Kai woke shivering, the cold gnawing at the bare skin between his boots and the hem of his borrowed blanket. The camp was silent. He rolled over, expecting to find Lena's bright hair spilling across her side of the fire, but she was gone—her blanket gone too, and no sign of her boots in the flattened moss.
For a long minute, he just lay there, the ache in his chest heavier than the morning frost. It took everything he had not to believe that she'd vanished for good, that he'd managed to drive her off with nothing more than a kiss and a night of awkward silence. He stared at the dull embers, thinking of Maya, of the orphanage, of all the other people who'd left without saying goodbye. His hands curled tight around the edge of the blanket. It didn't help.
He packed anyway. She'd said north, and the ridge was still north. If she wanted to walk alone, he'd follow her shadow until she told him to quit.
He stomped out the last of the fire, shouldered his pack, and trudged through the birch stand. Her footprints weren't hard to find—she moved in straight lines, never meandering, always angling for the high ground. He moved faster, the rhythm of his boots and breath shutting out everything else.
After half an hour, he saw her: a silver smudge against a runty pine, shoulders hunched and eyes fixed on the ground. She didn't turn when he stopped beside her, but he could see her jaw working, like she was chewing glass and trying not to spit.
"Morning," he said. It was all he could muster.
She didn't answer, just pointed up the slope and started walking.
He trailed her, careful to keep a few paces behind. The air was sharp, full of pine pitch and the faint sweetness of thaw. Kai tried to focus on the land—the shape of the ridges, the way water cut through stone, the signs of deer or fox in the soft earth—but his mind kept circling back to the fire, to the feeling of her lips, to the way she'd pulled away and left him hanging in the dark.
The silence was worse than any fight. They climbed for hours without a word, Lena never looking back, Kai never trying to catch up.
By midday, the sun was high and mean, and the ground had started to change. The moss went thin, replaced by spiny brown grass and bare rock. The woods thinned, replaced by stands of dead timber—gray, stripped of bark, as if something had sucked the color from them.
Kai noticed the smell first. Not smoke. Not even rot. It was a choking, chemical reek that left a film on the back of his tongue and made the air taste burnt. He stopped, gagged, and spit into the dirt.
Lena stopped too, scanning the wind with her nose like a hunting dog. She motioned for him to come closer.
"That's not woodsmoke," she said. Her voice was dry. "That's Gloom-burn."
He stared at the dead trees, the way their trunks twisted skyward, every branch reaching as if in pain. "How close?"
She shook her head. "Close enough that we should be quiet."
They crept forward, using the broken terrain to mask their approach. The stench grew worse with every step, until even breathing through his sleeve did nothing to blunt it.
As they topped the final ridge, Kai dropped to his knees and crawled the last few yards. Lena lay flat beside him, her chin nearly touching the stone.
The view below made his stomach flip. A village—maybe a dozen buildings clustered along a bent river—was half-smothered in a pall of gray-green smoke. Most of the houses were nothing but skeletons, the bones of their roofs splayed wide to the sky. The dirt between them was black and glassy, pocked with holes where something had burst up from underneath. Closer to the river, the stone church was still standing, but its bell tower had melted, the spire drooping like wet wax.
Nothing moved in the streets.
Kai stared, trying to make sense of the destruction. He'd seen fires before, seen what happened when a lightning strike hit the wheat barns or a careless candle took down a block of the old town. This was different. The burn marks were too clean, too precise, as if the fire had come with a plan. The glassy holes, the warped stone, the silence—none of it made sense.
He glanced at Lena, but her face was blank, the muscles around her eyes drawn tight. For a second, he thought she might cry, but she just pressed her lips together and pointed to the church.
"That's where the survivors will be," she said. "If there are any."
She pushed up, brushing dust from her palms. "We go now," she said, "before whatever did this comes back."
Kai nodded, and together they slid down the ridge, the smell of the Gloom burning in their lungs.
Kai kept low, hugging the slope, every step sending a plume of ashy dust into his boots. Lena moved ahead, swift and certain, eyes darting over every shattered fence and melted window. The smell was so thick now that it layered inside his head—bitter, electric, with a hint of something rotten underneath, like old blood.
The village was smaller than Shenya, but the main road was the same: a spine of hard dirt with houses clustered close, outbuildings scattered like loose teeth. Half the doors hung off their hinges. The other half were shut and blackened, like eyelids swollen with fever. No birds, no dogs, not even flies. Just the wind and the slow settling of ruin.
They reached the church in minutes. The old stone was scorched but intact, the windows smeared black but not broken. The oak doors had been barricaded from within, the edges chinked with mud and something that looked a lot like raw wool.
Lena rapped twice, hard, then called, "We're not Gloomed. Let us in."
A pause. Then a scrape, a scuffle, and the sound of something heavy being dragged back.
The door cracked open. A face peered out—an old man, one eye swollen shut, skin gone the color of wet chalk. He blinked, then yanked the door wider, ushering them inside with a frantic wave.
Lena ducked through, and Kai followed, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the dim.
The nave was packed. Maybe thirty people huddled along the pews, their faces twisted by fear or pain or both. Most wore what looked like bedsheets, hastily wrapped to hide burns or worse. The air buzzed with low whimpers and the soft, helpless sobbing of children.
