The cell was colder than death.
No lights. No sound. Just metal dense, old, the kind of alloy forged not to imprison criminals but to hold myths. It hummed faintly beneath Ravenna's feet, like it remembered the weight of angels. Like it was afraid.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, lips parted slightly as if reciting something ancient under her breath.
She wasn't praying.
She was unlocking.
The ignition shard; a sliver of divine circuitry forged from the bones of the fallen Seraph King — responded to thought, not touch. It had no button. No code.
Only one trigger:
Despair without surrender.
And Ravenna had perfected that.
A low thrum echoed in the corners of the cell. Not mechanical. Not electrical.
Living.
The air turned thick.
Her breath misted.
And then… something stepped in.
It didn't need a door.
It simply was.
A silhouette unfolded in front of her — tall, narrow, cloaked in shifting parchment made from human skin, wings shaped like words that had never been spoken. No face. Only a mouth full of candlelight.
It knelt.
And spoke.
"You called me."
Ravenna opened her eyes. "I need a doorway."
"All doorways require sacrifice."
"I'm giving you the ship."
"I require more."
She raised her head, eyes twin coals burning from a ruined soul. "Take my name."
The entity tilted its head, the candles in its mouth flickering.
"Why?"
"Because I'm done being her."
Silence.
Then — nod.
"So be it. Ravenna is no more. The name is ash. The ash is the price. And the price is paid."
The ignition shard in her chest began to sing — low, like the cry of a world mourning itself. The walls of the cell shifted. Bent inward. Metal wept.
The gods behind the veil stirred.
And the ship began to tilt.
Alarms screamed.
Somewhere above, General Vor shouted commands that would never reach ears fast enough.
Because she wasn't fighting a woman anymore.
She was fighting the echo of a fallen heaven wrapped in vengeance and blood.
And it was burning.
—
Outside, Jace felt the shift.
It wasn't visual.
It was in the bones.
Every screen across the city flickered. Every comm line went dead. Even the Forsaken—thirty-thousand chanting zealots—paused as if someone had just exhaled into their spine.
Then the ship above groaned.
Lurched.
And split.
Not exploded.
Split.
Down the middle, like something inside had birthed itself in rage.
Flames poured from the seam — not red, but silver and black. Fire that didn't burn oxygen. Fire that consumed memory. The ship began to descend — not crash, but fall, like a judgment.
Jace ran.
Toward it.
Toward her.
Debris rained across the city. Buildings screamed. Sirens shorted out mid-howl.
And through it all, as he sprinted across the ash-choked streets, Jace could hear her voice again.
Not in his head.
Not in his ears.
In the mark.
In his blood.
A whisper.
"Come and see."
The ship hit.
A shockwave tore through Sector Twelve, uprooting concrete, shattering windows from blocks away. Silence fell — the kind of silence that feels like the breath before god says your name.
Then… footsteps.
One.
Two.
Three.
She walked from the crater.
No chains.
No coat.
No name.
Just fire behind her eyes.
The entity followed — no longer separate, but stitched into her shadow. Her blood was ink now. Her heartbeat — a bell tolling for the end of false divinity.
Jace stopped at the edge of the blast zone, eyes wide.
He'd seen her furious.
He'd seen her wounded.
He'd seen her in love.
But this?
This was post-Ravenna.
Whatever came next… wasn't about survival anymore.
It was about balance.
She walked straight to him.
And said, simply:
"I've unmade the lie."
He didn't ask what lie.
He already knew.
The gods they feared were the ones they had built.
And now?
They would burn with them.
Ravenna reached for his hand — not like a lover, not like a soldier — but like someone who had chosen her witness.
And Jace?
He didn't flinch.
Because the world was ending.
And he'd rather watch it fall beside her than live through it without her.
The wind in Blackmarsh changed.
Not direction—emotion.
It wept.
Not for the dead, but for those about to join them. It moved through the ruins like a forgotten lover touching skin for the last time; soft, sorrowful, aware of what must come next. Even the trees—those black, half-dead cypress that lined the ancient cisterns—bent their crowns as if in mourning.
The throne was nearly finished.
Thirty-thousand Forsaken knelt in concentric circles around it, lips stitched, eyes sunken, hands bloodied from carving scripture into the stone. They had not slept. They had not eaten. They had only believed. And their belief had taken shape: a throne built from ribs and lullabies, wrapped in the whispers of a god too old for language.
The child stood at its foot.
Still barefoot.
Still silent.
But her shadow had grown longer.
It stretched behind her like a curtain pulled between realities—where things slithered and waited and grinned with teeth that predated stars. The city didn't just feel her now. It remembered her. In its bricks. Its sewers. In the murder songs whistled in the alleys after curfew.
And as she raised her hand—
the throne breathed.
Not a sound.
Not a tremble.
A breath.
Like something enormous preparing to speak.
—
Jace knelt beside Ravenna in the edge of the crater, dust still curling around them in thick waves, tasting of metal and prophecy. His hand was still in hers. But her pulse… wasn't human anymore.
It was measured. Purposeful. Like each beat pushed something ancient through her veins.
She didn't look at him.
She couldn't.
If she did—if she saw the worry, the love, the faith still left in his eyes—she might stop.
And if she stopped, they all died.
So she looked ahead.
Past the smoldering wreckage.
Past the people fleeing in terror.
Past the skyline, where the throne of the god-child now pierced the horizon like a monument to extinction.
"Rav…" he whispered. "You're—changing."
She breathed in, steady. "No. I'm returning."
"To what?"
"To the girl they buried with a different name. The one who bled for everyone and asked for nothing. The one who kissed you in the rain and laughed before the war turned her teeth into weapons."
His voice cracked. "Then let her come back. Please."
A pause.
Then, she looked at him.
And he swore the sky dimmed.
"I can't," she said. "Because I need to burn the gods. And she was made of mercy."
Tears rimmed his eyes before he could stop them. Not dramatic. Not weak. Just real. The kind of tears that fall when you realize the person you love is still alive—but slipping into something you'll never touch again.
He pulled her closer. Pressed his forehead to hers.
"I don't care what you become," he said. "As long as you don't face it alone."
Her voice broke. Just once.
"You still love me?"
He didn't hesitate.
"With all the parts you lost."
And in that moment—just that moment—she wasn't a vessel. She wasn't a prophecy. She wasn't Red Sin, or the traitor of the Bone Circle, or the harbinger of the Choir's awakening.
She was Ravenna.
And that was enough.
—
The earth groaned.
In Blackmarsh, the child stepped onto the first step of the ribbed throne. The Forsaken didn't cheer. They didn't sing. They hummed—a low resonance, like grief carried on a thousand tongues stitched shut by devotion.
The air darkened.
Not with shadow.
With intention.
And the veil above the throne cracked.
From it poured not flame—
—but memory.
Children murdered in civil wars. Mothers who drowned for food rations. Fathers crucified in corporate squares. The screams of entire cities buried in censored reports.
Everything the gods had silenced.
Returned.
The city writhed under it. Screaming buildings. Crying churches. The ground pulsed as though it too wanted to rise up and beg forgiveness.
