"Caelum," Lilith said without turning her gaze from the glass. Her voice was soft, controlled, but edged with steel. "With me. Elias, stay close."
The door opened under Caelum's hand, and the evening air curled inside—cool and damp, carrying the sour scent of rain-soaked stone. Lilith stepped out first, Elias jumped down behind her, his expression taut with questions he hadn't yet voiced.
Caelum descended last, his gaze sweeping the street with the precision of a blade slicing fog. No movement. No sound save the distant drip of water. His fingers brushed the hilt at his hip as he scanned the rooftops, shadows layering like scales across the slate.
"Where?" he asked quietly.
Lilith didn't answer. She simply closed her eyes, feeling the thrum beneath her skin—the faint vibration of something wrong, dark, and restless. It tugged at her senses like a thread of smoke winding through bone.
"This way."
She moved, and they followed, their steps echoing down a side alley that swallowed the last of the sunlight. The passage narrowed, walls closing in slick with damp. Runes half-scratched and worn lined one doorframe, relics of wards long dead. Rats skittered unseen through the dark, their claws whispering against stone.
Elias glanced around uneasily. "Lilith… this feels like the part in those old tales where the idiot gets gutted."
"Then stay behind me," Lilith said without looking back.
"I wasn't planning on doing otherwise," he muttered.
The air thickened the deeper they went, laced with the stench of mildew and something coppery beneath it—faint, but there. Chaos curled like frost in her veins, tugging harder now, threading her forward until the alley bent and broke open into a dead end.
And there she saw her.
Curled in on herself like a discarded shadow, a girl sat crouched against the alley wall. Her knees hugged her chest, bare feet cracked and dirtied. Her arms were too thin, as though hunger had gnawed at her for months. A thick black cloth was tied over her eyes, frayed at the edges and stained with soot. What caught Lilith's attention immediately, however, were the horns—long, ebony, and sweeping back above her skull, curling at the ends like dark ivory carved by time. Her ears, too, were long and pointed, elven in shape but not elven in spirit.
A dragonoid.
Lilith inhaled sharply.
She had read of them in the forbidden archives Caelum once let her glimpse—rare demi-human descendants of draconic bloodlines, persecuted almost as ruthlessly as Chaos followers. Many were thought extinct in the Empire's central lands.
This one... she was radiating Chaos magic.
Elias froze behind her, breath catching. "What... Is that..?"
"Quiet," Caelum murmured, one hand lifting slightly for silence. His other hovered near his blade, his body angled toward the dark beyond the alley mouth. Always calculating. Always watching.
Lilith moved forward slowly, her voice low and level. "Who are you?"
The girl stirred at the sound, head lifting fractionally though the blindfold stayed dark across her eyes. Her lips parted, and when she spoke, the words rasped like ash over stone.
"I heard Her voice," the girl whispered. "In the dark. She told me to wait. That someone would come. Someone like me... Someone who wouldn't leave me behind."
Lilith stilled. "Whose voice?"
"The… Goddess…" A shudder wracked the girl's frame, a tremor that seemed to hollow her further. "She said… someone would come."
Elias blinked, stepping closer despite Caelum's sharp glance. "What happened to you? Those… horns, and, are you hurt?"
The girl coughed, a dry, brittle sound, and the stench of iron sharpened as Lilith's gaze tracked the lines of bruises and welts striping her limbs. Whip marks, old and new. Shallow cuts caked with grime. And worse, the dark bloom of infection spreading from a torn gash at her side, angry and weeping.
"I escaped," the girl whispered. "From… them." Her head lolled faintly against the wall. "Chains… collars… slavers."
Lilith's jaw tightened. A thousand calculations spiraled cold behind her eyes; risks, costs, the weight of eyes watching from shadows if she lingered too long. This was not a tangle she needed, not now.
But then the girl shifted again, as if dredging strength from the marrow of her bones, and spoke with a raw certainty that cleaved through the rot of the alley.
"She told me you would come."
Lilith stilled. "The Goddess told you?"
The girl nodded, barely a dip of her head, but enough.
For a breath, the world pressed silent. Then Lilith exhaled once, a whisper of sound, and the decision crystallized in her voice like ice.
"Caelum."
"Yes, my lady?"
"She's coming with us."
Elias blinked hard. "What? Lilith, are you sure? I mean — look at her, she's half dead, and what if—"
"Enough, Elias," Lilith said softly, the tone brooking no argument. Her gaze cut to Caelum. "Can you carry her?"
"I can." His answer was quiet, absolute.
He sheathed his blade in a single smooth motion and stepped forward, crouching beside the girl. She flinched when his shadow fell, a shiver twitching through her starved frame, but his voice when it came was low and even, forged to soothe.
"You're safe now," he murmured. "Hold still."
She didn't fight when his arms slid beneath her, just a broken sigh as her weight settled against him, far too light for what she should have been. Her breath stuttered once, then fell to a shallow whisper, lashes fluttering beneath the blindfold before sinking closed.
"She's fainted," Caelum said, rising with fluid ease, the girl cradled against him as though carved from something fragile enough to break on air.
Lilith turned slightly, her gaze sweeping the alley's shadows, senses taut as wire. The chaos trace lingered like smoke, but thinner now, fading, or masked.
"Are we clear?" she asked without looking at him.
"Not entirely." His eyes skimmed the rooftops again, narrowing. "But no eyes I can pin down. If someone was here, they're gone."
"Then let's leave," Lilith said. "Quickly."
Caelum shifted his hold on the unconscious girl, his expression unreadable save for the cold, meticulous calculation in his gaze as it flicked once more to the empty dark. Whatever game this was, it had just changed.