Kai stared, caught between horror and helplessness. He'd never seen so many people hurt at once—never seen so many eyes turn to him with that desperate, animal hope.
Lena didn't hesitate. She pushed past the old man, straight to the front where the worst-off lay sprawled on the floor. A boy of maybe twelve, pale as flour, veins gone black and pulsing up his neck. A woman clutching her stomach, fingers dug so deep in her skin they'd left half-moons of blood. An infant, swaddled and silent, not even enough strength to cry.
Lena dropped to her knees, hands already moving. She stripped the blankets from the woman, checking for wounds. She pressed her ear to the baby's chest, then snapped at Kai: "Water, clean cloth, now."
He moved without thinking, following her orders as if they'd been drilled into him since birth. He found a barrel at the back—half full, a few cups floating inside—and dipped a rag, wringing it out with numb fingers. He returned to find Lena holding the baby, cradling its head and murmuring under her breath. She looked up, eyes flinty.
"Help the woman," she said. "If she starts to seize, hold her arms down. Not too hard."
Kai nodded, kneeling beside the woman. Her lips were cracked, her teeth black at the roots. She stared at him, but didn't seem to see him.
Lena finished with the infant, passing it to a waiting girl. "Keep it warm," she said, then turned to the boy on the floor. She pressed her hand to his chest, and for a moment, Kai saw a ripple of violet light flicker under her palm.
The boy gasped, coughed, and spat up a clot of something thick and black. Lena didn't flinch, just rolled him onto his side and wiped his mouth.
"Talk to me," Lena said, voice low. "What happened here?"
The old man shuffled closer, picking at the scab on his cheek. "It came in the night," he said. "First the river went bad—froze in place, turned black as pitch. Then the dogs howled, and next thing we knew, the Gloom was in the streets."
He jerked his head at the church windows. "A beast, with a dozen arms. It screamed, and anyone who heard it dropped where they stood." He pointed at the boy, now whimpering in Lena's lap. "He got the worst of it. Tried to run, but it found him."
Kai swallowed, remembering the shadows in the woods, the way they hunted without sound or mercy.
Lena listened, never pausing in her work. She used a strip of blue cloth to tie off the woman's arm, then pressed two fingers to the inside of her elbow. For a moment, the woman convulsed, teeth clattering, but Lena held steady.
"It's poison," Lena said, mostly to herself. "It's in the blood, spreading fast. They're trying to anchor the Gloom here, make it a permanent rift to spawn more creatures."
The old man nodded, as if he understood. "The priest said it was judgment, for our sins. He tried to fight it with prayer, but—" He trailed off, gesturing at the far end of the nave, where a body wrapped in a stole lay propped against the altar.
Lena ignored him, focusing on her patient. She closed her eyes, muttering words Kai couldn't catch. The violet shimmer built, then faded. The woman relaxed, her breathing steady but shallow.
Lena sat back, wiping sweat from her brow. For a second, she looked old—older than anyone in the room. Then she turned to Kai, her face back to business.
"Check the others," she said. "Look for the black veins. If it's above the shoulders, they're past help. If it's just in the limbs, we can buy time."
He did as told, moving from pew to pew. Most of the survivors were children or elders, and nearly half bore the marks. Some stared straight ahead, their eyes milky, unblinking. Others whimpered, clutching at whatever part of themselves still felt pain.
Kai tried not to gag at the stench, the way the infection crawled under the skin, turning it thin and papery. He did as Lena asked, marking the ones who could be helped, trying not to meet the eyes of the ones who couldn't.
By the time he finished, Lena had already started treating the next group. She worked with a speed and precision Kai had never seen, barking orders, improvising splints, even yanking a splinter of Gloom crystal from a boy's shin with nothing but a knife and a rag for biting.
Every time she finished with a patient, she stood, scanned the crowd, and picked her next target. There was no hesitation, no doubt. Only motion.
Kai watched her, awed and a little afraid. This was not the Lena from the ridge, or the Lena from the birch grove. This was someone else, someone hard enough to stare down the end of the world and keep working.
He tried to help, but mostly he just stayed out of her way.
The day blurred into evening, the church filling with the groans of the wounded and the whispered prayers of the living. Outside, the sky dimmed to a sickly yellow, the smoke from the burn still thick enough to blot out the sun.
Lena didn't stop. Not even when her hands shook, or when her eyes glazed over with exhaustion. She just kept going, moving from one body to the next, leaving a wake of the barely-saved behind her.
Kai found himself at the back of the church, holding a cup of water for a girl no older than Tomas. Her hands were bandaged, her face smeared with soot, but she drank greedily, like the water was the first real thing she'd tasted in years.
He glanced at Lena, now bent over an old woman with a deep wound in her thigh. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen someone care this much, risk this much, for people they didn't even know.
He couldn't.
He looked back at the girl, whose eyes were already closing. He tucked her blanket tight, then sat beside her, staring at the flicker of the candlelight on the cracked stone.
Outside, the world burned. Inside, Lena was the only thing holding back the dark.
He listened to her work, the sound of her voice cutting through the chaos, and felt something shift inside him—a little less hollow, a little more real.
He wasn't sure what came next.
But for now, he had a job to do.