And then…
She sat.
The child sat upon the throne.
And something ancient awoke.
—
Ravenna collapsed.
Not from pain. From connection.
Jace caught her before she hit the ground, but her body was convulsing. Her spine arched. Her teeth clenched.
She was seeing it.
Everything.
The child's first breath.
The god's last lie.
The war beneath the world.
"Talk to me!" he shouted, holding her tight.
But her voice wasn't hers anymore.
She spoke like a choir of bones.
"The throne is claimed. The veil is open. The Choir remembers."
Then her body stilled.
And she opened her eyes.
Not red.
Not brown.
Not even human.
But mirror-black, reflecting every soul she'd ever buried.
Jace stepped back, breath caught.
"Ravenna…?"
She stood.
Slow.
Deliberate.
And smiled.
But it wasn't peace.
It was resolution.
"They made me their sword," she whispered. "Now I'm going to teach the gods how it feels to be on the other side of the blade."
Behind them, the wind howled.
Ahead, the throne screamed.
And the apocalypse sang its opening note.
The wind carried her forward.
Not pushed — invited.
Like the world itself had shifted to make way for her rage. Every footstep Ravenna took left an imprint that hissed with smoke, not from fire, but from meaning. The ash beneath her feet wasn't ash anymore; it was dust ground from broken prayers, the kind that never made it to heaven because heaven had closed its ears.
Jace walked beside her, but a step behind now — not because he feared her, but because he understood.
Some flames aren't followed.
They're witnessed.
They moved through the wreckage of Deadman's City in silence. No words. No signal. Just the pull — the inevitable gravity of fate collapsing inward.
The city watched.
And it remembered.
Blackmarsh came into view like a scar split across the horizon. Buildings long since abandoned now leaned in reverence to the throne. The streets were crawling with Forsaken—rows upon rows of hollow-eyed zealots, robes wet with blood, fingers raw from carving glyphs into their own skin.
But they didn't attack.
They knelt.
As Ravenna passed, they bowed lower. Some touched their heads to the stone. Others simply wept. Jace saw a man tear out his own eyes in silence, whispering "She's here. She's here."
And in the center of it all—
The child.
Sitting on her throne, pale feet dangling just inches above the blood-slicked altar stone. She didn't move. Didn't blink. But her presence radiated through the air like static through bone.
Her eyes fixed on Ravenna.
And for a heartbeat…
Nothing.
Then—
She smiled.
Not cruel. Not innocent.
Inevitable.
"Welcome," the child said. Her voice was quiet, but it slammed into the world like prophecy. "You've brought the last flame."
Ravenna stepped forward. "I didn't bring it. I am it."
The child tilted her head. "Will you burn me too?"
"If I must."
The throne trembled behind her. A shape moved in its shadow — not fully formed, but unmistakably divine. Limbs too long. Wings like stained-glass knives. A ribcage made of singing. The god was waking.
Jace gripped his weapon. "Tell me you have a plan."
"I don't," Ravenna said, still staring at the child. "I have faith."
"In what?"
She turned her head just enough to meet his eyes.
"In the fire. In you. In us."
The god behind the throne opened its mouth.
No lips.
No tongue.
Just hunger.
And from its core came a sound — like history being rewritten through screaming. The Forsaken began to chant again, louder now, bones vibrating, blood steaming in their veins.
The child rose.
Still barefoot.
Still small.
But the moment her feet touched the altar, the throne shattered behind her — ribs scattering like stardust, bones melting into symbols, flame rushing upward like memory released from gravity.
She walked toward Ravenna.
And the city went silent again.
"You could join me," she said, softly. "We were born of the same grief. The same betrayal. You know what the gods did."
"I know," Ravenna replied. "I just don't want to become them."
The child frowned. "Then you'll die like the rest."
Ravenna's hand opened. The ignition shard glowed against her palm — not just a bomb, but a beacon. A signal. A summons.
The Choir wasn't just a cult.
It was a prison.
And Ravenna…
Was the key.
From beneath the earth, the ancient cisterns cracked open — one by one — like lungs gasping after centuries underwater. Steam poured from the ground. Screams followed.
The Choir rose.
Not just the Forsaken.
The originals.
Twelve figures — faceless, sexless, clothed in scripture and regret — hovered from the cracks like ghosts learning to speak again. Each held a blade made from confession.
They did not kneel.
They waited.
For her.
For Ravenna.
The child turned, unsure for the first time.
"You… called them?"
Ravenna stepped forward. "They were gods once. Until you made them martyrs."
"Martyrs are dangerous," the child hissed.
"No," Ravenna said, voice steady. "Martyrs are contagious."
And with that—
She dropped the shard.
It didn't explode.
It sang.
A single note.
Clear.
Pure.
Old.
The kind of sound you hear in the womb.
Or on the day you decide to never forgive.
The earth split.
The air ignited.
The god behind the throne screamed.
Not in rage.
In fear.
Because this wasn't fire.
This was remembrance.
And remembrance always burns.
The child's smile faltered.
Just a crack at first — like porcelain splitting down its center — but in that fracture lived every emotion she'd never been allowed to feel. Confusion. Fear. The slow, gnawing realization that the throne she sat on had never belonged to her.
The Choir began to move.
Twelve divine relics of grief — robes trailing ink and blood, their eyes veiled by scripture, their blades glowing with the sins of civilizations. They hovered just above the ground, untouched by gravity or guilt, circling Ravenna in perfect formation.
The child stepped back.
One pace.
Two.
The god behind her writhed. Its ribbed body shimmered, losing shape — its limbs folding into smoke, its mouth stretched wider with uncertainty. Not pain. Not rage.
Doubt.
Because Ravenna had not come to destroy.
She had come to remember.
To remind the world of what it chose to forget.
That gods can fall.
That even divinity shatters when touched by truth.
Ravenna stood still as the shard's song reached crescendo.
The Choir whispered now, and though no mortal could understand the language, every soul present felt it — a pulse like mourning, like forgiveness denied. Their blades rose, each pointed toward the rib-shadow of the god behind the child.
The child's voice cracked.
"No. No, you don't understand. I was made to fix it. I was the solution!"
Ravenna stepped closer. Her voice was not cruel. Not angry.
Just honest.
"You were made to repeat it. They fed you broken prayers and called it power. They used your innocence to build a cage for the rest of us. You're not a savior."
She paused.
"You're a mirror."
The child shook her head. "I didn't ask to be this."
"I know," Ravenna whispered, softer now. "But none of us did."
The god screamed — the sound like history being torn in half.
And still, Ravenna didn't flinch.
Instead, she turned to the Choir. One glance. That's all.
And in that glance, they moved.
Twelve blades carved through the air — not toward the child, but toward the god behind her. The ribbed thing of flame and memory reeled, its form collapsing into waves of sound, of scripture, of broken gospel. Light burst from it — too bright to be holy, too sharp to be sacred.
It tried to flee.
But there was nowhere left to run.
Because Ravenna had unsealed the past.
And the past does not forget.
