The drums never stopped.
They rolled across the wasteland in relentless waves, echoing off the broken ridges and rattling the cracked stones beneath her boots. The sound didn't just fill the air—it lived there. It thudded against her ribs, crawled up her spine, and made the ground itself feel alive.
Aria ran.
Each breath tore through her throat. Her lungs burned, raw and heavy. Sweat stung her eyes and turned the dust on her skin to grit. Every step landed out of rhythm, her boots slapping against the earth, but the drums swallowed even that.
She wanted to stop. Just for a heartbeat. Just long enough to breathe.
But the bond wouldn't let her.
Every time her body wavered, it pulled her upright again—Lysander's strength threading through her exhaustion, his will a hard, steady pulse inside her chest. The connection between them pulsed like an iron cord, dragging her forward even when her own muscles screamed for mercy.
Yet through that same link she felt it—his fatigue. The tremor hidden beneath the calm. His pulse hammering too fast. His exhaustion bleeding into hers like a second heartbeat.
And that scared her.
Because even he was slowing.
The thought cut through her haze like a knife of cold water. Lysander was built for endurance, forged by something cruel and precise. But he wasn't infinite. No one was.
The Crimson Blades knew it too.
They weren't chasing wildly. They were driving.
The rhythm of the drums was too measured, too deliberate. Each beat was a signal. Each pause a message. They were closing the circle, and every step Aria took only tightened the snare.
When the first horn sounded—a long, low wail that crawled through the wind and sank beneath her skin—she stumbled. Pain flared under her ribs where a bruise had already bloomed.
The sound wasn't random. It was a command.
Her panic spiked through the bond before she could stop it.
Lysander's reply came rough and steady. "I know. They're herding us."
His voice should have calmed her. It didn't.
The way he said it—quiet, sure, resigned—told her everything. He had expected this. He had planned for it. Which meant it was worse than she'd imagined.
The wasteland stretched before them like a scarred memory, all jagged ridges and hollow scars. The moonlight spilled over the ruins, catching on twisted frames that might once have been towers or the bones of giants. The air shimmered faintly with heat that had no source, carrying the whisper of magic long dead.
Aria's chest heaved. She risked a glance at Lysander.
He looked carved from shadow. Tall, silent, his face streaked with dust and blood that gleamed silver under the moon. His hands were slick, his breathing shallow. Yet his eyes stayed fixed on the horizon.
The bond hummed with his focus—sharp, cutting, impossible to ignore. It anchored her even as it frightened her.
Don't fall apart, she told herself. Not when he's still fighting to keep you standing.
But the tremor in her legs wouldn't stop. The fire in her throat wouldn't fade. The exhaustion wasn't only in her body; it ran deeper, lodged somewhere between fear and fury.
And still the drums followed.
They came again, closer now. Louder. The ridges threw the echoes back in jagged pieces until the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Aria flinched, teeth clenching. For a moment her vision blurred, and through the haze she thought she saw movement—dark figures slipping across the ridgelines, torches winking in and out. Watching. Waiting.
Her stomach twisted.
"We'll never outrun them," she whispered.
Lysander stopped so suddenly she nearly collided with him. His arm shot out, catching her wrist and dragging her into the shadow of a broken ridge.
His voice was low, calm. "Then we don't."
"They'll expect us to keep running," Lysander said.
His voice barely rose above the whisper of the wind. Around them, the ruins were still—bones of an old world rising like broken teeth against a pale horizon. The moon hung low, bleeding through the clouds.
Aria pressed a hand to her ribs, forcing her breathing steady. "And if we don't?"
He looked at her. The faint light caught the edges of his expression—sharp, unreadable, but not cold. Never cold. "Then we make them guess wrong."
The words sat between them for a moment, heavy and impossible.
Her mind fought to piece sense through the exhaustion, but all she could hear were the drums echoing somewhere far behind. She knew what he meant. It wasn't about fighting or surrender. It was about control. Turning panic into purpose.
Lysander crouched near a cracked pillar, tracing lines in the dust with his gloved finger. The patterns he drew looked deliberate—geometric, old, maybe ritualistic. Aria couldn't tell if it was strategy or instinct.
"We move east," he murmured. "Through the outer ruins. There's cover. And if we're lucky, they'll split their line trying to flank."
She swallowed, throat raw. "Lucky hasn't really been our thing lately."
That earned a flicker of a smile. Small. Almost human. "Then we make our own."
Something in his tone steadied her. The bond between them hummed, faint but certain, carrying his resolve through her chest like a low heartbeat. She didn't trust the world, not anymore. But she trusted that sound.
Still, doubt lingered in the spaces silence filled.
"Lysander," she said quietly, "how many of them do you think are out there?"
He didn't look up. "Enough to make us wish we hadn't stopped running."
Her laugh was short, bitter, and too tired to be real. "That's comforting."
