The city wall was not merely a barrier; it was a declaration. It rose from the baked earth like the jawbone of a colossal, petrified beast, so high it seemed to shear the clouds in two. Its grey, pockmarked stones, each larger than a man, spoke of centuries spent repelling things far worse than starving boys. Leo—the name felt loose and ill-fitting, a borrowed shirt—stood at the tail of a line that coiled listlessly along the wall's shadow. The shadow itself was cold, a stark river of shade cutting across the sun-scorched ground.
His feet were ruins. Three miles of forest path, thorns, sharp stones, and finally this hard-packed approach road had transformed them into maps of raw pain. Each heartbeat sent a fresh pulse of agony from his soles to his spine. The hunger, however, was worse. It had evolved past a simple ache. It was a presence, a coiled, intelligent void in his gut that actively consumed him from the inside, gnawing at the very fabric of his being.
A commotion erupted at the grand iron-bound gate ahead. A guard, a mountain of muscle and boiled leather, shoved a farmer sending the man's bundle of kindling scattering. "No permit? No entry! The law's the law. Now beat it!"
Leo's chest seized. Not with his own fear, but with a surge of foreign rage. It erupted hot and white behind his eyes, a geyser of fury that was not his own. It came with a scent: oiled metal, sweat, and the coppery tang of fear. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the world dissolved.
---
The memory was not a picture; it was an immersion.
He was the soldier. Lysander, his name was. The golden scale armor was heavy, too ornate, a gift from a lord he despised. It pinched under his arms. He stood before a heavy oak door in a stone corridor that smelled of damp and despair. From behind the door—not screams, not anymore. Whimpers. The hopeless, broken sounds of animals in a trap. A tall man in a velvet doublet, his face a mask of bureaucratic calm, stood nearby. "The quarantine is absolute, Sergeant Lysander. The Black Lung takes entire towns. Orders are: no one comes out. You seal it."
Lysander's hand, encased in a steel gauntlet, rose to the door's iron latch. His own breath sounded ragged in his helmet. A child's cough, wet and hacking, echoed from within. My son had a cough like that, he thought, madness bubbling up. Just last spring.
"The orders, Sergeant," the velvet man said, his voice devoid of everything but a cold expectation.
Shame, hotter than the rage, flooded Lysander. Shame at his powerlessness, at the uniform that made him the instrument of this atrocity. A profound, soul-crushing self-hatred took root. He was not following orders; he was annihilating himself. With a sob that tore at his throat, he threw the bolt. The thunk of the locking mechanism was the loudest sound he had ever heard. The whimpers behind the door grew frantic, then faded into a terrible, pleading silence. The memory didn't end there. It lingered on the aftermath: the endless nights staring at his own hands, the taste of vomit, the slow realization that he had not just locked a door, but had stepped into a prison of his own making.
---
Leo gasped, wrenching back into his own body, staggering as if struck. The soldier's remorse, his self-loathing, clung to Leo's spirit like a toxic mold. It felt more real than the ground beneath his blistered feet.
"You alright there, lad?" An old woman beside him whispered, her eyes wide with a concern that felt alien. He couldn't answer. His throat was a desert crevice.
The line was a funeral procession in reverse, inching toward a gate that promised not salvation, but judgment. When his turn finally came, the guard—his face a topographical map of scars and contempt—looked down. "Permit?"
"I… have none," Leo's voice was the rustle of dead leaves.
"Then you have no business here. Scram."
"Please. I need… food." The word felt pathetic.
The guard's laugh was a short, brutal bark. "Think I run a charity kitchen? Get lost, runt."
A new wave hit Leo. This wasn't Lysander's complex shame. This was pure, undiluted hatred. A deep, venomous loathing for the very concept of authority, for the smugness of power encased in leather and metal. It belonged to someone else—a rebel, a thief, a firebrand. His small hand clenched into a fist of its own volition, the nails biting into his palm.
"Listen," Leo said, and his voice changed. It flattened, lost its youthful tremor, gaining a disconcerting, metallic edge. "I am entering."
The guard's smirk widened. "You? This scrap of—"
It happened. In Leo's eyes, the deep brown irises seemed to swirl, and for a fraction of a second, two points of baleful crimson light glowed from within, like coks seen through ash. It was no conscious act. It was a leak, a bleed-through from the thing that slept beneath.
The guard's smirk died. He didn't just step back; he recoiled, a primal instinct overriding his duty. The color drained from his face. "What in the hells… your eyes…"
Leo, riding the strange, borrowed certainty, pressed the advantage he didn't understand. "You will let me pass. Or else." He stopped, the script of the threat ending. Or else what? He had no idea.
The guard stared, his bravado crumbling. He looked from Leo's now-normal eyes to the unwavering set of his jaw. Swallowing hard, he jerked his head toward the gloom of the gate passage, his voice subdued. "Go on. But you're marked. My eyes are on you."
Leo walked through the arched stone throat of the wall. The victory was ashes in his mouth. The hatred that had cowed the guard was a borrowed weapon. The fear he'd inspired was a phantom. He was a puppet, and his strings were pulled by the ghosts in his marrow.
The city of Aethelgard exploded upon his senses. It wasn't just a place; it was a living, roaring entity. The noise was a physical wall—the clatter of cart wheels on cobbles, the shouted calls of hawkers selling copper pots and spoiled fruit, the rhythmic clang from a blacksmith's forge, the bleating of goats, the shrieking laughter of children chasing a dog. The smells layered upon each other in a nauseating, rich tapestry: baking bread and roasting meat from a tavern, the sharp tang of urine from an alley, the sweetness of overripe produce from a stall, the pervasive, low stink of too many unwashed bodies living in too close a space.