With each strike, the god's body twisted, splintered. Its scream became a song — low, unraveling, beautiful in the way that endings sometimes are. The air thickened with falling feathers — not white, but obsidian, burned through with names of those who had died in its worship.
The child fell to her knees.
Alone now.
Small.
And Ravenna walked toward her — past the Choir, past the dying light, past the shadows of empires once thought eternal.
Jace moved to follow but stopped.
This wasn't his moment.
This was hers.
She knelt before the child, who stared up at her through tears that shimmered like molten glass.
"Will it hurt?" the girl whispered.
Ravenna touched her cheek, gently. "No. Not if you let go."
"I don't know how."
Ravenna leaned in, her forehead against the child's. "Then let me show you."
She held her close. Tighter. Softer. Like a sister. Like a mother. Like someone who understood what it meant to be made into something you never wanted to become.
And then—
The child exhaled.
A single, shaking breath.
And with it…
the last remnant of the throne dissolved.
The light faded.
The fire died.
The sky cleared.
And for the first time in centuries…
Deadman's City fell silent.
Not because it had been silenced.
But because it was finally listening.
—
The Choir returned to the earth — one by one — blades vanishing, robes trailing dust. Their forms dimmed, softened, folded back into the bones of Blackmarsh where they would sleep again. Not to wait.
To rest.
The war was over.
Not won.
Just ended.
Because sometimes, endings are more sacred than victory.
—
Ravenna stood alone on the altar.
Jace approached slowly, carefully, like walking up to a flame that now held the warmth of a dying star.
He said nothing.
He didn't have to.
She turned, eyes wet, hands trembling. Not with rage.
With relief.
And in his arms, finally, she collapsed.
Not as a weapon.
Not as a martyr.
Just a girl.
A girl who had burned the gods down to ash—
—and lived long enough to feel human again.
The wind, for once, was soft.
Not a warning.
Not a herald.
Just… wind.
It drifted through the broken towers of Deadman's City like a lullaby hummed by the ruins themselves. The bones of buildings no longer screamed. The streets, once rivers of blood and neon, now lay quiet — blanketed by ash and the faint smell of burnt memory. No gunfire. No bells. No chants.
Just the sigh of a city exhaling.
The war was over.
But peace wasn't applause.
It was silence.
—
Ravenna sat alone at the edge of the old Bastion wall — legs dangling, face tilted up toward a sky that didn't look like judgment anymore.
The sky was still cracked. Still bruised. But something inside it… had softened. The false moon was gone. The gold-veined cloud cover no longer pulsed like a wound. And somewhere, far off, birds were singing again — tentative, like they too had been waiting for a sign it was safe.
She barely heard Jace approach.
She just felt him.
He sat beside her without a word. They didn't touch. Didn't need to. The closeness itself was contact enough.
For a while, neither of them said anything.
Then Ravenna whispered: "Do you hear that?"
Jace cocked his head. "What?"
She smiled faintly. "Nothing. That's the point."
He nodded. "It's nice. Confusing, but… nice."
A beat.
Then—"Do you regret it?"
She was quiet for a long time.
"I regret that we let it go on so long. That we were too broken to stop it before it got this bad. That people died thinking their gods were listening."
Jace glanced at her. "But not what you did?"
Her voice didn't waver. "No. Not what I did."
He reached out and gently took her hand. This time, she let him.
And in that small gesture — not of passion, not of desperation, but of understanding — something passed between them that the war hadn't ruined.
Hope.
Not for a perfect world.
But for a better one.
—
In Blackmarsh, the Forsaken were scattering.
Some wandered the streets aimlessly, confused and weeping, finally freed from the weight of false divinity. Others knelt beside the ruins of the throne, whispering apologies to gods that no longer existed.
A few tried to take their own lives.
More were saved.
Because even here, kindness had survived.
The Choir had vanished back into the earth. The glyphs they'd carved still shimmered on the stones — but now, they hummed with remembrance, not power. A memorial, not a prison.
And at the heart of it all…
The child.
No longer a god.
No longer a weapon.
Just a girl.
She sat quietly on the steps of a burned chapel, hair tangled, feet blistered, eyes watching ants crawl over a cracked hymnal. She didn't cry. She didn't speak. But she breathed.
And that, for now, was enough.
A woman from the Outskirt Rebuilders — scarred, limping, missing an eye — knelt beside her and offered a coat. No questions. No fear. Just a gesture.
The girl looked at her.
Took the coat.
And leaned against her shoulder.
The world was still wounded.
But healing had begun.
—
Two days later, Ravenna stood at the edge of the wreckage where the Coalition ship had fallen. The crater still smoked faintly, like the city was remembering what it had survived.
She lit a cigarette.
Didn't smoke it. Just let it burn between her fingers.
Behind her, Jace sorted through salvaged intel cubes — what remained of General Vor's blacksite records. Data they could use to dismantle the last strings of the machine that had fed this war.
He looked up. "You sure about walking away from this?"
Ravenna exhaled, smoke curling up like the last lie leaving her lungs.
"I'm not walking away," she said. "I'm walking toward something else."
"What?"
She smiled, tired but honest. "Myself."
He stepped up beside her. "You think we'll ever find a place that isn't burning?"
"I don't know," she said, flicking the cigarette into the crater. "But I want to be there when we do."
Then she turned to him.
Held out her hand.
"Come with me?"
He didn't answer.
He just took it.
And together, they walked away from the ashes.
Not toward a sunset.
But toward whatever came next.
Because sometimes survival isn't the end.
It's the beginning.
And Deadman's City…
was finally ready
to live again.
—
Six Months Later.
Blackmarsh has quieted. The Forsaken have disbanded. The Choir has gone back beneath the earth. Ravenna and Jace now live in the Gray Sector — a border zone between ruin and reconstruction. Peace is slow, fragile, almost delicate. People laugh again. Music returns. Walls get repainted.
But under it all…
Something is stirring.
Not from above.
From below.
—
It begins with the earth.
Small tremors. Not seismic — organic. Like something breathing under the foundations. Water becomes thick in certain districts. The trees twist slightly in the wrong direction. And in one graveyard just east of the Dead Choir's burial mound, a corpse is found standing upright.
Eyes wide open.
Mouth sewn shut.
Hands full of living soil.
The gardener who finds it drops dead the next morning — lungs filled with roots.
—
Meanwhile, Ravenna dreams in red again.
Not flame this time.
Roots.
Twisting through her chest. Threading through her bones like veins turned inside out. In her sleep, she whispers a name she's never spoken before: "Gethsem."
When she wakes, her fingernails are dirty.
And Jace—watching her—starts keeping a gun under his pillow again.
He doesn't say why.
She doesn't ask.
—
Elsewhere…
In a darkened chapel deep below Sector 9 — a place erased from Coalition maps — Thirteen awakens.
She was presumed dead after the Choir burned.
But death doesn't stick to her kind.
Now, she is something else.
Reborn in the residue of broken gods, Thirteen begins building a new congregation. No more Forsaken. No more obedience.
Only one rule:
"The soil remembers."
She feeds her followers not with scripture — but with blood.
She grows sermons in flesh.
And beneath her chapel floor…
something roots itself.
