That night, after walking until his legs refused to hold him, Ares found a small rise above the trees. From there, he could just make out the pale line of the river in the distance. Beyond it, faint and sharp against the horizon, were the first rooftops of the outer slums.
Korvan.
He didn't know what would be waiting for him there. He had no coin, no name, no family. Only his strange eye, the map, and a past he didn't dare speak of. But the city meant people, crowds, streets where he could vanish. If he could reach it, he'd survive.
And survival, for now, was everything.
The sky darkened to violet. Ares curled beneath a tree, wrapping his thin cloak tight, ignoring the hunger in his gut and the soreness in his bones.
Sleep came slowly, chased by thoughts of the temple, the priests, the Ash-Hounds—and that strange moment in the dark, when the beast looked into his eye and turned away.
He didn't know what it meant.
He only knew one thing:
He could never go back.
He could never go back.
The temple, with its red-glass windows and black stone spires, would haunt him like a scar carved into memory. No matter how far he ran, the priests would send their whispers into the wind, their servants into the streets, and their curses into his blood if they could. Even now, some part of him felt watched.
Sleep never truly came. He drifted in and out—each time he closed his eyes, he heard the low moan of temple bells or the growl of ash-hounds from the forest floor. When dawn finally broke, it didn't bring comfort—just a sky smeared with grey and the faint scent of soot.
By midday, his legs felt like splintered wood, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Hunger was no longer sharp—it was dull, hollow, like someone had carved a pit into his chest and left it empty.
But he kept moving.
He followed the trickling river east, its water shallow and bitter, until the land began to dip. The trees thinned. The smell of civilization—smoke, grease, iron—grew stronger.
And then, at last, from the crest of a rocky hill, he saw Korvan.
It rose like a wound carved into the landscape. No banners flew from its towers. Its walls were stained with age, patched where stone had fallen. Black smoke coiled from chimneys, and the sound of metal striking metal echoed faintly through the haze.
Ares stood there a long while.
He had left this city a child—dragged from its gutters by men in red robes, forced into a temple he didn't choose, trained for something he never asked to be. And now he had returned, half-starved and hunted, with nothing but a satchel and a burned scrap of a map.
But Korvan didn't care who you were. It never had.
It only cared whether you could survive it.
The outer slums bled into the wild like a slow infection. Shacks made of scavenged metal leaned against each other for support. Smoke hung low over the alleys. People moved like ghosts—faces hollow, backs bent, voices low. Ares pulled his hood tight and slipped into the stream.
He was just another hungry shadow.
No one asked questions in the slums. That was the first rule.
The second rule: never make eye contact. Someone always thinks you're challenging them.
The third: run if you hear bells, because bells mean the Watch.
He kept moving, weaving through alleys he half-remembered. He passed the same butcher's stall he'd once stolen a knife from. The same square where he'd seen a relic merchant strung up by the wrists, his eyes melted out for "heresy." Nothing had changed.
Korvan was still dying—just slower than everything else.
Eventually, he reached the old wash-quarter, where abandoned cisterns had become homes, and tunnels led into the bones of the city. He slipped into one of them—a narrow passage stinking of damp and mold—and curled up behind a broken brick wall.
It wasn't safety.
But it was shelter.
That night, he stole a crust of bread.
It wasn't hard—just a matter of walking close to a cart, timing it with a distraction, and slipping the stale piece into his cloak sleeve. The vendor never saw his face. Ares ate in silence beneath a sewage grate, the bread dry as bone but tasting like triumph.
His mind kept drifting back to the Temple. To the watcher who passed him in the corridor and didn't raise the alarm. To the way his black eye had pulsed, cold and steady.
What was that?
Why had the hound stopped?
No answers came.
Just the growing certainty that something inside him had changed.
By morning, he knew he needed more than bread to survive. He needed coin. Or someone who owed him a favor.
So he went looking.
Past the rusted bridges and the bone-marked walls, past the broken remains of what had once been the Marrow Market—a place where relics, cursed tools, and fragments of forgotten gods had once traded freely. Now the Empire had driven it underground.
But Ares knew how to find what had been buried.
A bent nail driven into a wall at a certain angle.
A scratch on a sewer lid.
A knock—short, short, long.
It led him beneath an old tannery, where a narrow passage opened into a lantern-lit space no bigger than a tavern's kitchen. The walls were lined with crates of junk—gears, broken staves, metal teeth, and chains inscribed with holy runes long worn smooth.
At the back, hunched over a worktable, was a dwarf with one blind eye and a pipe made of bone.
Old Garruk.
"You're dead," the dwarf said without looking up. "Or you should be."
Ares stepped forward, lowering his hood just enough to be seen.
"I need work."
Garruk squinted. "What in the Deep Hells happened to you?"
Ares tossed the burnt map on the table. "This is what I have. That and a name you might still remember."
The dwarf grunted, eyeing the map, then Ares, then the map again.
"This is real?" he muttered. "This... this is Archive script. Pre-Eclipse, maybe older. No one's mapped this sector in a century."
"So I've heard," Ares said.
Garruk leaned back, puffed on his pipe, and exhaled a trail of smoke that curled like a serpent.
"There's rumors. Always rumors. The Archives under the city—twisted places. Machines still ticking, doors that eat people, mirrors that lie. They say something sleeps at the center."
A pause.
"What kind of something?"
"No one knows."
Garruk handed the map back, eyes narrowing. "If you're going down there, boy, you're either stupid, cursed, or desperate."
"Maybe all three."
The dwarf grinned. "Then you'll fit right in."
When Ares left the tannery, night had fallen again. Korvan's streets pulsed with orange lanterns and drifting ash. The city never truly slept. It just grew quieter, more dangerous.
He made his way back to the gutter tunnels and crouched low beneath the broken stone arch, map clutched in his fingers.
Somewhere beneath this rotting city, something waited.
He didn't know what.
But something inside him—cold, patient, watching—did.
And when he closed his eyes, he dreamed of gears turning behind walls, of doors without handles, and of a heart that beat not with blood—but with silence.