Riven walked fast.
Not running — but the kind of walking that said I know exactly where I'm going and I don't care if you keep up. I kept up. Mostly because standing still in this city already felt like an invitation to die.
We moved through the crowd and I tried to take everything in at once.
The streets were wide but suffocating. Buildings pressed in from both sides, black stone stacked high with narrow windows that glowed orange and red from fires within. Everywhere I looked there were people — merchants shouting over each other, children darting between legs, men with weapons at their hips watching the crowd with flat, measuring eyes.
And the smell. Blood and smoke and something sweet underneath it all, like rotting fruit.
"Stop looking around like that," Riven said without turning back.
"Like what?"
"Like everything is new. It marks you."
I fixed my eyes forward. "Where are we going?"
"Somewhere you won't get killed in the next five minutes. After that we'll figure out the rest."
We turned off the main street into a narrower passage. The noise of the crowd dulled behind us. The buildings here were shorter, older, the stone crumbling at the edges. A few people sat in doorways watching us pass with eyes that felt like hands, reaching, checking, calculating.
Riven stopped in front of a door that looked like every other door on the street — old wood, iron handle, nothing marking it as anything other than forgotten.
He knocked three times. Paused. Then once more.
A slot in the door slid open. A pair of eyes looked out.
The slot closed. The door opened.
Inside was a low-ceilinged room that smelled of candle wax and old wood. A few tables, a bar with bottles of things I didn't recognize, and four people who all looked up when we entered and then looked back down, which I decided was the best possible reaction I could have hoped for.
Riven sat down at a corner table and gestured across from him.
I sat.
He studied me for a moment. Not unfriendly — but thorough, the way you'd check a weapon before trusting your life to it.
"Name," he said.
"Aren."
"Where from?"
"Village on the edge of the Black Desert. You wouldn't know it."
"I know every settlement within three days of this city." He leaned back. "Cardwen? Ashpeak? The nameless farming cluster near the second dune ridge?"
I stared at him. "The last one."
He nodded once, like that confirmed something. "Long walk. You came alone?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I told you. My brother—"
"I heard what you told me." His voice wasn't unkind but it cut clean. "I'm asking why you came. Why not guards. Why not a search party. Why one person, alone, on foot."
"Because there was no one else."
Silence.
Riven looked at the table for a moment. Something moved across his face — too fast for me to read — and then it was gone.
"Alright," he said. "Then here is what you need to know to survive the next twenty-four hours."
He held up one finger.
"Rule one. Never attack a Lord directly. Not their body, not their property, not their people wearing their colors. The Lords are the law here. Everything else is negotiable. They are not."
Second finger.
"Rule two. Never fight inside the Black Palace. The palace in the center of the city belongs to all seven Lords equally. It's neutral ground. Anyone who spills blood there dies before they hit the floor. I've seen it happen. The palace enforces itself."
Third finger.
"Rule three. Never open a gate to the Abyss. There are places in this city — mostly underground — where the walls between here and something much worse are very thin. There are people who will try to sell you ways to breach those walls. They are lying about being able to control what comes through."
He lowered his hand.
"Break any of these three rules and no one in this city will help you. Not because they're afraid of punishment. Because they'll know you're either stupid or suicidal, and neither is worth the trouble."
I absorbed this. "Those are the rules everyone follows?"
"Those are the rules that keep the city from eating itself completely." He paused. "Everything else is just survival."
"What's your rank?" I asked.
His eyes narrowed slightly. "You know the ranking system?"
"I heard about it on the road. Ash, Ember, Flame—"
"Flame," he said. "Which means I'm three levels below a Lord and several levels above someone who just arrived and accidentally threw a gang member through a wall with Void energy." He tilted his head. "What about you? What rank were you assessed at back home?"
"There's no one to assess people where I'm from."
"So you're unranked."
"I didn't even know I had any power until twenty minutes ago."
Riven was quiet for a long moment.
"Void energy," he said finally, more to himself than to me. "I've been in this city for nine years. I've seen Wrath, Greed, Envy, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Pride." He paused. "I've never seen Void."
"Is that bad?"
"It's complicated." He turned his cup slowly on the table. "The seven sins — everyone here has one. You're born with it or it grows in you. It gives you power. It also slowly shapes who you are. A man with Wrath sin becomes violent without choosing to. A woman with Lust sin starts to see people as tools." He looked at me. "Void is the eighth. It doesn't shape you toward anything. It empties."
The word sat between us.
Empties.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means your power works differently. The seven sins add — more strength, more speed, more control. Void removes. It can take away power. Drain it. Absorb it." He held my gaze. "What you did to that boy wasn't an attack. It was an absence. You didn't push him. You removed whatever was keeping him standing near you."
I thought about the feeling. The door opening in my chest. The cold wave.
"I didn't do it on purpose."
"I know. That's what worries me." He stood. "It also means every Lord in this city just felt a disturbance when you used it. Void energy doesn't just move through the air — it moves through the sin network that runs under the whole city. When you used it, every person here with significant sin power felt a small silence where the network usually hums."
He walked to the bar, exchanged a few words with the man behind it, and came back with two cups of something dark.
He set one in front of me.
"Your brother," he said. "What's his name?"
"Kael."
Something shifted in Riven's expression. Too small to name but too visible to miss.
"Kael," he repeated.
"You know him?"
Riven sat down slowly. He wrapped both hands around his cup and stared into it for a moment that stretched longer than it should have.
"I've heard the name," he said carefully. "In connection with things I'd rather not have heard it in connection with."
My stomach tightened. "What things?"
"Not tonight." He looked up. "Tonight you need to sleep somewhere safe, and tomorrow you need to be assessed and ranked, because walking around this city unranked with Void energy is like walking through a fire district carrying oil." He pushed his cup aside. "After that, we talk about your brother."
"Why are you helping me?"
The question came out more direct than I intended. But I needed to know.
Riven looked at me for a moment. Then something that wasn't quite a smile moved at the corner of his mouth.
"Because Void energy is the rarest thing I've seen in nine years," he said. "And rare things in this city either get used or get destroyed." He stood again. "I'd rather see what you become."
He moved toward the back of the room.
I sat there for a moment, hands around the warm cup, feeling the city outside pressing against the walls of this small room like something breathing and hungry.
Somewhere under the floor, very faint, I thought I could feel it.
A hum. Constant and deep.
The sin network Riven had mentioned. Running beneath everything. Connecting everyone.
And somewhere in that hum, a small silence.
Where I was.
Where the Void had already started to spread.
I drank from the cup. It tasted like smoke and bitter herbs and something I couldn't name.
Then I followed Riven into the back.
Above the city, the purple sky had grown darker.
And in the Black Palace at the center of it all, seven pairs of eyes had just turned toward the same direction.