongue even now.
Half my comrades were lost to that same glow, men and women of my Order, gone in fire and screams, their bodies torn apart before Harmon ever thought of his grand designs. That color is triumph and ruin both, and it haunts me.
I swallow hard, the sound deafening in my ears. My throat is dry, my tongue raw, but I push the words through. They must reach Aston. They must. “Stay calm, play hidden, and stick to the pla—”
A hiss fills my head, sharp and violent, like serpents writhing across my skull. My tongue twists against my teeth as if poisoned, and my heart sinks. The world darkens, and for a moment, I see Elena’s face blur before me—her laugh, her eyes, the promise I swore I would keep. The same laugh as my daughter once had. I must place her somewhere safe, so she can call a family her own again.
The dream flickers before me, weak, against the choking night, shattered by the entrance of the false god—the yellow-blooded.
Silence falls over us, heavy as lead. My breath scrapes my throat, and Grim says nothing. Amber bites her lip, and William, the new blue, lingers behind.
I feel the tremor building in my chest until I stamp down hard, my boot denting the roof beneath. The sound is hollow, but it breaks the stillness.
Amber is the first to speak, her voice wavering. “W–what now?”
Grim remains quiet, too quiet, his silence sharper than any blade.
My eyes drift toward the estate, its grand towers veiled in fog, then to the streets curling left and right, endless paths into shadow. Ravens scream above us, their cries too close, too knowing, as though they hear the agony lodged inside me.
“We go to Harmon,” I say at last, my voice iron. “We find him. And we hear his orders.”
There is no other choice.