Something ancient.
Older than gods.
Older than sin.
—
Back to Ravenna…
The nightmares intensify. Her mark — long dormant — begins to pulse again, but it's not responding to the Choir. It's responding to something deeper. Something buried.
She begins seeing sigils carved into alley walls — not Forsaken glyphs.
Older ones.
Rougher.
Hungrier.
Jace gets a message on an encrypted channel.
An old contact from his double-agent days.
One sentence:
"The Verdant Wound has opened."
He doesn't know what it means.
But Ravenna does.
And she says three words that chill him:
"We left it alive."
—
It started with a smell.
Not rot. Not smoke.
Sweetness.
The kind that shouldn't exist in a graveyard.
It hung heavy in the air, thick as syrup, clinging to Ravenna's tongue as she moved between the cracked stones of the Old Choir Cemetery. The lantern in her hand flickered with each step, casting long shadows across the tilted crosses and collapsed mausoleums.
She stopped at Plot 77.
The grave was open.
Not dug.
Split.
Like something had risen — not to flee — but to watch.
Jace knelt beside it, his gloves already slick with that black-red sludge that wasn't quite blood, wasn't quite soil. His face was drawn, mouth hard, eyes narrowed.
"I checked three hours ago. This grave was intact."
Ravenna crouched beside him. Her fingers hovered over the soil, close enough to feel its pulse. Because it was pulsing. Slow. Rhythmic. Like something sleeping and satisfied.
She dipped two fingers into the dirt.
And hissed.
Burning. Not heat — memory.
Screams.Laughter turned to choking.Roots swallowing tongues.A baby buried alive beside a priest who'd starved himself in penance.
She yanked her hand back, knuckles scraped raw, eyes wide.
"This isn't natural," she whispered.
Jace stood, wiped his hands. "None of this city ever was."
They both turned as the wind shifted. Cold. Too cold. And laced with the scent of iron and orchids.
Then — a voice.
Soft. Cracked. Familiar.
"Rav…"
They froze.
The voice came from behind the grave.
From the dark.
From someone who should be dead.
Jace drew his pistol. Ravenna didn't move. Couldn't.
Because the voice…
It was her brother's.
Riven.
Gone. Fifteen years now. Executed for a war crime he didn't commit. She'd buried him herself — ash and bones and a note he wrote her the night before they took him.
The voice came again.
"You left me here."
She stepped forward, slowly. Lantern trembling in her grip.
And there he was.
Standing at the edge of the tree line.
His uniform rotted. Chest caved in. Eyes glowing a dim, wet green like moss grown over glass. His mouth stitched with vine, but still moving.
"Ravenna," he rasped. "They're growing in me."
Jace fired. Once. Twice.
Riven didn't flinch.
Instead, he lifted his hand — and from the soil beneath him, arms grew. Not human. Rooted. Bark-covered, sinewed with veins of sap and bone. They clawed from the ground, grasping, dragging a second corpse from the mud.
Then a third.
Then a fourth.
All of them smiling.
Ravenna staggered back.
"No. No, this isn't resurrection. This is infestation."
Jace grabbed her wrist. "We need to leave. Now."
But it was too late.
The trees at the cemetery's edge began to shift. Trunks twisting. Bark opening like mouths. The sky went green at the edges. Faint spores rained down like golden snow.
And something spoke.
Not aloud.
In them.
"The soil remembers."
—
Elsewhere…
Thirteen stood barefoot in the Chapel of Wounds. Her hair was longer now, braided with dried tongues. Her hands bled constantly — a sign of favor, the cult said. Around her, dozens of converts knelt, pressing their foreheads into the moss-covered floorboards, mouths open like hungry roots.
She smiled as the candles extinguished themselves.
"The Veil burned," she said. "But the earth—"
She crouched and pressed her tongue against the wood.
"—the earth forgives."
From below the chapel, something growled. Not like an animal.
Like a tomb learning to breathe.
She turned to her followers.
"It's time," she whispered.
And the moss grew faster.
—
Back in the cemetery…
Ravenna and Jace ran.
The dead followed.
Not screaming. Not moaning.
Smiling.
Because they weren't alive.They weren't undead.
They were harvested.
Fed by guilt.Fertilized by secrets.Rooted in blood.
And they were just the beginning.
The tunnels beneath Sector Twelve weren't on any Coalition maps.
They were older.
Built before the war. Before the Choir. Before the sigils and the silence. These catacombs were carved in blood and secrecy by the city's original architects — the ones who'd turned mass graves into blueprints and buried their sins beneath bureaucratic cement.
Ravenna and Jace moved through the dark with quiet urgency. Their boots sank into moss that pulsed with heat. The walls… breathed. Faintly. Like lungs too tired to die.
Jace swept his light across the corridor.
Symbols carved into the stone.
Not Forsaken.Not Choir.
Founding glyphs.
The ones used before the First Collapse. Back when Deadman's City was called Sanct Arthael — a sacred zone between the living and the gods.
Only now…
The gods were gone.
And something else had taken their place.
—
Ravenna paused at a doorway overgrown with vines. Thick. Twisted. Pulsing green and black.
"They're alive," she muttered.
Jace leaned in, knife out. "More than alive. They're watching."
He pressed the blade to one — and the vine bled. Not sap. Not blood.
Memory.
A single drop hit the ground and exploded in sound. Voices. Screams. Children crying in a language that hadn't existed in centuries.
Ravenna staggered back. "They're feeding on it."
"On what?"
"On us. On everything we tried to forget."
Jace stared at her. "This isn't resurrection."
"No," she whispered. "This is harvest."
—
They kept moving.
Deeper.
The tunnel curved downward, spiraling like a throat. The deeper they went, the warmer it got. Wet. Rotting sweet. Like the breath of something ancient exhaling through stone.
The moss changed color — from green to violet. From violet to blackglass.
At one point, they passed a shrine carved from human bones — arranged in the shape of a spiral eye, centered by a single stone tooth etched with a name neither of them could read.
"What the hell is this?" Jace whispered.
Ravenna didn't answer.
Because something ahead was singing.
Faint. Low. Not melodic — cellular. Like it vibrated in the spine, in the blood.
The corridor opened.
And they entered the Chamber of Roots.
—
It was vast.
Cathedral-sized.
And in the center — hanging upside down from the ceiling — was a corpse.
Or what used to be one.
A body, stretched and nailed to a lattice of roots. No face. No limbs. Just a chest cavity filled with moving vines and glowing spores.
Ravenna whispered, "That's a vessel."
"For who?"
The corpse's mouth opened.
From it came words.
No voice. Just vibration.
"You should not have come back."
The roots writhed.
And the walls closed.
—
They ran.
But the corridor behind them was gone.
The tunnels had changed.
Now there were doors.
Twelve of them. Each marked with a single name. Each bleeding slightly at the edges.
Ravenna recognized one.
Her mother's.
Jace stepped forward. "This is a memory trap. The Wound's pulling from our pasts. Trying to fragment us."
Ravenna's breath caught. "It wants to turn us into soil."
One door creaked open.
Inside, a vision.
