The rains did not reach the Marches.
They hung, instead, like a curtain at the border—a trembling line in the sky where the civilized world ended and something older began. Beyond it lay only breathless stillness, heat, and the low chorus of insects chewing their way through everything still soft enough to yield.
The Toxic Marches were not truly a swamp. They were a memory of one—rotted trees sagged on their knees in water that no longer flowed, while vines black as oil stitched the sky to the earth. The air tasted of copper and sulfur. Here, even the light was wrong: green-tinged, directionless, and always damp.
Zeyr Vol moved through it like a man moving through his own dream.
Each footstep sank a little, hissed, and pulled free again with a sound like teeth parting from flesh. He had discarded his silks and mask upon re-entry, shedding them beneath a hollowed-out bramble tree whose roots still whispered old names. Now he wore only a sleeveless robe of stiffened reeds dyed dark green, cinched at the waist by a length of braided cord. His scales, exposed to the air, glistened with the faint film of natural toxin that had begun to exude from his pores the moment he stepped across the veil.
Behind him, a figure struggled to keep pace.
"Zeyr!" came the breathless voice. "Must we always—walk in silence?"
He stopped without turning.
The woman who emerged from the undergrowth was tall and whip-thin, her hair shaved on one side and bound in silver cords on the other. Her skin was the color of antique pearl, and her eyes were hidden behind lenses of smoked glass. Eila Mournblade, mistress of knives and second of the Sect, cursed as she scraped thick resin off the blade of her boot.
"You brought a storm to the capital," she said as she caught up. "Bold. Wasteful. Beautiful, yes, but reckless."
Zeyr finally turned. "Not wasteful."
"They were minor nobility."
"They were the archiver bloodline," he said. "The Briarwoods held the last surviving catalog of celestial rites predating the Sun Choir's dominance. That house wrote the ceremony that killed Aeryn. Now it's erased."
Eila raised a single brow. "So it's Aeryn again."
Zeyr didn't answer.
They came upon the Veiled Root, a tree so massive it obscured the sun entirely. It was not dead, though its bark was peeling in strips and its trunk split down the center. From the fissure glowed a faint blue-green light, pulsing in time with some unseen heartbeat.
Zeyr passed beneath its limbs and laid a hand on the bark.
It did not resist.
It opened.
The fissure widened like lips parting, revealing a tunnel of slick roots winding downward, luminescent mushrooms pulsating like lungs along the walls. A single step echoed too long inside the passage. Eila followed him without a word now—her mocking tone gone, replaced by a stiffness in her shoulders.
At the end of the descent, they emerged into the Chamber of Petals, where the Sect trained.
If the empire saw them, they would call it a cult. Perhaps it was.
Dozens moved across the floor, each pair locked in vicious but graceful combat: bare hands painted with diluted venom, bodies flickering in fluid strikes that targeted veins, eyes, spines. They wore no uniforms—only green wrappings and bone charms. Some sparred. Some chanted. Some lay in meditative poses with mushrooms growing from their arms or legs, symbiotic.
As Zeyr entered, the motion stilled.
One by one, each student fell to their knees, pressing foreheads to the warm, moss-covered floor.
He passed through them in silence, hands clasped behind his back, until he reached the altar. Upon it lay a bowl of black water and a spine carved with symbols. He dipped a claw into the water, then touched the spine. The symbols flared.
"Who among you has completed the Trial of Stillness?" he asked, voice low.
A youth stood. Her arms were scarred with fine incisions. Her eyes were bloodshot, but her face calm.
"I sat beneath the Rotshade tree for three nights," she said. "I did not move. The flies laid eggs in my cheek. I let them hatch."
Zeyr nodded once.
"You may speak your poison."
The girl stepped forward, removed a thorned needle from her hair, and pressed it against her palm. A single drop of black fluid emerged, suspended on the tip.
"Cloth rot," she said. "Applied to silk or velvet, it renders the wearer hallucinating with guilt and ancestral shame. Victims beg for confession."
Zeyr tilted his head. "What did you sacrifice?"
"My sister. I used her voice to ferment the mixture."
He turned to Eila. "Inscribe her. Give her a name."
Eila smiled faintly. "It will be done."
A cheerless kind of pride rippled through the chamber. The student returned to her place, leaving the thorn behind.
Later, when the chamber was empty, Eila joined Zeyr at the observation ledge overlooking the training floor. They watched as acolytes swept up shed skin and dried blood.
"She is strong," Eila said.
"She will die early," Zeyr replied. "Her poisons are too attached to memory. She'll be undone by guilt, or nostalgia."
"She reminds me of you."
Zeyr's jaw tensed. "Do not romanticize me."
"You're the one poisoning palaces in love's name."
"I did it in hate's name. Love only delayed me."
Eila laughed, dry and low. "You're exhausting."
She leaned on the ledge beside him, close enough that her arm brushed his.
"She'll be at the rites tomorrow," Eila said after a beat. "Aeryn. The Choir parades her now. A doll with a holy battery. You want to see her again."
Zeyr did not respond. But his eyes flicked toward the floor. A drip of green sweat slid down his brow and hissed on the stone.
"She's not your lover anymore, Zeyr. She's a divine meat lantern. You'll break yourself open for her."
Zeyr turned to her. "She was never mine."
Eila didn't flinch. "Then why do you keep bleeding?"
He looked away.
Below them, two acolytes resumed sparring, sweat flying from their limbs in arcs as they twisted and dove in silence, mimicking the duel between past and present that neither Zeyr nor Eila would name aloud.
"She spoke to me once," Zeyr murmured.
Eila tilted her head. "When?"
"When I was dead."
Eila blinked behind her dark lenses. The air shifted.
"Yasshal dragged me into his roots. Crushed the breath from my lungs. I saw her—Aeryn—walking across the water's surface. Barefoot. Her eyes full of fire. She didn't weep. She didn't call my name. She just said: 'Don't come back like this.'"
Eila folded her arms.
"And you didn't listen."
"No."
"You never do."
Silence again.
A bell sounded—deep, resonant, and throbbing with fungal spores that puffed from the walls. The day's rites had ended.
Zeyr stepped away from the ledge.
"I leave at dawn."
"Alone?" Eila asked.
He did not answer.
She watched him disappear into the mouth of the side tunnel, the glow of his poison glands fading like a lantern swallowed by fog.
When she was alone, Eila unsheathed a slender dagger from the back of her boot and carved a fresh mark into the wood rail.
A tally.
The count of how many times she'd watched him walk away.
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