By the time the sun began its slow, weary descent, painting the sky in hues of bruised purple and angry orange, the endless wasteland of rubble finally began to change.
The vast, desolate plains of shattered stone and void-ink-stained ruin gradually surrendered to the outer wards of Veyra City.
It rose from the broken world like a defiant, jagged crystal—a living monument to humanity's stubborn refusal to die after the Fall. Towering spires of pale chrome and smoked glass clawed at the bruised sky, their flanks etched with glowing runes that shimmered like living veins beneath translucent skin.
Sky-barges drifted between them on sigil-bound currents of wind, their lacquered hulls catching the dying light, while great arteries of woven mana pulsed between the spires in slow, breathing pulses of cobalt and rose, feeding the city's hunger from the cathedral-high reservoirs at its heart.
Down below, the streets churned with chaotic, vibrant life—a messy collision of the old world and the strange, miracle-bright thing humanity had cobbled together in its place.
Carriages glided through the air on whispering disks of bound wind, weaving past battered, smoke-belching wagons drawn by lumbering iron-hoofed grays that looked as if they'd survived three apocalypses and resented every fucking one of them.
Hawkers pushed floating carts that drifted a hand's breadthabove the cobblestones, calling out wares in every dialect of the surviving kingdoms—shimmering cubes of dream-fed bread that sparkled like captured stars, vials of essence promising borrowed strength, charms that swore on the bones of dead saints to ward off the soul-chill that crawled in from the wastes after dark.
Guild members in pristine white plate patrolled the crossings, their oath-staves glowing soft and ominous, ushering the crowds along with sharp gestures and the quiet.
'Well-fed authority of men who hadvenever gone hungry a day in their pampered fucking lives.'
Charlatans in colored silks shouted over one another, hawking miracle cures and relics dragged from the broken towers of the Old Bloodlines, half of them fakes and the other half cursed enough to peel the skin off a man who didn't know any better.
It was a city three generations after the Fall—humanity clinging desperately to its lost glories with one hand while reaching, white-knuckled and trembling, for the dangerous wonders of its strange new dawn.
Magic, powers, gifted, heroes, villains, awakened and the similar sorts had become the new normal.
Lanterns flickered beside drifting illusion-banners that sang their merchants' praises in honeyed voices, street minstrels coaxed weeping melodies from instruments strung with phoenix-hair, and barefoot children darted between the legs of the crowd while tiny hearth-spirits trailed at their ankles like loyal kittens, leaving little curls of perfumed smoke in the air behind them.
Lulu's head was on a swivel.
Her pained, limping steps were forgotten the moment the city swallowed them whole. Her one good eye, ringed with soot and old tears, had gone enormous beneath the scarf and she kept making these tiny, breathless sounds—half-gasp, half-laugh—every time something new caught the light.
A drifting illusion of a leaping silver fish above a fishmonger's stall.
A child no bigger than herself blowing a soap-bubble that hatched into a fluttering paper-winged sparrow and flew away into the gathering dusk.
A vendor's hearth-spirit hopping from cart to cart, lighting the candles in their lanterns with a pleased little chirp.
Pryce watched her watching all of it, and something in his chest, something he'd thought scarred over years ago, gave a small, traitorous ache.
He smiled. Couldn't fucking help it, soft at the edges.
"Easy there, shortstack," he murmured, steering her gently around a puddle of something that gleamed wrong in the torchlight. "Keep your eye that wide and a moonsprite's gonna mistake it for a window and try to move in. Then you'll be pissing fairy-dust for a week and blaming your big brother for not warning you."
She made another of those breathless little sounds, and he felt her press a fraction closer against his side.
Then she saw a girl, maybe a year or two older than Lulu, with wild silver hair whipping in the wind and hunter's leathers hugging an athletic frame, rode tall and easy through a crowded crossing on the back of a great storm-wolf.
The beast was big and looked dangerous and powerful muscles moving under it's skin—its powerful body sculpted from living thunder and pale, crackling lightning.
Its coat rippled like wind across a summer field, every strand a thread of soft white lightning. Its eyes burned twin and steady as captured stars, and faint sparks leapt and hissed along the length of its long fangs and flowing mane like fireflies caught in a rainstorm.