A young Ravenna — sixteen — stabbing a Coalition soldier while screaming her brother's name.
She stepped forward, drawn to it.
"Don't," Jace warned, grabbing her wrist.
"It's not real—"
"It's not fake either," she said. "It's the truth. The one we buried."
—
Behind them, the corpse in the chamber laughed.
"Every sin you've sown—""—will bloom again."
Roots burst from the walls. Fast. Sharp. They chased like spears.
Jace shot two. Useless. They regrew.
Ravenna pulled the ignition shard from her jacket. The same one she'd used to call the Choir — now blackened and cracked.
She whispered a prayer she didn't believe in.
And threw it.
The shard exploded — not with fire — but with memory.
The vision-doors shattered.
The corpse above the chamber screamed. The roots recoiled.
And for one breath—
They had a way out.
They ran.
Bleeding. Shaking.But alive.
—
They emerged into daylight.
Barely.
Sector Twelve was different now. The buildings were cracked — not from battle, but from growth. Moss lined the streets. The sky had a green tinge. People walked slower.
Some with dirt under their skin.
Some with roots in their eyes.
Jace collapsed to his knees, gasping.
Ravenna stared down at her hands.
One of her fingernails was turning green.
And beneath her skin—
Something pulsed.
—
The next morning came late.The sun, when it rose, looked sick.
A pale green disc behind thinning clouds, dimmer than usual; as if the sky itself had caught something and hadn't stopped rotting since.
Ravenna stood beneath it, coat torn, boots caked in tunnel filth, a smear of blood still drying on her neck. She hadn't slept. Couldn't. Every time her eyes closed, she felt the pulse again. Not a heartbeat. A tug. Like something inside the soil — inside her — was trying to finish what it started.
Jace leaned against the doorway of the makeshift safehouse, wrapping his bandaged hand tighter. The wound from the root's near-stab was deeper than it looked. In the candlelight, it pulsed with faint green veins like vines crawling beneath the flesh.
He didn't say anything.
Neither did she.
Some silences are necessary.
Like grief.Like healing.Like the pause before you admit something isn't going away.
Deadman's City had changed.
They noticed it in the way people moved now. Slower. Less urgency, more hesitation. Shopkeepers no longer called out prices with confidence — their voices cracked, their eyes watched the sidewalks like something might crawl from beneath them.
There were flowers growing in the cracks of buildings that hadn't seen green in decades.
Not normal flowers.
Verdants.
They bloomed with black petals lined in gold, and if you leaned too close, you could hear them whisper. A soft, wet sound. Like roots growing through bone.
A week ago, nobody even knew what they were.Now every sector had at least one.
By the third day after the tunnels, seven districts were quarantined. But no one said why.
No news.No panic alerts.Just quiet blockades.
And the ones who went in to investigate?
Didn't come back.
—
Ravenna watched a boy kick a stone into the gutter. It stopped halfway — not from friction, but from sinking. The concrete was soft. Warm. Damp.
She lit a cigarette and watched him walk away.
Jace came up behind her.
"Sector Four just collapsed."
She looked at him. "Collapsed how?"
He shook his head. "Gone. Buildings tilted inward. Foundations swallowed. They're calling it subsidence, but that's not it."
"Roots?"
"Worse. They think it's sentient now."
Ravenna exhaled slow. The smoke curled green in the sunlight.
"They're wrong."
He glanced at her.
She didn't blink.Didn't flinch.
"They're not roots. They're nerves."
—
The Verdant Wound had stopped hiding.
That was the problem.
For months it had crept beneath streets and graveyards, pulling memories from soil, feeding off silence. But now it was pushing upward.
And the city — battered, fragile, trying to rebuild itself from holy war and divine trauma — had no idea how to handle something that didn't explode or shoot back.
They knew how to fight bullets.They didn't know how to fight seeds.
So Ravenna and Jace went looking for the one person who might understand it.
Not a scientist.Not a warlord.
A defector.
Someone who had once stood beside Thirteen before she turned godslayer.
—
Her name was Ilsa Vein.
She lived underground. Literally. Beneath a flooded cathedral repurposed into a radio station, near the Verdant District's edge.
They found her in the bell tower.
She was building something.A map.But not of streets.
Of growth patterns.
Red strings stretched across a cracked model of the city. Pins stabbed into points where reports of spontaneous flora and psychic symptoms had been logged. At the center of it all?
Blackmarsh.Where it had begun.
Where Ravenna had lit the spark that killed a god.
"I told her not to touch the core," Ilsa said without looking at them. Her voice was dry. Not cruel, just used up. "I told Thirteen the soil was still listening. She laughed. Said she'd make it her choir."
Jace stepped forward. "What is it? The Wound. The roots. What the hell is it doing?"
Ilsa turned.
Her eyes were milky. Not blind — overused.
"Feeding. Transforming. But not into something new. Into something old. Something we buried beneath centuries of concrete and doctrine. It's not spreading to evolve."
She paused.
"It's remembering to become."
Ravenna narrowed her gaze. "Become what?"
Ilsa stared at her a long moment. Then spoke the name again.
The one Ravenna had whispered in her sleep.
"Gethsem."
—
The name hit her like a punch in the lungs.
She saw flashes.
A garden.
Not peaceful — sacred.
Not green — crimson.
A god buried alive.Because it loved too much.Because it would not kill.Because it refused to obey.
"Gethsem was the first," Ilsa said softly. "The city was built over its bones. The Choir was formed to keep it asleep. But when you killed the False God…"
Ravenna's voice cracked. "We unsealed the grave."
Ilsa nodded. "Now it's remembering everything. And it's growing a body to carry it."
—
A scream pierced the silence.
Ilsa moved fast — faster than Ravenna expected — to the window.
Outside: vines burst from the ground three blocks away. Fast. Like whips. A man got snatched off his feet. His body didn't break. It softened. Absorbed like water into a sponge.
The vines retreated.
Gone.
No blood.
No sound.
Just flowers blooming in his place.
Jace turned to Ilsa. "Can we stop it?"
"No," she said flatly. "But we can choose how we die. That's something."
Ravenna clenched her fists.
"Not good enough."
Ilsa met her gaze.
"Then go to its root. To its oldest memory. That's where it's growing from. Not Blackmarsh. Not the Choir's old ground."
"Then where?"
Ilsa lifted a shaking finger.
"To the Garden of Red Silence."
—
Outside, the city began to tilt.
Not just physically.
Emotionally.
People didn't cry anymore. They stared. Silent. Blank.
Because even their grief was being eaten.
Gethsem was almost ready to speak.
—
The sirens didn't wail anymore.Not because the threat was gone.
But because the towers that once housed them had grown over.
Moss threaded through antennas. Ivy gripped broken glass like fists closing around old lies. Everywhere Ravenna looked, the city was mutating — but not with rage.
With memory.
It didn't want revenge.It wanted roots.It wanted to be understood.
That was more dangerous.
She and Jace moved fast, weaving through half-choked alleys where murals once painted in resistance were now blooming. The faces of martyrs twisted into overgrowth, lips peeled back in silence, their eyes dripping sap.
