RAGNA POV...
During those endless, sun-scorched months, I felt as though our rattling carriages had crawled across half the world, grinding their wheels through kingdom after kingdom, always under the suffocating escort of the Black Steel knights who never—not once—failed to loudly announce each border we crossed, as if they were tolling funeral bells meant for my ears alone.
It was almost theatrical, the way they did it, like they wanted the words to echo in my skull: There is no escape. There never was. And the more they repeated it, the more it felt like the idea of freedom had been nothing but a childish hallucination I once clung to.
Eventually—inevitably—we sank into the heart of the desert.
