Read Chapter 17: The City of No Feeling

Dawn came gray and wet, the road to Veyren a ribbon of mud between empty fields. Elara walked with her hood up, arms wrapped around herself, though the morning was not cold. The void inside her hummed like a struck bell, faint but constant, and she had not slept since the alley.

Dain kept pace beside her, silent. He had not asked about the locket again after she’d told him she found it in a market stall, years ago, and had worn it without knowing its owner. The lie sat in her throat like a stone she could not swallow. Every step toward Veyren made it heavier.

"There," Dain said, pointing.

The city rose from the mist like a gray tooth. Veyren. It was smaller than Ravensmoor, its walls older, its towers round and squat. But it was the smoke that caught her attention—thin, gray plumes rising from chimneys, steady and uniform, as if the entire city breathed on a schedule.

They passed through the gate unchallenged. No guards. No toll. The gatehouse stood open, the portcullis raised halfway, rusted in place. Inside, the streets were clean. Too clean. No litter, no mud, no leaves blown by wind. The cobblestones gleamed as if scrubbed by hand that very morning.

"Where is everyone?" Dain murmured.

They were not alone. That was the worst of it.

A baker stood in his doorway, hands dusted with flour, a loaf half-shaped on the board behind him. He did not move. His eyes faced the street, but they saw nothing—fixed, glassy, like painted marbles. A woman knelt at a well, bucket in hand, frozen mid-pull. A child sat on the step of a shuttered house, a wooden horse in his lap, his mouth slightly open. No tears. No expression at all.

Elara approached the baker. She raised a hand in front of his face. Nothing. No blink, no flinch. His chest rose and fell in slow, even breaths.

"They're alive," she said, "but they're not here."

Dain moved past her, checking doorways, pressing fingers to necks. "Pulse is steady. Skin is warm." He straightened, jaw tight. "This is what she did. What Maren did. She didn't drain them—she took something else. The will to feel."

Elara's own void stirred, almost hungrily, at his words. She pressed a hand to her sternum, forcing it down. *You could take it from them,* the voice whispered. *You could give it back. All of it. You could be the cure.*

She shook her head, hard enough that Dain glanced at her.

"You all right?"

"Fine." She forced a smile. "Just tired."

He did not believe her. She could see it in the way his eyes lingered on her hand, still pressed to her chest. But he let it go.

They moved deeper into the city. Every street was the same: people frozen in the middle of ordinary lives, their faces wiped clean. A market square with stalls untouched, fruit ripening on the counters. A blacksmith with a hammer raised, mid-strike, the metal on the anvil cooling to gray. A priest at the door of a small chapel, hand raised in blessing over a congregation that had never received it.

The silence was the worst. No birds. No dogs. No sound of labor or laughter. Just the whisper of wind through dead air and the soft, even breathing of a thousand hollow people.

"We need to find someone who knows what happened here," Dain said. "A survivor. A record. Something."

"The church." Elara pointed to a spire rising above the rooftops, taller than the others. "Any city like this keeps records in its consecrated hall. If the creature has been here, there will be evidence."

It took them twenty minutes to reach the cathedral. The doors were open, hanging crooked on their hinges. Inside, pews lay overturned. Candles had burned down to stubs, wax pooled and hardened. But the altar was intact, and on it sat a book—leather-bound, thick, open to a page marked with a ribbon of faded red silk.

Dain reached it first. He read in silence, his face growing harder with each line. Then he turned the book toward her.

"Plague records," he said. "From fourteen years ago. The year Maren died. Veyren had an outbreak of the same sickness that took my sister."

Elara's blood went cold. She looked at the page. The handwriting was neat, clerical. Lists of names, dates, symptoms. Fever. Numbness. Unusual passivity. And then a single marginal note, cramped and hurried:

*Herbal remedy insufficient. Supply of soulflower exhausted. Will not hold the tide.*

"Soulflower," she breathed.

"Old healer's remedy," Dain said. "Rare. Grows only in places where death has been violent. Battlefields, plague pits, execution grounds. The healers of my order used it to draw out spiritual corruption." He paused. "It's not a cure for the soul-eater's touch. But it might slow the process. Give the body a chance to purge the void on its own."

"Where do we find it?"

Dain closed the book. "The plague pit would be east of the city, outside the old wall. But we have a problem."

He pointed through the chapel's broken window. Beyond the rooftops, at the city's edge, a shape stood motionless in the distance—a tall, thin figure, pale as bone, watching the gates with the patience of stone.

"It's still out there," he said. "It's not leaving."

Elara looked at the creature, then down at her own hands. The skin around her fingernails had begun to pale, to lose color, like frost creeping over a window. The void hummed in her ears, eager, pressing against the inside of her skull.

*Let it see you,* the voice purred. *Let it feel what you've become. It will flee. You'll be free.*

"No," she said aloud.

Dain turned. "What?"

"I said no." She pulled the hood lower, hiding her hands. "We need the soulflower. But I can't cross the pit alone. The creature—" She hesitated. "It recoiled from me before. I don't know why. But if I go out there, it might follow me, and it might not stop until we know."

Dain studied her for a long moment. "You didn't tell me everything about Ravensmoor."

"I didn't have time."

"You have time now."

Elara met his eyes. The lie she'd told about the locket sat between them. She could tell him the rest—about the woodcutter, about her healing, about Maren. But the void whispered, *Not yet. He needs you whole. He needs you strong. The truth will break him, and then you will both die.*

"I absorbed part of it," she said instead. "One of its victims, it had already hollowed him. I pulled the void out of him into myself. It hurt the creature. Burned it." She showed her hands. "It's changing me. But if it can hurt the creature, maybe we can use that. Maybe I'm the weapon we need."

Dain was silent a long time. Then he nodded slowly, the words settling in him.

"We get the soulflower first. You're no weapon if you lose yourself before we reach the fight." He moved to the chapel door, scanning the street. "The plague pit is half a mile east. We'll take the alleyways, stay out of sight. If the creature moves, we move faster."

He looked back at her. "And Elara?"

"Yes?"

"When this is over, I want the truth. The whole truth. About Ravensmoor. About the locket. About what you're hiding." His voice was quiet, but it had iron in it. "You owe me that."

Elara nodded. The void inside her laughed, low and satisfied, and for the first time she was not sure if the voice was her own fear or something that had grown roots in her chest.

"After," she promised.

They stepped out into the empty street, and the creature at the gates did not move. But as they turned east, Elara saw it shift—a subtle turn of its pale head, tracking them like a weather vane finding the wind.

It was not waiting anymore.

It was following.