The girl sat the creature as if she'd been born on its back, one hand loose in the lightning of its mane, the other resting easy on the broad slope of its neck.
When she scratched behind one of its great ears, harmless little bolts of light skipped along her fingers and curled around her wrist like affectionate kittens. The wolf rumbled—a sound like distant thunder rolled in honey—and the girl tipped her head back and laughed, bright and fearless, the sound carrying clean across the square.
Lulu stopped dead.
Her one good eye filled with a longing so vast and so private that Pryce almost had to look away from it. Almost.
That was what she wanted. Not just to be made whole. Not just to outlive the next sunrise.
She wanted that—to ride tall through a city that had only ever ground her under its boot, to have a great and beautiful creature at her side that would die before it let her be hurt, to be more than the small, scared, half-burned thing who'd spent her whole short life hiding behind her brother's coat.
Pryce watched her watching the rider, and something proud and something mournful went to war inside his chest.
Pride won, by half a breath. He smiled again, slower this time, soft enough that the scarf hid most of it.
"By the Seventh Saint's sweaty fucking ball-sack," he muttered, because tenderness always tasted better wrapped in something sharp, "try not to drool on my only pair of trousers, Lu. They're already three battles past honest, and they were lying about the first one."
Lulu didn't answer right away. Her gaze stayed fastened to the silver-haired girl and her magnificent storm-wolf until the pair of them rounded a corner in a trailing veil of fading sparks and the soft, retreating hush of thunder.
"That's what I want," she said quietly, the scarf muffling the words but not the quiet fire underneath them. "Not just to be healed. Not just to live. I want… that."
Pryce's jaw tightened for the space of a heartbeat. Then the cocky grin slid back onto his face like a familiar piece of armor, well-oiled and battle-scarred and altogether his.
"Yeah, well, keep eye-fucking the local cavalry like that and our shiny new angel-tits boss is gonna get jealous. She's supposed to be our cosmic patroness, remember? Can't have you running off with the first pretty hellion who pulls up on a thunder-mutt the size of a granary.
"We'd never hear the end of the celestial bitching."
Lulu let out a small, pained laugh that ended in a wince, and Pryce hated the wince and treasured the laugh and tucked them both away somewhere deep where the bad days couldn't reach them.
"You're an idiot," she whispered.
"Guilty as charged, your honor. But I'm your idiot." He adjusted his grip on her, taking a little more of her weight onto the new, unfamiliar strength in his shoulders, and started them moving again, deeper into the bright belly of the beast.
"Come on, shortstack. Let's find the Guild house before you start begging strangers for riding lessons. We've got a celestial sugar-mama to check in with and a certain thunder-arsed cocksucker's tab to start collecting on."
She giggled into the scarf. He smiled down at the top of her grimy little head, and he let himself feel the small, fierce, terrible love of a man who had nothing left in this world but one half-burned little sister and the long red ledger of every bastard who'd ever made her cry.
Then he lifted his eyes back to the city, and the smile cooled at its edges.
He knew Veyra. Gods help him, he knew her too fucking well.
The shimmer of the rune-banners. The hush of the sky-barges. The fearless laughter of a silver-haired girl on a thunder-wolf.
All of it a beautiful, gilded skin stretched tight over something that had been rotting.
The streets bustled and sang around them, alive and noisy and altogether unaware of the two battered siblings limping through their midst.
One healed and already sketching, in the quiet back room of his skull, the long and patient list of improvements he intended to make to the world with a knife.
One still burned and aching but dreaming for the first time in her short little life of lightning wolves and a power that might one day be her own.
Pryce kept the grin plastered on for her sake.
Veyra City might glitter with wonder.
But he knew, down to the marrow of his angel-healed bones, how fast shiny things cracked once heroes started playing their pretty little games on top of them.
And this time, by every saint sweating in their heavens, he was through being collateral fucking damage.
He was the chosen blade of something far older, far hungrier, and far less merciful than the Guild of the Seven had ever dared to dream up in their worst, wettest nightmares.