The path to the Garden of Red Silence wasn't marked.Wasn't named.It was felt.
They moved south, past Sector Eight's flooded underways, through the skeletal remains of Old Thrail Station. Rats with fungus behind their eyes watched them pass. The walls breathed. Everything down here breathed.
Jace's comm crackled once — garbled words — then died.
The deeper they went, the more electronics failed.
Even the air changed. Thick. Sweet. Like rotting honey in a dying mouth.
—
The first sign they were close?
The statues.
Half-buried figures, carved into the stone of the walls. Not sculpted — grown. As if the roots had remembered people. Twisted their shapes into curled, reaching effigies of agony and awe.
One of them looked like Jace.
He didn't say anything.Just walked faster.
Ravenna paused beside one.
A woman.
Hands open. Throat slit. Eyes closed.
And from her mouth — a single red flower bloomed.
Ravenna touched it. Gently.
And saw—
Her own face, younger, kneeling at a broken altar.Whispering to someone buried beneath.Asking for forgiveness.Not for killing.But for letting them live.
The flower wilted under her fingers.
Jace was calling.
She tore herself away.
—
The tunnel widened.
Then opened.
And they stood at the threshold of the Garden.
It wasn't a garden in the way the surface knew gardens.
It was a chamber — dome-shaped, lit from somewhere unseen. Roots like ribs arched along the ceiling. The floor was soft. Breathing. Red moss everywhere. Pools of still black water between the overgrowth.
And at the center…a tree.
If you could call it that.
Its bark was flesh.Its limbs bones.And its leaves —memories.
Thousands.
Hovering like ghostlight. Little glasslike discs that shimmered with voices. Touch one, and you'd hear something you forgot you remembered.
A sob.A laugh.A murder.A lie.
Ravenna stepped in first.
The moss beneath her feet adjusted — not crushing, not resisting.
Accepting.
Jace followed, slower, his eyes scanning every angle. "This is where it started?"
Ravenna nodded. "No. Worse."
She crouched near one of the water pools. Looked down.
Not at her reflection.
At another her.
Inside the water. Pale. Bloody. Mouth moving.
Jace saw it too.
But the figure beneath wasn't Ravenna.It was his mother.
Waving.
Inviting.
They both staggered back.
The pool rippled.
Ravenna clenched her fists. "This isn't memory. It's bait."
From behind the tree, a sound.
Footsteps.
But not boots.Bare feet.
Soft. Deliberate. Childlike.
They turned.
And from behind the red moss curtain walked a girl.
No older than seven.
Eyes like black seeds sunk in gold honey. Hair woven with thorns.
She smiled.
"You came late," she said. "But you'll still bloom."
Ravenna froze.
That voice.
Not the child from the war.
Not a new one.
This girl…
She had her voice.
Her childhood voice.
"Who are you?" Jace demanded.
The girl blinked. Tilted her head.
"I'm her. The part she buried. The part you both forgot when you burned the gods. You broke the chain, Ravenna. Now something older wears the collar."
She pointed behind them.
And the tree moved.
Not its limbs.
Its face.
Slowly, bark peeled open like a wound.
And behind it — inside its trunk — was a figure. Bound in roots. Sleeping.
No.
Not sleeping.
Becoming.
It looked like a man. But not really. Too many ribs. No eyes. Mouth sewn with vines.
Ravenna whispered, "Is that—"
The girl nodded.
"Gethsem. The god that chose to sleep. Until you remembered him."
Behind her, a thousand red petals fell.
And the air began to sing.
The song wasn't music.
It was nerve.
A hum that traveled beneath the skin, deep through marrow, like your bones had started listening against your will.
Ravenna staggered. Her ears rang. Not from pain — but from the pressure of memory. Her knees hit the moss-soft floor. Her hands dug into the red soil. And she heard…
A heartbeat.
But not hers.Not Jace's.Not the girl's.
The tree.
Gethsem.
It was alive again.
Jace crouched beside her, hand on her shoulder, but she barely registered it. Her mind had cracked open — like a window forgotten during a storm — and now something vast and weeping was crawling in.
Not invading.No.
Remembering. Through her.
She gasped.
Then choked.
Then screamed.
The memories weren't hers.
She was watching now.
Seeing through soil. Through time. Through rot.
—
Visions:
A king, centuries ago, kneeling in this very chamber, weeping blood as he offered his firstborn to Gethsem for "protection from above."
A woman, hair wild, eyes unblinking, whispering, "If you feed on our sorrow, never let us forget."
A choirboy, his tongue cut out, being buried alive in the roots as tribute.
A mass grave, unmarked, filled with the bones of enemies and children alike.
And then…Ravenna.
As a child.
Kneeling by a garden in Blackmarsh.Burying something.A locket.
Inside it?
Her brother's voice.Not the real one. The memory of it.
"Promise me, Rav… Promise you'll never forget who we were before the city."
—
She ripped herself back with a cry, breath catching like she'd just surfaced from drowning.
Jace pulled her to her feet, gripping her arms.
"Talk to me. What did it show you?"
She stared at him, trembling.
"Everything."
And behind them, the tree began to open.
Not physically. Not entirely.
It opened in their minds.
Jace flinched.
He saw his father — a Coalition commander — smiling as he burned a sector just to send a message.
He saw his younger self, holding the lighter.
He had obeyed.
He had watched.
He had survived.
He fell back, clutching his chest, shaking.
The girl laughed.
"You thought this was a god? This is a mirror. Gethsem doesn't want faith. He wants remembrance."
And from the air, the voices grew louder. Not words. Confessions.
Every whispered betrayal. Every blood oath broken. Every apology never given.
"Make it stop," Jace muttered, eyes glassy. "Make it shut up."
But it wouldn't.
Because Gethsem wasn't asking for permission.He was feeding.
—
Ravenna looked at the girl. Her younger self. The fragment that had never healed.
"You're not real."
The girl smiled again. "Neither are you. You think this city made you? No. You made the city. With every choice. Every kill. Every moment you wanted to forget."
"You don't know what I've done."
"Gethsem does."
And suddenly—
The tree spoke.
Not with a voice.
With a pulse.
And inside it: a wordless command.
Return.Replant.Remember.
—
A new root burst from the ground. Between them. Thick. Wet. Holding something.
A body.
Not dead.
A woman. Eyes rolled back. Chest rising shallow.
She had green growing from her mouth.
Her arms were scarred. Military tattoos. Recent.
Jace recognized her first.
"Kayna."
He ran to her. Lifted her into his arms.
She twitched — not conscious. Not lost either.
Ravenna knelt beside her, peeled open one of the woman's eyelids.
Green.
No white. No iris. Just verdant nerve.
But behind it—
She was still in there.
"She's been planted," Ravenna whispered. "But not claimed yet."
Jace looked at her. "Can we get it out?"
"I don't know."
Behind them, the girl began to fade. Slowly. Petals falling from her mouth as she dissolved into moss and dust.
The last thing she said?
"You're next."
—
Ravenna stood.
Eyes burning.
Blood on her palms.
Memories in her lungs.
