The rain had stopped hours ago, but the city still held onto its damp breath. Water clung to the cobblestones, pooling in the dips and grooves like tired eyes refusing to close. My boots pressed against the slick ground, each step peeling away with a faint suction. Somewhere beyond the dark, a door slammed, its echo crawling between the buildings until it bled into the silence again.
The alleys here always felt older than the rest of the city — narrower, hunched forward like crooked shoulders. The kind of place where the weight of stone seemed more alive than the people who moved between it. I shouldn't have been here.
Not this deep, not at this hour. But the trail had led me down, and I was tired of turning away from trails.
The alley narrowed ahead, swallowing the light until only a single crooked lamp marked the bend. My footsteps echoed—faint, dampened—and for a moment I thought I heard another set matching mine. I stopped. So did they.
I was halfway down one of them when I heard it.
Not a sound that screamed for attention. Just… a shift. A scrape. Like someone dragging the edge of a boot across wet stone, slow and deliberate.
I didn't turn at first. My breath stayed steady, my eyes fixed forward. But my ears sharpened, sifting through the stillness.
There it was again. Closer.
I slid my hand into my coat pocket, my fingers brushing the cold metal edge of the small folding blade I kept there. The weight of it was grounding. The Wraithmark pulsed faintly beneath my shoulder blade. Not a glow yet—just the warm, restless pressure that meant something nearby was brushing against the fabric of Remnantry. The feeling was like a warning whispered too close to the ear.
The alley narrowed until the walls almost touched my shoulders. Old brick on the left, weathered limestone on the right — the stone seemed to sweat under my fingertips as I brushed past. I didn't know if it was condensation or if the city simply leaked at its seams.
When the sound came again, it wasn't from behind me. It was from above.
My eyes flicked up. A shadow shifted across a balcony ledge, just enough to suggest the outline of a figure before it was gone.
I moved faster.
The street ahead forked — left toward the quieter residential quarters, right toward the abandoned quarter the locals avoided. The air to the right was heavier, colder, as if it had been left untouched for longer than it should've. I took it anyway.
The sound followed.
This time, it wasn't a scrape. It was a footfall — the kind you feel as much as you hear. The faint tremor underfoot when someone heavier than they should be steps too close.
I glanced over my shoulder.
The alley was empty. But the darkness between the walls felt crowded.
I didn't stop. My boots hit the stone harder now, my pace just shy of a run. The air here smelled of iron and wet dust. Streetlamps were scarce — the few that still worked burned with a jaundiced yellow, casting misshapen shadows across the cracked walls.
Something moved in my peripheral vision.
I spun.
Nothing. Just a stretch of wall, the kind that looked more like a bruise than a structure.
Then —
A hand shot out from the darkness.
It didn't grab me. It brushed across my shoulder as it passed, almost casually — but the touch was cold enough to make my muscles lock. I turned fully, my hand on the blade in my pocket.
The figure was already walking past me, slow, head tilted down. Their coat trailed just above the wet stone, black and heavy, the edges fraying into threads that swayed with each step. They didn't look at me.
But when they passed under the nearest lamp, I saw it.
The glint of something beneath their collar — a mark. Not ink. Not scar. Something that seemed to catch light from nowhere at all.
My throat tightened. Wraithmark.
I followed.
The alley bent sharply to the right, the kind of corner where sound dies before it rounds with you. The figure moved with the unhurried confidence of someone who knew I'd follow no matter what.
The further we went, the more the stone beneath my boots changed. It stopped feeling like city pavement and began to feel like something older — uneven, ridged, almost breathing under the soles of my feet.
A faint tremor pulsed through it.
We broke into a wider space — a dead courtyard hemmed in by crumbling walls and collapsed archways. The figure stopped in the center.
For a long moment, neither of us spoke. The rainwater collected in shallow pools around us, reflecting fragments of the broken sky.
Then they turned.
Their hood fell back. The face beneath wasn't monstrous, but it wasn't… whole. Too pale, too sharp in some places and smoothed away in others, like it had been carved from memory rather than flesh. The Wraithmark burned faintly at the base of their neck, its lines shifting like restless veins.
"You shouldn't be here," they said, voice low but without urgency."
"I could say the same."
They tilted their head, studying me the way a predator might study the distance between themselves and their prey. My Wraithmark burned hotter. He wasn't human. Or at least… not entirely.
