I walked the streets of Turga, moving through darkness until the light found me — street lamps set at even intervals, casting warm pools across the cobblestones that connected and overlapped into something almost continuous. The alleyway I had emerged from had no light at all. The buildings there were warehouses and storage structures, blank-faced and utilitarian, the kind of architecture that exists purely to contain things rather than to welcome anyone.
I followed the lamps.
They led me to a residential street. Soft light filtered through windows — candlelight mostly, the warm unsteady glow of households settling into their evenings. Through walls and glass came the sounds of lives being lived: laughter, conversation, the particular percussion of plates and cutlery that meant families sitting down to eat.
I slowed my pace and simply listened for a moment.
*Much time has passed.* The thought arrived with a small pull of guilt attached to it. Had Arvid returned to the tower? Was he there now, finding it empty, the fire gone cold and no trace of me except the evidence of what had happened on the floor? I should go back. I should find him.
But the city was alive around me, and I had never seen Turga before, and I was not yet ready to leave.
I would explore a little more. Then I would return.
I continued along the street and began to encounter the people of Turga — not many at this hour, but enough to give the city its texture. A group of young boys clustered under a street lamp, not doing anything in particular, talking over each other about the small events of their day with the complete absorption of people for whom those small events constitute the whole world. A man hurrying past in the opposite direction, a large bag of groceries in each arm, muttering to himself just audibly enough to catch: *I'm late, she's going to kill me.* A young couple moving slowly in the same direction I was, hand in hand, heads inclined toward each other, speaking in the low private register of people who have temporarily forgotten there is anyone else around.
They mentioned a night market. The words surfaced twice in their conversation, and both times with the particular anticipatory quality of something looked forward to.
I decided to follow them.
I kept a reasonable distance — enough not to be peculiar about it — and within a few minutes the destination announced itself without any need for guidance. The light came first: more lamps in a single space than I had seen gathered anywhere outside a palace, flooding the city square ahead with a brightness that softened the edges of the surrounding dark. Then the noise arrived — vendor calls layered over customer responses layered over general crowd movement, the whole thing producing a specific kind of lively chaos that was somehow organised beneath the surface. And then the smell: food, predominantly, rich and varied and deeply persuasive, threaded through with something sweeter that might have been perfume drifting from one of the other stalls.
I stepped into the market and let it absorb me.
The vendors were arranged in rows by category — food here, goods there, the logic of it becoming apparent as I moved between them. I walked without any particular destination, looking at everything. Arvid would enjoy this. The thought arrived with an ease that surprised me — the simple, domestic pleasure of imagining bringing someone you love somewhere you've discovered. *We should come here together*, I thought. *Properly, in daylight, with time to spend.*
I reached the far end of the market and found a crowd gathered around something I hadn't expected: a performance troupe, positioned in the open space beyond the last row of stalls, in the final preparations before beginning. I joined the gathered audience without quite deciding to, drawn in by the anticipation in the air around me.
A young woman stepped forward. She was slight, poised, with the particular quality of stillness that performers have just before they begin — completely present, completely composed. She introduced herself as Athia. Then the flute began, low and searching, and the drum followed a moment later, and then her voice.
*My love, my love,*
*how is it you hate me so?*
*You told me you would be happy for me,*
*and yet you are not.*
*You called me deceitful,*
*but I am nothing of the sort.*
*My love, my love,*
*you were the one who deceived.*
*You told me that you loved me,*
*but all you ever wanted*
*was what I had to offer.*
*Have you ever truly loved me?*
*My love, my love,*
*we were fools in love —*
*or so I believed.*
*But why does it seem*
*as though I was the only fool*
*who was truly in it?*
I stayed through the rest of her performance before moving on. Even after I had left the square and turned into the quieter streets beyond, her voice followed me — carried on the wind in fragments, reaching further than voices usually do, as though the night itself was reluctant to let it go. It was hauntingly beautiful. The kind of voice that gets into you and stays without asking permission.
I walked further west, letting the city unfold around me, following no particular route.
And then I smelled it.
I stopped walking.
The smell of kin.