And one truth blooming like poison behind her teeth:
This wasn't a war.This was a harvest.
And Gethsem wasn't done planting.
They didn't speak as they carried Kayna out of the chamber.
There was no language left for what they had seen.No words to cover the soft terror pressing behind their ribs, like something had taken root inside their lungs and refused to stop growing.
Ravenna gripped Kayna's legs. Jace had her shoulders. The woman twitched occasionally, murmuring nonsense in a voice too soft to be human. Like her tongue wasn't made of flesh anymore, but of leaves.
Behind them, the chamber pulsed.
Not like a heart.
Like a womb.
The kind that didn't give life — only reshaped it.
And Gethsem watched.Not with eyes.With presence.
They felt him at their backs. Felt the hunger that wasn't malicious, but inevitable.
Like soil doesn't hate the body.It simply welcomes it.
—
It took them hours to climb back out through the tunnels.Not because of distance.
Because the passages had changed.
Walls that had been stone were now soft. Spongy. Breathing.
They walked through corridors where faces pushed through the ceiling — not screaming — just watching.
No footsteps echoed.
No vermin scurried.
Just silence.
Alive.
By the time they broke through a rusted maintenance hatch and climbed into open air, Jace's shoulders were slick with sweat, Kayna's pulse was faint, and Ravenna's hands shook without reason.
The world above hadn't waited.
—
Deadman's City was blooming.
But not in a way anyone wanted.
Buildings stood crooked. Steel girders twisted like antlers. Trees grew out of windows, thick-trunked and veined with sap the color of ash.
And people…
Oh, the people…
They were different now.
Not all. Not yet.
But enough.
They walked slower. Eyes glassy. Smiling faintly like dreamers halfway between sleep and drowning.
Some sat cross-legged on sidewalks, hands open to the air, whispering to no one — but the flowers around them bent to listen.
Ravenna and Jace moved fast, cloaks pulled up, Kayna limp between them.
No one stopped them.
Because no one cared.
Everyone was too busy listening.
To the roots.To the hum.To the soil beneath their feet that now had something to say.
—
Ilsa Vein had moved. Again.
They found her in an abandoned greenhouse at the city's western edge — what used to be a water filtration hub.
Now it was just glass and dust and light filtered through fungus-covered panes.
She looked worse. Thinner. Eyes more sunken. Her hands stained green up to the wrists.
Ravenna dropped Kayna on the table. "She's changing."
Ilsa stepped close. Touched the woman's forehead. Didn't flinch at the sap leaking from her tear ducts.
"Not fully claimed yet," Ilsa muttered. "Still fight left in her."
"Can you stop it?"
Ilsa didn't answer at first.
She reached for a scalpel.
Not hesitantly.
Intimately.
"I can cut away the new growth. Delay the change. But I need blood. And memory. Something deep. Something painful."
Ravenna stepped forward without hesitation. "Take mine."
Jace grabbed her arm. "Rav—"
She didn't look at him.
Just stared at Ilsa.
"Do it fast."
—
Ilsa worked like a butcher.A careful one.
She sliced open Ravenna's palm. Collected the blood in a stone bowl etched with old Choir runes. Mixed it with sap from Kayna's mouth. Added a shaving of obsidian and a drop of melted sigil wax.
Then she painted it across Kayna's chest in slow circles.
As the mixture touched skin, Kayna screamed.
Loud.
Sudden.
Raw.
But not just her voice.
Others.
Thousands of them.
Echoing through the room.
Dead voices. Dying voices. Forgotten ones.
Ilsa didn't stop.
She pressed two fingers into Kayna's sternum and whispered:
"Unroot. Unsleep. Unbecome."
Kayna convulsed.
Ravenna staggered, nearly vomiting from the backlash.
Jace caught her, held her steady.
And then…
Silence.
Kayna's breathing steadied.
Her eyes opened.
Normal.
No green.
She looked around, dazed.
Then: "I… I dreamed I was underground. I was water. And you were all roots…"
Ilsa smiled faintly.
"She'll live. For now."
—
Ravenna stepped outside. Needed air. Space. Distance from the inside of her own skin.
The sky was worse.
Now tinged entirely green, like a rot-bloom spreading across the atmosphere. Birds no longer flew overhead. Only the occasional shadow — too large to name — drifting in the clouds.
She lit a cigarette.
Her hand shook.
Jace joined her.
Said nothing for a long while.
Then: "Gethsem isn't just remembering."
She nodded.
"I know. He's gathering."
"Kayna was a test."
She exhaled. "A seedling."
"And we're what… fertilizer?"
"No," Ravenna whispered. "We're the harvest."
They stood in silence.
The wind carried a faint chant.
Not loud. Not far.
A dozen voices. Maybe more.
Chanting in time with the city's pulse.
"Bloom us. Bind us. Break the stone. Let the roots return the throne."
—
Inside, Ilsa began packing. Moving fast.
Ravenna turned.
"What are you doing?"
Ilsa didn't look at her.
"Preparing. Because he'll reach me soon. And I'm not letting him take my memories."
She strapped a blade to her thigh.
"If you want to stop Gethsem, you need to get to the core root. The place where he was first planted. It's not the Garden."
Ravenna's voice was raw. "Then where?"
Ilsa looked at her.
Dead serious.
"Under the First Altar. Beneath the old Ash Cathedral. Before it was bombed. Before the Choir. Before you. That's where he waits."
Jace spoke low. "We go tonight."
Ravenna looked out the cracked window. Watched vines wind around a dead lamp post.
"No," she said.
"Not tonight."
She crushed the cigarette beneath her boot.
"Now."
—
The Ash Cathedral was gone.
At least, that's what the city told itself.
Decades ago, after the riots, the collapses, the first Choir incursion — the Coalition declared the structure condemned. Bombed it from orbit. Sealed the crater in steel. Wrote it out of city records with the kind of pen that doesn't just lie — it rewrites.
But Ravenna knew better.
She remembered her mother's voice, drunk and broken at 3am, whispering behind a locked door:"They didn't kill the god… They just buried the altar. The ash still breathes, Rav. It always breathes."
—
Ilsa drew them a map — hand-sketched, stained with time, marked with old sigils that hadn't been used since before the First Collapse.
"This isn't just a structure," she said. "It's a sealed memory. You don't open the doors with keys. You open them by hurting the right way."
Jace raised a brow. "You mean we have to suffer to get in?"
Ilsa nodded. "Yes. But it won't be yours. Gethsem doesn't want your pain — he wants your ancestors'. He wants your ghosts. He wants the screams you inherited without knowing their names."
Ravenna said nothing.She just took the map.
And they left.
—
They crossed Sector Twelve's dead zone on foot — once a bustling hub of market life, now reduced to green-infested silence.
Cars sat half-melted, consumed by vines that had cracked the pavement like glass. Whole apartment blocks leaned together like gossiping corpses.
The only noise was wind.
And breath.
And every few blocks, a new bloom.
A child's shoe, gently cradled by petals.A skeleton kneeling in prayer beneath a flowering oak that hadn't existed a week ago.A sigil on a wall pulsing faintly — not glowing, just breathing.