Then, without warning, they moved.
The first step was slow. The second, impossibly fast.
I barely had time to draw the blade before they were on me. Their hand closed around my wrist — the grip felt more like stone than skin. I twisted, the metal scraping their sleeve, and broke free just enough to step back.
The air thickened, my breath catching in my throat. The Wraithmark on their neck pulsed once — and the ground beneath us answered.
The cobblestones shifted.
No — not shifted. They rose. Slightly at first, then in uneven jerks, like something underneath was pressing against them.
They lunged again. This time I didn't dodge. I stepped into the movement, slamming my shoulder into their chest. They staggered back, their boots grinding against the wet stone.
The tremor underfoot deepened. The pools of water rippled outward in perfect rings.
Somewhere in that soundless moment between us, I realized the weight I felt beneath the stone wasn't the city's age or the rainwater's burden. It was something alive.
Something waking.
The figure's eyes flicked down. Not at my blade. At the ground.
They smiled — a thin, knowing thing — and let go of my wrist.
Then they stepped back into the shadows, vanishing like the damp air had swallowed them whole.
The tremor didn't stop.
It grew.
And beneath my boots, I felt the shape of something vast shifting just under the surface.
Then he lunged again. This time I let the Wraithmark flare. Heat surged through my back and down my arm, manifesting in a brief pulse of dark light that crawled across my forearm in jagged lines. I caught his wrist mid-swing, the contact sending a shudder up my arm. His skin was colder than the rain.
His eyes widened, just enough to break the trance-like calm he'd worn.
"You… bind," he breathed. "Then you're mine."
He twisted, unnaturally flexible, wrenching free and stepping back into the shadow.
I followed—maybe recklessly. My boots splashed through shallow puddles as I pressed forward, unwilling to lose sight of him.
The alley bent sharply, leading to a dead-end courtyard hemmed in by high, uneven walls. The shadowed man stood at its center, waiting, head tilted like a bird listening for prey.
Then he moved again, but not at me.
At the ground.
His palm struck the stones, and the world seemed to crack.
The courtyard floor fractured, not with sound but with silence—an absence of it so sharp it felt like pressure in my skull. Through the breaks in the stone, black strands began to writhe upward, slick and thin like the limbs of something that had been waiting too long in the dark.
Remnants.
My pulse hammered.
The Wraithmark surged again, heat crawling up the side of my neck. My body reacted before my mind caught up — I reached out, my hand cutting through the air in a jagged motion that felt half-instinct, half-memory. The strands recoiled, shuddering back as if burned, but more kept rising.
The man smiled. It was wrong on his face—too wide, too sharp.
"They like you," he said. "They can taste the stone on your soul."
I didn't know what that meant. I didn't care.
If the strands reached me, it wouldn't matter anyway.
The first of them lashed forward, aiming for my legs. I kicked off the nearest wall, using the momentum to spin past the strike and drive my shoulder into the man's chest. He staggered back, but the strands shifted direction, curling toward me again.
One brushed my boot, and an instant wave of cold bit up my leg. My breath caught. I slashed downward with the light from the Wraithmark—if it was even light, it was darker than the shadows themselves—and the strand split, dissolving into a fine black mist that hissed as it touched the rain.
The man's expression twisted—not in pain, but in hunger.
"You could feed them for years."
Something deep in my gut told me to end this now.
I drove forward, forcing him toward the wall, my free hand closing around the front of his coat. The Wraithmark's dark glow crawled higher up my arm, searing through the wet fabric between us.
For the first time, he screamed.
It was not a human sound.
The remnants convulsed, pulling back into the cracks. The courtyard shuddered once, and then the fractures in the stone sealed as if they'd never been there. The air warmed, just slightly.
The man went limp in my grip. His eyes rolled back, the strange hunger gone— replaced by emptiness. I let him drop to the stones, his body already fading at the edges like smoke. By the time he hit the ground, there was nothing left but the coat.
The mist closed in again, filling the courtyard with its cold quiet.
I stood there for a long moment, breathing hard, the Wraithmark cooling beneath my skin.
Something had changed.
Not just in me— though I could feel it there too, like a weight beneath the stone of my own body— but in the city. The air felt… aware.
And somewhere in that awareness, I knew this wouldn't be the last time I was followed.