It was unmistakable — something deep and old in my newly reconfigured senses recognising it before my conscious mind had caught up with the recognition. *Dragon.* The scent of dragon, here in Turga, in a port city on the southern coast of the Selon empire, where no dragon had any reason to be.
I stood very still for a moment.
Then I moved toward it.
The elderly woman's body I was wearing was not built for urgency — the cane, the careful gait, the pace of advanced age. I dissolved the form quickly and rebuilt myself into something more serviceable: a young woman, face shaped slightly differently from my own, unremarkable in the way that allows a person to move through a crowd without attracting attention. Then I followed the scent.
It led me around a corner, and I saw it.
A mausoleum.
It had been built with considerable care. White marble, pale and luminous even in lamplight. Carved stonework along every surface — intricate patterns worked into the facing, decorative columns, the kind of detailed craftsmanship that signals the importance of what is being preserved inside. A tomb sat at its centre, visible through the architecture.
A dragon tomb.
I stared at it.
The questions arrived all at once, overlapping and insistent. Why was there a dragon tomb in Turga? Who had built it, and when, and for whom? And then the question beneath all the others, the one with the weight:
*Arvid must know about this. He is the emperor. This is inside his empire, inside one of his cities, guarded by his soldiers. He must know.*
*So why did he never mention it?*
The premonition came slowly, the way cold does — creeping rather than striking, spreading across my chest by degrees. Something dark moving upward from somewhere beneath rational thought. A pang of something I didn't want to name settled in my chest and sat there.
*No.* I pulled back from the conclusion before it fully formed. *He may not know. He hasn't been emperor long. There is much a new emperor doesn't know yet about the full extent of what he's inherited.* I held that thought carefully, deliberately, the way you hold something fragile. *That is the most likely explanation. Don't reach for the other one.*
I studied the mausoleum from a distance.
It was heavily guarded. Soldiers with firearms patrolled the perimeter at close, regular intervals — alert, professional, carrying themselves with the posture of people who have been told this post matters and have believed it. They were not going to be distracted by conversation or misdirection. No one without authorisation was walking through those front doors.
That was not, strictly speaking, my problem. I could enter unnoticed. The doors, however, were closed, and opening them with magic directly in front of armed guards would not pass without notice.
I circled the building.
At the rear, I found a back entrance — a single door, plain and unornamented, the functional access point that every grand building has and no one is meant to use for anything important. Two soldiers were seated in front of it at a small table, a worn deck of cards between them, deep in a game with the particular focused ease of people who expect nothing to happen on their watch.
I needed them away from that door.
I ducked into the shadows, let my appearance shift once more — a young boy this time, unremarkable, the sort of child who might be anywhere in a city at night without it meaning anything. Then I conjured a stone from nothing, felt the weight of it in my palm, and threw it.
It struck the corner of the table with a sharp crack of impact.
"Oi!" I shouted in the high register I'd constructed for the boy, and then I ran.
Both soldiers were on their feet before the echo had finished. I heard the scrape of the chairs, the sound of boots on stone, and then they were behind me and I was running — around a corner, down the narrow alley beyond it, fast enough to stay ahead and not so fast as to seem anything other than a child fleeing a prank. The moment the alley's shadow swallowed me completely, I vanished.
I rematerialised beside the back door.
One breath. Two.
I unlocked it with a small, silent expenditure of magic, slipped inside, and locked it again behind me. The whole sequence took perhaps four seconds.
Half a minute later, boots on cobblestones. The soldiers returning, their pace already losing its urgency.
"Bloody kids." The first voice was sour with irritation.
"To be honest," said the second, with the philosophical tone of a man who has made his peace with his posting, "we guard something no one wants to rob. There's nothing in there. And yet here we are, on watch, because the emperor insists on it." A pause. "The civilians don't even take us seriously."
"Should we report it to the commander?"
"For a child throwing a stone? No. The door is locked. Our duty is intact."
A beat of silence. Then the sound of one of them crossing to the door — the faint pressure of a hand testing the handle from outside.
"Locked," he confirmed.
"Nothing happened," the other said.
"Nothing at all," the first agreed.
The scrape of chairs being pulled back to the table. The quiet resumption of the card game.
I stood inside the mausoleum and let my eyes adjust to the dark, and waited to see what the emperor had been keeping here in secret.
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