He rose, brushing dust from his palms. "Comfort doesn't keep you alive."
"Neither does your kind of honesty," she shot back.
His gaze lifted to hers then, slow and deliberate. For a heartbeat the air between them seemed to still—like even the wind was waiting.
The bond shivered.
And in that quiet exchange, she understood it wasn't anger that hardened him. It was fear—buried deep, silent, unspoken. Fear of failing, of losing, of what would happen if that bond ever broke.
He finally spoke, softer now. "Aria. When this starts again, stay close. If the bond flickers, you stop—no matter what."
She frowned. "That's not how—"
"Promise me."
The words weren't sharp this time. They were heavy. Pleading.
She opened her mouth to argue, but something in his eyes stopped her.
"…Fine." The word came out smaller than she intended. "But only if you stop treating me like I'll break."
He looked away, jaw tight. "You already have."
The silence after that was too loud.
They didn't speak again for a long time. The ruins around them whispered and shifted as the wind moved through the hollow bones of ancient towers. A flicker of dawn began to touch the edge of the horizon—a gray light crawling slowly over the broken earth.
When they finally moved, it was wordless.
Side by side, their steps fell into rhythm. Every motion practiced, every breath shared. The bond thrummed steady between them, thin but alive, a thread of defiance pulled taut across the emptiness.
Somewhere behind, the drums began again.
But for now, in that fragile stretch of silence, they allowed themselves to believe it was enough.
The Crimson Blades had found them.
Aria felt it first—the shiver in the bond, the air tightening around her skin, the way the earth seemed to listen. Then came the sound: the scrape of metal, the whisper of boots through ash, the faint click of crossbows being drawn.
Lysander was already moving.
He grabbed her arm, yanking her behind the fractured shell of a wall just as the first arrow sliced through the air. It struck stone, splintering into silver dust.
"Left ridge," he hissed.
Aria spun toward it, fingers outstretched. The bond pulsed, and energy surged through her veins—burning, electric, alive. The spell came raw, unrefined, but strong enough to shatter the ridge's edge. Screams echoed as figures fell in a rain of dust and crimson light.
"Two more," Lysander said, already advancing.
She followed. The bond steadied her, kept her from collapsing under the weight of what she'd just done. There was no time to think—only movement.
A shadow lunged from the debris, twin blades glinting. Lysander met it head-on. His sword flashed, catching the faint morning light, and the sound of steel on steel split the air. Sparks scattered between them like stars.
Aria ducked another swing, rolled, and came up with a dagger she didn't remember drawing. The world had shrunk to rhythm—the strike, the breath, the heartbeat. Everything else was gone.
For every Blade they felled, two more appeared. The air thickened with dust and the metallic tang of blood.
They're too many. The thought pulsed through the bond before she could hide it.
Lysander's answer came as a single, jagged breath. Then we end it fast.
He broke away, dragging energy through the link so abruptly that she gasped. The world around him blurred, his movements faster, heavier, almost desperate. He moved like a storm barely contained—each strike a fracture in the air itself.
The Crimson Blades faltered.
Aria pressed her hand against the earth, pouring everything she had left into a pulse of force that rippled outward. The ground cracked. The nearest arch collapsed, swallowing three of them in a cloud of dust and flame.
The noise was deafening.
And then—silence.
Not the quiet of peace, but the kind that comes after something breaks.
Aria stood in the haze, her chest heaving, the taste of iron sharp on her tongue. Her vision wavered. The link between them flickered, weak and dim.
"Lysander," she breathed.
He was still standing—barely. His sword hung loose at his side, the edge stained dark. Blood ran down his forearm, dripping into the dust. When he turned toward her, his eyes looked wrong—too bright, too distant.
She stumbled to him, catching his shoulder before he could fall. "You idiot," she whispered. "You were supposed to—"
"Stay alive?" His laugh came out rough, breathless. "I'm trying."
Her hands tightened around his wrist. The bond trembled, unstable. "You can't just burn through the link like that. You'll—"
He shook his head, cutting her off. "You felt it too. If we hadn't—"
She didn't want to hear the rest.
Behind them, the ruins still smoked. The world felt smaller now, as if the fight had taken pieces of it away. The morning light began to push through the dust—thin, gold, almost gentle.
Aria exhaled slowly. Her hands were shaking. His were, too. But when their fingers brushed, the bond steadied. Warmth spread through the static, quiet and fragile.
Lysander's voice came low, almost a whisper. "They won't stop."
"I know."
He looked past her, toward the horizon where the sun was rising over the wasteland. His jaw clenched. "Then we don't, either."
Aria followed his gaze, the air between them still humming with exhaustion and something heavier—something that might have been hope.
For the first time since the night began, the drums were gone.
Only the wind moved now, threading through the ruins like a memory that refused to fade.
Aria closed her eyes. The bond flickered once, then settled—tired, steady, alive.
It felt like a promise.