The snow was quiet around the ruined wall, almost too quiet, as though the city itself had swallowed every sound. Ashfall crouched near the remains of a half-collapsed barricade and pulled one of the last ration packs from his coat. He tore it open with the practiced motion of someone who had done it a thousand times before and chewed slowly, the taste flat and metallic.
Beside him, Calethia sat against the broken stone, her knees drawn up, her pistol resting across her lap. She was eating too, though slower, like she was half lost in thought. When she noticed him looking, she raised her head and offered a faint smile.
"Not much left," she said, her voice dry.
"There never is," Ashfall answered. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You ration enough to last, but somehow it's always less than you think."
She turned her gaze down to her own food, her fingers absently brushing against her left eye. Ashfall noticed the faint glint there, the subtle shift of the clock's hands within it. The hour hand had moved further along the circle than before.
"It's already at one," he muttered, nodding toward her eye.
Calethia blinked, a little startled. "You noticed."
"Hard not to," Ashfall said. His voice was flat, but his eyes lingered on hers. "It's not just decoration. Sooner or later, you're going to have to show me what it means."
She leaned back against the wall, her smile turning faintly amused. "Maybe sooner. But I'd rather show you when it counts. Easier than explaining."
Ashfall grunted, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. He had no interest in playing guessing games, but he understood the instinct to hold cards close to the chest. In this world, secrets were often the last shield a person had left.
When they had finished their rations, they rose again and began to move along the wall, searching for any sign of a passage. The wall was more wounded than whole, towers crumbled, sections shattered, but still it stretched on in massive, unbroken density. Every gap they found was either too narrow, filled with collapsed rubble, or so high they would waste half a day trying to climb.
The longer they walked, the more Ashfall felt the weight of the metropolis pressing down on him. The city wasn't simply big, it was overwhelming. A vast carcass of steel and stone that seemed to defy the scale of anything he had seen before. Every time the snow cleared, every time his eyes lifted above the ruined wall, he felt like he was staring not at buildings, but at broken mountains.
Hours passed before they came to it. A six-lane road, wide enough to swallow rivers of traffic, stretched out before them, smothered in snow. The road cut straight toward an entrance gate, the kind that once must have opened to the lifeblood of the city.
But what stopped Ashfall in his tracks wasn't the gate itself. It was the field of corpses along the way.
Rows of rosty cars sat abandoned, buried in ice, stacked and twisted as though something had piled them deliberately into heaps. Snow crept through broken windows and frozen engines. Between the cars, bones gleamed faintly in the pale light: human skeletons, curled into the seats, scattered on the ground, locked in positions that told stories no one had survived to finish.
Calethia slowed beside him, her breath catching. "The suburb didn't have this," she whispered. "No bodies. No bones. Just ruins."
"I noticed," Ashfall said. His hand slid down to the hilt of his knife, as though the bones themselves might rise. "Strange. People vanish out there, but here…" He gestured to the white-coated piles of bones. "Here they linger."
He felt the unease burrow into him deeper than he wanted to admit. Something about this wasn't just wrong; it was impossible. He turned and looked back the way they had come, at the plain of snow, the frozen river, the skeletal suburbs beyond. Nothing. No sign that this six-lane artery had ever led in that direction. It was as if the road existed only in one direction: into the metropolis.
Ashfall clenched his jaw. The world liked to twist itself into shapes that mocked memory. It took what had once been whole and cut it into fragments, erasing whatever it wanted. The Clock, the Stars, the Mythbornes, it all worked together to strip reason down until survival was the only language left.
They moved forward through the car graveyard, keeping their steps careful and quiet. The silence was unbearable. No Minor Mythbornes skittered in the shadows. No laughter echoed through the wind. Not a single sound but the crunch of their boots and the faint whistle of air through shattered glass.
"Too quiet," Ashfall murmured.
Calethia nodded, her pistol raised loosely at her side. "Feels like a trap."
"Everything is a trap," Ashfall said. "Sometimes you just don't see the teeth until they close."
When they finally reached the gate, Ashfall stopped again. The structure was massive, iron and concrete fused into one, its frame sagging but not yet destroyed. Rust streaked it like blood, but still it held, as if the city refused to open itself easily to the world.
He touched the gate with his gloved hand, running his fingers across the cold, corroded metal. For a moment he thought he could feel something beneath the surface, a faint hum, like a pulse buried under centuries of frost. He pulled his hand back quickly, not sure if it was real or his mind playing another trick.
They stepped through, passing under the gate into the shadow of the metropolis.
The air changed immediately. The wind howled through the streets, carrying with it not laughter, not screams, but emptiness. The city was a graveyard, and yet it wasn't. Towering skyscrapers lay in heaps, collapsed into one another like fallen giants, but many still rose high, their jagged edges scraping the sky. Snow buried everything: cars abandoned in mid-turn, broken glass glittering like stars beneath the ice, staircases that led nowhere.
But no Mythbornes. No twisted flesh, no watchers in the distance, no whispers behind the wind.
Calethia turned slowly, her face pale, her voice barely more than breath. "Where is everyone?"
Ashfall scanned the ruins, his hand tightening on his weapon. He could feel it pressing at the back of his skull, that wrongness that always came before the world shifted again.
Something is off. Not just unusual, not just dangerous... impossible.
And impossibility in this world always meant one thing: They weren't alone.