### Chapter 16 – Shadows Speak
The palace walls had never felt so impenetrable. Obsidian towers rose high, guards patrolled ceaselessly, and every citizen bowed lower than the dust at Kael and Selara's feet. Yet on the fifteenth night after the burnings, something unexpected slipped through Draeven's silence.
Not fire. Not blades. Words.
By morning, the plazas and alley walls were covered in red paint: a handprint, simple and crude, smeared across stone. Beneath each mark was a message scrawled in ash:
**"Heroes do not butcher children."**
**"The crown is built on corpses."**
**"The Crimson Hand lives."**
Kael stood before one of the walls, silver eyes fixed on the dripping words. His jaw was rigid, but his silence carried the weight of fury. Around him, soldiers scraped desperately at the paint, but the more they tried to erase it, the more marks were discovered—on shop doors, on church walls, even on the gates of the palace itself.
Selara appeared at his side, her gown trailing through the ash-streaked street. Her eyes scanned the message, and for the first time in weeks, her smile faltered. It was not fear that touched her—it was rage. "They dare speak against us?" she whispered, her voice sharp as broken glass.
"It is not speech," Kael said coldly. "It is infection. And infection must be cut out before it spreads."
That day, executions were not hidden. They were parades. Suspected sympathizers were dragged through the streets, their mouths sewn shut before they were hanged. Entire households vanished into the dungeons, never to emerge. Yet even as blood pooled in the gutters, fresh handprints appeared the next morning.
Rennick and Liora had struck no blows, shed no blood—but their whispers had spread further than any dagger could reach. The people began to look at their rulers not with awe, but with loathing, buried deep beneath terror.
In the council hall, Kael's temper finally broke. He smashed his gauntleted fist onto the obsidian table, the sound echoing like thunder. "How do they slip past us? How do they paint the very walls beneath our eyes?"
Selara's fingers tapped the hilt of her dagger, her voice a purr laced with venom. "Because they are not warriors. They are rats. And rats breed in shadows."
From a hidden basement beneath the ruined shrine, Rennick whispered to his scattered allies, "We cannot fight them with swords. We fight them with truth. Every mark is a wound they cannot close."
Liora lit a small torch, pressing her palm into red paint before smearing it against the wall. The crimson handprint glowed in firelight, defiant. "Let them bleed themselves trying to silence us," she said softly.
That night, Kael and Selara stood on the palace balcony, staring at the city below. Torchlight revealed more red marks spreading across Draeven like a disease.
Selara's smile returned, but it was cold, hollow. "If they want shadows," she murmured, "then let us show them what lives in the dark."
Kael's silver eyes glowed with fury. "Then mercy dies again. And this time, we will burn even their whispers."
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