The horns began before the soldiers regrouped.

  The sound rolled across Varenthol in sharp, deliberate bursts, echoing from tower to tower. Signal fires flared along distant rooftops, answering in sequence.

  Seris’s stomach dropped.

  “They’re calling the whole district,” she rasped.

  The bond tightened, but not in panic. In decision.

  Move.

  The Harrower turned from the broken street and strode into a side thoroughfare without hesitation. Shadows peeled from his armour in long, controlled ribbons, sweeping debris aside rather than exploding outward.

  Seris stumbled after him as the tether snapped taut, dragging her into motion. Behind them, Imperial soldiers flooded back into the ruined intersection, but they did not charge blindly this time.

  They spread.

  “Seal the north gate!”

  “Wards on the high ground!”

  “Cut off the canal routes!”

  They weren’t attacking. They were containing.

  A flare of white-gold light ignited across a distant rooftop, shaped like a lattice. It shimmered into place over the street ahead like a descending cage. Seris saw it a heartbeat before he did.

  “Left!” she gasped.

  For the first time, she pulled. It felt like grabbing hold of a falling star.

  The bond resisted, immense and grinding, then shifted just enough. The Harrower adjusted his stride mid-step, turning down a narrower lane as the ward slammed into place behind them with a thunderous crack.

  The shockwave chased at their backs.

  Seris nearly collapsed.

  But he did not slow.

  Behind them, an Inquisitor’s voice rang clear and cold:

  “She is the anchor! Separate them!”

  Her blood ran cold. So that was the plan. Not to kill him.

  To take her.

  The bond reacted before fear could fully form, compressing, hardening, wrapping around her spine like iron bands.

  You are not taken.

  Imperial soldiers surged from intersecting streets, shields raised. Instead of charging the Harrower, they angled toward her.

  She was the weakness.

  One broke formation and lunged, but Seris didn't think.

  She reached; not wildly nor with blind terror, but with precision born of desperation.

  Necrotic frost lashed across the cobblestones in a sharp crescent. The front line stumbled as ice crawled over greaves and locked their joints in place. They were frozen.

  The Harrower noticed. For a flicker of a second, she felt something in the bond shift.

  Useful.

  Heat flushed her face despite the chaos. “I am not your weapon,” she shot back through the tether. But she ran.

  Ahead, the street narrowed toward an arched market bridge spanning a lower canal road. Above it, more light flared, a second containment lattice forming.

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  “They’re herding us,” she realised.

  Yes.

  The answer came without hesitation. Rage spiked through her. “You’re letting them?”

  No.

  Understanding followed, cold and vast. They think they choose the ground.

  The Harrower accelerated. Behind them, boots thundered in disciplined rhythm. The Empire no longer shouted in panic. Instead they moved like a closing fist.

  A bolt of concentrated light speared down from a rooftop, striking the cobbles at the Harrower’s feet. The impact cratered stone, radiating sanctified energy designed to fracture necrotic constructs. He staggered half a step.

  Pain ripped through Seris’s chest in echo.

  Another bolt charged.

  She looked up and saw the focusing prism mounted atop the bell tower, priests channeling in coordinated formation.

  “They’ll pin you,” she breathed.

  Then she made a choice.

  Instead of following the bond’s forward pull, she twisted sideways and slammed her frost-slicked palm against the canal wall. Necrotic energy flooded downward, seeping into old mortar, into the ancient supports beneath the bridge.

  The structure groaned.

  The Harrower understood instantly.

  Shadows surged upward, reinforcing the weakened struts for a single heartbeat —

  — then withdrew.

  The bridge collapsed just as the second light-bolt fired.

  Stone and timber cascaded into the canal road in a deafening avalanche. The sanctified blast detonated harmlessly into falling rubble. Priests shouted in fury as their line of sight vanished beneath dust and smoke.

  The Empire’s advance broke. Seris dropped to one knee, vision swimming.

  “That won’t stop them long,” she choked.

  It does not need to.

  He turned. Not in the way she had expected - to the city's edge or to a new hiding place. Instead, downward. Towards the old districts. Her breath caught.

  “No.”

  Even before she saw it, she knew.

  The half-collapsed archway waited at the end of the sloping road, choked in shadow and rot. The old underways. The burial tiers beneath Varenthol. The places abandoned after the plague decades ago.

  The Empire did not patrol there, because they'd already sealed it.

  You know this place.

  It wasn’t a question. She had grown up hearing the stories. Bodies stacked in limestone corridors when the pyres overflowed. Whole families entombed when the sickness spread too fast.

  “It’s unstable,” she whispered.

  It is forgotten.

  Behind them, horns shifted pitch, closer now. A new signal. The containment ring began closing. A squad of Inquisitors rounded the far end of the street, armor blazing with interlocking wards. This unit did not hesitate. They advanced directly toward her.

  “Separate the anchor!” one commanded.

  The bond convulsed. The Harrower stepped in front of her fully for the first time since the street, shielding her.

  Shadows condensed into a dense wall as sanctified chains hurled forward. They struck the barrier and recoiled in showers of light.

  Seris stared at his back, at the impossible breadth of him.He could turn and annihilate them there and then.

  The bond pulsed with the temptation.

  End them.

  She felt the calculation in him. The city. The soldiers. The escalating response. Total devastation was within reach.

  Her voice broke.

  “If you do that, they’ll never stop hunting us.”

  A pause.

  Then the shadows thinned. He chose movement over massacre.

  Forward, Seris.

  The bond yanked tight again, with urgency.

  They ran for the archway as another wave of light hammered into the street behind them. Stone liquefied under the impact. The Inquisitors advanced through their own devastation without flinching..

  Seris crossed the threshold first—

  —and something whistled through the dark.

  A sanctified chain snapped around her ankle.

  The force ripped her off her feet and dragged her backward across stone. Pain exploded up her leg as she clawed at the ground, fingers scraping uselessly against dust and broken rock.

  “Anchor secured!” someone shouted.

  The Harrower turned with a violence that seemed to split the air. Shadows condensed into razor-thin precision and sliced through the sanctified chain. Light burst like a dying star.

  But another hook was already flying.

  It struck her shoulder, searing through cloth and skin. The pull wrenched her halfway back into the street. For one sickening heartbeat, the bond stretched, thinned.

  Threatened to tear.

  The Harrower stepped forward and caught her, seizing the back of her armour and hauling her bodily against his chest as sanctified spears slammed into the archway around them.

  He hauled her backward across the threshold as sanctified spears shattered against stone. The air changed instantly; damp, cold, thick with the smell of old earth and something far worse. Sound swallowed itself in the narrow corridor beyond. The Harrower followed, ducking beneath fractured stone as the entrance shuddered.

  An Inquisitor’s voice echoed from outside:

  “Collapse the access! Now!”

  Shadows lashed upward. The Harrower drove both hands into the arch supports.

  “Wait—” Seris gasped.

  But it was too late. The entrance caved inward in a controlled implosion, sealing them beneath tons of rubble just as sanctified light flared at the threshold.

  Darkness swallowed everything. Silence followed.

  Seris swayed, lungs burning in stale air. The bond did not strain now. It hummed; steady. Focused.

  A faint tremor ran through the stone beneath their feet, deeper tunnels settling in response to the collapse. Behind them, muffled through layers of stone, the Empire’s horns continued to sound; frustrated, circling, contained above ground.

  Down here, there were no wards. No priests, no sky.

  Only the dead.

  The Empire thought they were driving a monster into hiding, but they were wrong.

  He was going home.

  And he had brought her with him.