By dusk, they reached the crater.
What was left of the cathedral lay like a scar in the earth.
Blackened arches. Shattered spires. Stone melted into bone.The steel seal the Coalition installed had been torn open from the inside.
Roots. Dozens. Maybe hundreds.
All curling outward, reaching for sky like fingers from a grave.
Jace unslung his rifle. "No resistance?"
Ravenna squinted. "We're not seen as invaders anymore."
"Then what?"
She stepped forward.
"The first offerings."
—
The descent was wrong.
The staircase shouldn't have existed. The angle bent in ways the body resisted. The air got colder, not warmer. And the deeper they went, the more they heard laughter — not around them, but inside.
Ravenna's memories started whispering.Her father's voice.A scream she once caused.A lullaby in a language she never learned but still knew.
Jace reached for her hand once.
She didn't stop him.
She gripped it like it was the only real thing left in the world.
—
They reached the bottom.
And saw it.
The True Altar.
Carved from black bone. Veined in red sap. Half-buried in ash so fine it moved like mist.
And in the center: a basin.
Empty.
Waiting.
No sigils around it. No glyphs.
Just one phrase, etched in blood-metal across the wall:
"TO WAKE THE ROOT, BLEED YOUR FATHERS."
Ravenna stared at it for a long time.
Then she pulled out her knife.
Jace grabbed her wrist. "Don't. You don't know what that'll wake."
She looked at him.
Eyes steady.
"I'm not bleeding for them. I'm bleeding for what they hid."
—
She sliced deep.Let the blood fall.
Into the basin.
Drip by drip.
Nothing happened.Then—
The ash shuddered.
The ground beneath them sighed.
And the wall cracked open.
Roots poured out. Not attacking. Not hostile.
Just parting.
Like curtains pulled back on the stage of memory.
And behind them?
A crypt.
Filled with coffins that breathed.
Dozens of them.
Maybe more.
Each coffin made from bark and bone, pulsing faintly.
And from within each one came…
Music.
Humming.
Low.
Beautiful.
Terrifying.
Ravenna stepped inside. Slowly.
As she passed the first coffin, it opened.
Not violently.
Just gently.
Like the sleeper inside had been waiting for her.
—
And out stepped a man.
Not rotted. Not monstrous.
Alive.
Eyes green.
Skin cracked with root lines.
He smiled.
And said her name.
"Ravenna."
She froze.
"…Dad?"
Jace turned, weapon raised. "What the fuck—"
But the man didn't flinch.
He stepped forward.
"You thought we were dead. That they buried us in war and silence. But no, Rav. We were planted."
More coffins began to open.
Men and women. Children. Old faces. New ones. All blinking slowly.
All speaking in one voice.
"Come home."
Jace stepped back. "They're rootborn."
"No," Ilsa's voice echoed faintly in Ravenna's head.
"They're pre-root. They're the memories the city buried to stay alive. And now… it's choosing to remember."
—
Ravenna's father reached out.
"Let go," he said gently. "Let the war end. Let the garden grow."
She looked at him.
Saw the scar on his cheek.
The same one she gave him when she was ten, defending her mother.
Saw the sadness in his smile.
The way his fingers trembled.
She took a breath.
And—
BOOM.
An explosion.
From above.
The tunnel shuddered.
Screams echoed down the shaft.
Jace spun around.
"We're not alone anymore."
—
The ceiling split like a lung finally punctured.
Concrete rained down. Screams twisted through the falling dust. And above the crack, silhouetted against firelight, figures began to descend — not soldiers.
Acolytes.
Verdant-marked.
Veins glowing faint gold under their skin, weapons forged from bone and ritual. Eyes wide, unblinking. Smiling in a way that said they didn't know fear anymore — not because they'd conquered it.
But because they'd been erased.
Thirteen's children.
Not born.
Rewritten.
—
Ravenna didn't hesitate.
She turned to the man — her father — the thing wearing his smile.
"What happens if I destroy the altar?"
He paused.
Not surprised.
Not afraid.
Just… sad.
"Then all that the city buried returns. All the weight. All the cost. No more forgetting. No more mercy."
"Will it kill you?"
He looked at the others — those waking from coffins like dreams returning to flesh.
"Yes."
Jace grabbed her wrist. "Rav, we need to move."
The first acolyte landed beside the crypt entrance — a woman with ivy for hair, spine bent backwards like her body hadn't decided which way was front anymore.
She screamed once.
And the ash caught fire.
Not with heat.
But with memory.
Visions surged. Pain returned.
Jace reeled — he saw himself, burning a village under orders. Children screaming. Not in fear. In understanding. Like they knew this would happen someday.
Ravenna turned, eyes locked on the altar.
On the roots now writhing.
The basin still red with her blood.
She heard her father's voice, warm and trembling:
"Come with us. We'll carry it together. We'll bloom as one."
And she heard Thirteen's voice, far above — her whisper laced through the air like perfume through a coffin:
"If you won't be my blade, be my soil."
Ravenna clenched her fists.
And answered neither.
She drew her pistol.Aimed it at the altar.
Jace's eyes widened."Wait—what are you—"
She fired.
—
The bullet hit the basin.
It didn't crack.
It screamed.
Roots twisted violently, shrieking in tongues. The altar convulsed like a spine breaking. The coffins — those grown from sorrow and bark — began to thrash. One by one, the waking forgot themselves. Eyes rolling back. Voices merging.
They screamed not in pain, but in freedom.
As if dying again was a release from being half-alive.
Ravenna turned, grabbed Jace's collar, and dragged him toward the exit.
Acolytes poured in now — chanting, blades drawn.
But the roots weren't loyal.
The roots were angry.
They struck out, impaling both allies and enemies. One acolyte burst like fruit beneath pressure. Another tried to scream, only to be pulled into the soil mouth-first.
The cathedral was collapsing.
But deeper.
Not falling down — falling inward.
As if the earth was swallowing itself. Returning to its origin.
—
Ravenna and Jace cleared the crypt's edge, crawling up what was left of the spiral path.
Jace pulled a small incendiary from his belt.
"What's that for?" she asked.
He glanced down the shaft. "Making sure none of that wakes up again."
She hesitated.
Then nodded.
"Light it."
—
The blast was silent.
No flame. No shockwave.
Just a sudden absence.
The earth beneath Deadman's City breathed out.
And everything… stopped.
The sky pulsed once.The chant above ended.The hum of roots went quiet.
And for the first time since this began, no one heard anything.
—
They emerged covered in ash, coughing, bloodied, worn raw.
Ilsa met them at the edge of the crater.
She didn't speak.
She just looked at them. Looked past them.
And whispered:
"…You broke the mirror."
Ravenna wiped soot from her cheek.
"No. I shattered the chains."
Ilsa knelt. Ran her fingers through the scorched soil.
Then whispered — so low only the roots might hear it:
"Then he'll have to grow anew."
—
Above them, the sky cracked.
And from it, something began to fall.
Not light.
Not fire.
A seed.
Large. Black. Shaped like a heart.
And it wasn't falling.
It was aiming.