Kael climbed down from the watchtower after the bells fell silent.
Silence was worse than screaming.
The streets of Brinefall were a ruin of salt-dusted stone and collapsed timber. Fires burned where oil had spilled, their flames low and sickly, as if even fire feared the dead. Bodies lay everywhere some torn apart, some untouched, all abandoned. The smell was copper and brine and something older, like a tomb cracked open.
Kael kept his eyes on the ground as he moved, not out of respect, but fear. Every corpse felt like it was watching him now. After what he had seen after the candlelight glow inside the dead man's chest he no longer trusted his own senses.
His spear scraped against stone as he walked. He did not remember picking it up.
A shape twitched near a fallen market stall.
Kael froze, heart hammering, breath loud in his ears. The dead had been moving with purpose at the gate, but these...these were the leftovers. The broken ones. The ones that hadn't been needed for the march.
The corpse dragged itself forward, one leg missing below the knee. Its jaw hung loose, teeth clicking softly. When it lifted its head, Kael saw the same pale fire inside it.
The hunger returned.
It wasn't like normal hunger. It didn't start in the stomach. It bloomed behind his eyes, clawed down his spine, curled around his heart. Every instinct screamed at him to step closer, to take.
"No," he whispered.
The corpse hissed, a wet, bubbling sound, and lunged.
Kael reacted without thought. He drove the spear down through its chest. Bone cracked. The body spasmed, then went still.
But the light didn't fade.
It hovered there, just above the ruined flesh, a flickering shard of something not meant to be seen.
Kael stared at it, trembling.
I'm not a monster, he told himself.
The soul pulsed.
He reached out before he could stop himself.
The moment his fingers touched the light, it collapsed inward rushing into him like breath after drowning. Kael screamed as the world shattered.
Memories that were not his tore through his mind: a woman salting fish at dawn, a boy laughing with broken teeth, the ache of hunger that never quite left. Then pain...sharp, final, absolute.
And then...
Power.
Kael fell to his knees, gasping. His vision burned white, then cleared. The corpse crumbled into true death, flesh sagging into emptiness.
The hunger was gone.
So was something else.
Kael pressed a hand to his chest, expecting to feel his heart racing. Instead, there was a strange calm. Too calm. The fear that should have followed, the horror, the guilt felt distant, muffled, like a sound heard underwater.
He tried to remember the dead man's face.
He couldn't.
Kael staggered to his feet.
Around him, the city groaned as the last fires died. In the distance, the dead marched east, banners trailing like funeral shrouds. Brinefall was no longer a city. It was a carcass.
Kael wiped blood from his hands and began to scavenge.
Boots from one body. A half-full water skin from another. Bread so hard it cracked when he bit it, but still edible. He worked quickly, methodically, avoiding faces.
Each time he passed a corpse, he saw it now the faint glow, some brighter than others. Some dim, barely clinging to existence.
He did not touch them.
By the time the sun dipped low, Kael had filled his pack and lost track of how many bodies he'd stepped over. Salt crunched beneath his boots, mixed with bone fragments ground fine by marching feet.
At the eastern edge of the city, he stopped and looked back.
Brinefall had survived tides, raiders, and famine.
It had not survived abandonment.
Kael turned away and walked into the wastes, carrying stolen food, a stolen spear, and a stolen soul.
Behind him, the city cooled.
Inside him, something watched and waited.