"Hollis, stop!" Luenna dropped the bundle onto the table with a heavy thud, the iron clinking beneath the linen. She stepped into his path, forcing him to halt.
She had not meant to raise her voice, but she could not help it. Not when he was moving like this, speaking like this, tearing through the room with the same blind urgency she had only ever seen in men who believed fire could cleanse sin.
The same frantic conviction. The same fear dressed up as certainty. It clawed at the old memories that had been buried in her chest, tasting like smoke and ash.
"You're talking about rituals and wards like the priests in Viremont," she gritted her teeth, her voice shaking now, anger and fear tangling together. "You're acting like the people who burned her!"
Hollis did not move. His chest heaved, his breath a rattling whistle in the quiet room. He looked down at his chalk-stained hands, then up at her. He had never been a man of faith or ritual. Never one to trust in symbols scratched into wood or prayers whispered into empty air.
But love, when twisted tight with fear, had a way of driving a man to reach for anything, even the things he once would have called foolish.
"The people in Viremont were fools." It was the principle he kept alive ever since he found her there. "They feared the spark because they didn't understand it. But the Spire-Lords? They understand it perfectly. They hunger for it."
Just as the words were out, the tension drained out of him all at once, like something inside had finally given way. His shoulders slumped, and for a moment, he looked older than she had ever seen him.
"I had a wife," he said. The words were so sudden, so out of place, that Luenna's anger dissipated. "And a daughter."
He sank slowly into the chair behind him, the cane slipping from his grasp and clattering faintly against the floor.
"We didn't live here," he went on, staring somewhere past her. "Not in this… place. We had a proper home. Trade was good, quiet, and safe."
Luenna slowed her breathing.
"She saw him first, that wicked Spire-Lord," Hollis said grimly. "Not in an alley like you. It was somewhere brighter. Somewhere decent." A humorless breath left him. "Came home shaking, just like you are now. Said the same things. That he didn't move right. That he…"
He trailed off, jaw tightening. "He spared her," he finished quietly.
Luenna's chest twisted painfully.
"I told her it was nothing," he continued. "Told her fear makes shadows into monsters. That if it really was one of them…" He shook his head faintly, "she wouldn't have come home at all."
His fingers curled against his knee. "But she kept saying it. Over and over. That he didn't hurt her. That he chose not to."
Hollis let out a slow breath, his gaze finally dragging back to her. "She started to believe it meant something good. Said maybe the Upperworld weren't all what people thought. Maybe he saw something in her. Maybe—" His voice tightened. "Maybe he was kind."
The silence that followed was unbearable.
"So I moved us," he said simply. "Packed everything we could carry and left. Came here. Thought if we went far enough, buried ourselves deep enough in the dirt, whatever it was would lose interest."
His eyes darkened. The sorrow lingering behind his bright blue eyes could tick off even the most hardened soldier as he said, "It didn't."
Luenna's breath hitched, her hands shook. "What happened?" She asked, even though she already knew what happened.
"They died," he answered immediately.
"T-the same way?"
"I don't know," he admitted, and that somehow made it worse. "There was no body left whole enough to tell me anything useful."
Hollis leaned forward, his gaze locking onto hers with a sharpness that cut through the lingering quiet.
"So I don't care what you think you saw," he said, low and firm. "I don't care if it looked at you gently or let you walk away." His hand came down on the table, hard enough to make her flinch.
"I have buried a wife," he said. "I have buried a child." His voice hardened. "I will not bury another."
Luenna swallowed hard.
"So you can hate me for this," he went on, quieter now, but no less certain. "You can call it foolish, or paranoid, or no better than the priests who made your life miserable."
He reached for the chalk again, his hands steadier this time. "But I am not taking that chance with you."
Luenna did not argue again after that. Not because she agreed, but because something in his voice left no room for it. She did not want him to reminisce the lost of his family, knowing that it cost him as much as her mother's death costed her. So she let him move.
She let him press the chalk and salt into her hand, guiding her fingers to trace lines she did not understand along the warped floorboards. Circles within circles. Marks that meant nothing to them yet seemed to steady him with every stroke.
She held the iron dish when he told her to. Watched as the dried herbs caught flame, the smoke rising in thin, twisting ribbons that smelled sharp and bitter, clinging to the back of her throat.
He muttered under his breath. It was not prayers, but something close enough to make her skin prickle. Words that sounded older than the walls around them. At some point, she realized her hands had stopped shaking despite the fear that still clung to her like a second skin.
The air grew heavy, dense with the scent of ash and something metallic beneath it. The flickering light carved strange shadows along the walls, stretching and bending until the space no longer felt entirely like their home.
And through it all, Hollis did not falter.
When it was over, it ended quietly. There was no grand shift, and definitely no visible change. Just the last curl of smoke thinning into nothing, the chalk resting dull and lifeless against the wood, and the old man sagging back as if he could finally breath.
Sleep came eventually after, though she did not remember sauntering up to her room and lying down. It dragged her under in uneven waves, her body too exhausted to resist, her mind too restless to rest.
The smell of burnt herbs clung to her hair. To her skin. To her dreams. She saw it again. Not clearly like before, but in fragments.
A flicker of silver moon.
A breath cold against her skin.
That voice, low and certain, curling through the dark.
Her chest tightened in her sleep, her fingers twitching against the thin blanket. Even in the dark, even wrapped in the fragile safety of walls and wards and a man who refused to lose her, it did not feel finished.
But morning came anyway.
The Underworld did not stop for fear, or grief, or things that lurked in the spaces between understanding. Hunger did not wait. Rent did not forgive. So Luenna went to work.
The Capital rose above her like it always had — cold, gilded, indifferent. Marble floors, polished to a shine that reflected nothing of the humble home she lived in. She kept her head down. Kept her hands moving.
Scrub. Rinse. Repeat.
As if the night before had been nothing more than a bad dream. As if she had not seen a man rip a heart from a body with his bare hand. As if something with eyes like bleeding moonlight had not looked at her and chosen not to kill her.
Her fingers tightened around the cloth as she remembered the story Mr. Hollis had spoke of during his rare moment of vulnerability. And though she did not quiet focused last night because of her inner turmoil, thinking about it now made her skin prickle.
What if she was no different from the girl in Hollis's memory, only standing at the same precipice while waiting for the fall to catch up to her?
"Psst—" The sound snapped her out of it.
Luenna blinked, her gaze shifting sideways to find a familiar face crouched a few feet away, scrubbing at the same endless stretch of gleaming floor.
Mirelle.
Her dark hair was tied up in a loose, messy knot that had long since given up holding itself together, strands falling into her face as she leaned in conspiratorially. Her bright brown eyes sparkled with a dangerous glint of curiousity.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Mirelle whispered, grinning. "Don't tell me you finally snapped and decided to haunt this place yourself."
Luenna exhaled quietly, forcing her shoulders to loosen as she resumed scrubbing. "Long night," she muttered.
"Mm," Mirelle hummed, unconvinced. Then, without missing a beat, she leaned even closer, her voice dropping further. "Speaking of long nights…"