He moved like a sleepwalker through the current of life. Every face he passed seemed to wear a second, translucent face beneath—a shadow-memory. A stout butcher wrapping cuts of meat had the fleeting, grieving eyes of a field surgeon. A young woman laughing with friends carried the graceful, melancholic posture of a court dancer from a fallen kingdom.
He found a stone fountain in a small, grimy square, its central statue of some forgotten hero worn smooth by time and green with slime. Parched beyond thought, he stumbled to it, cupping his hands to drink. The water was lukewarm and tasted of moss, but it was life. As he drank, he caught his reflection in the disturbed, algae-flecked surface.
It wavered, fractured, and for a moment, showed not one face, but many:
· The round, dirt-smudged face of the boy, Leo. Fearful, lost.
· The grim, hollowed eyes of Sergeant Lysander, heavy with a guilt that death had not erased.
· The sharp, defiant gaze of the rebellious spirit, all angles and fire.
· And deep beneath them all, like a creature looking up from a well, two steady, unblinking points of ember-red light.
He jerked back, water spilling. He shut his eyes tight, pressing the heels of his hands against them. Inside his skull, the council of the dead convened.
"The hunger… it is a living thing. Feed it." A voice like grinding stones, greedy and simple.
"Do not fear the power. Fear your fear of it."A calmer, older voice, perhaps a scholar or mage.
"The guard… he deserved worse. They all do. Burn their posts."The rebel, spitting venom.
"I am so tired… is there no rest?"A woman's voice, thin and frayed, the one who had sung the love song.
And then,clearer, closer than the others, a voice that felt like the echo of his own stolen breath: "Leo… I am… I was Leo. Remember the rice cake? The one before the cold?"
He opened his eyes. They were dry as dust. The fountain's gift of water was a lie; it hydrated his cells but did nothing for the desiccation of his soul. He understood now, with a chilling clarity. He was not a boy. He was a necropolis. A walking city of the dead. And the citizens within were becoming restless.
His gaze, scanning for some unknown sign, snagged on a painted wooden sign hanging above a bookbinder's shop. The script was elegant, flowing: "The Maple Leaf Academy – Inquiries." He shouldn't have been able to read it. But the knowledge was just there, deposited in his mind like a remembered fact. Nearby, two merchants haggling over a spice shipment paused, one gesturing up the hill. "…say the Academy's adepts can tell if a shipment's cursed just by touch. Cost a fortune, though."
An academy. A place of learning. Of order. A fragile hope, brittle as an old bone, sparked in him. Perhaps there, they had names for what he was. Perhaps they had… a cure.
Pushed by a tide of bodies, he found himself in a narrower, smellier lane. In a recessed doorway, sheltered from the sun and the crowd's flow, sat a beggar. The man was a composition of rags and grime, but his eyes, peering from a nest of wild hair and beard, were startlingly alert and sharp, like a bird's. They locked onto Leo with an unsettling intensity. Leo stopped, rooted. He didn't speak; he just stared, the silent plea of his entire condition screaming from his posture.
The beggar watched him for a long minute, chewing on nothing. Finally, he broke the silence, his voice a gravelly whisper. "Seeking or fleeing, kid?"
The term meant nothing, yet it resonated in the hollow places inside Leo. He remained silent, unable to formulate the storm in his head into a question.
The beggar grunted. "Cat got your tongue, or did the ghosts eat it?" He leaned forward. "The Academy, then? Is that the beacon you're stumbling toward?"
Leo managed a faint, almost imperceptible nod.
A dry, crackling laugh escaped the beggar. "Figured. You have the look. The 'not-all-here' look they love to study." He settled back, his demeanor shifting to that of a storyteller at a hearth. "The Maple Leaf. Oh, it's a shining thing. They take the special ones, the boys and girls who hear the wind's secrets or see the colors of magic. They teach 'em to weave light, to calm angry spirits, to read the history in a stone." His eyes grew almost wistful. "They say their healers can mend a shattered bone in a heartbeat. Their gardeners make trees bear fruit in winter. They built the public ward for the sick, down by the river. No charge." He leaned in again, his voice dropping. "They say the Headmaster once stared down a plague demon at the city gates and banished it with a word. Saved us all."
He painted a picture of benevolent, powerful sages, a bastion of light and knowledge. There was no hint of darkness in his telling, only awe and gratitude. To the common folk of Aethelgard, the Academy was the jewel in the city's crown, the source of its prosperity and protection.
"The road of black lanterns," the beggar said, pointing a grimy finger up the hill. "Starts at the old yew tree. Follow it to the end. You'll see the silver gates. What they see in you…" He trailed off, his bird-like eyes scanning Leo once more, a flicker of something undefinable—pity? caution?—passing through them. "That's between you and the leaves, kid."
The man offered no warnings, no tales of mysterious disappearances or failed students. His was the sanitized, heroic myth. It was all Leo had. With another silent nod, a currency of the utterly drained, Leo turned and began to walk, following the direction of the grimy finger.
The bustling market noise faded behind him as he found the Street of Black Lanterns. Old, wrought-iron lanterns, unlit in the daytime, hung from posts along a quieter, cleaner avenue that wound steadily upward. And there, at the crest of the city's highest hill, piercing the sky, were the fabled towers of the Maple leaf Academy. They were slender and impossibly tall, made of a pale stone that seemed to drink the sunlight and glow softly from within.
Answers waited there. So did more questions, far more terrible than any he had yet asked himself. Each step up the hill was an effort, a lifting of the weight of a hundred dead lives and one crumbling, living body. He carried his necropolis toward the gates of a temple, not knowing if he sought salvation, study, or simply a stronger lock for his own inner doors.