Rain followed Manraj home.
By the time he reached his building, his clothes were a second skin and his bones felt hollow. The alley, the fox with nine tails, Azhar's voice—Hello, brother—looped in his head like a song he hated but couldn't turn off.
He shut his door harder than necessary.
The room greeted him with its usual cramped silence. Peeling paint. Flickering tube light. A narrow bed pushed against the wall, as if even furniture didn't trust the center of the room.
He toed off his shoes and sank onto the mattress.
The moment he let his shoulders drop, the fire woke up.
Heat gathered under his sternum, pushing against his ribs. Not a flare this time, but a slow, steady burn, like coals waiting for air.
Azhar's face rose in his mind—older, sharper, soaked in rain, eyes carrying a history Manraj's own mind refused to show him.
You left.
No. You forgot.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
A memory tried to surface: two boys, a circle of light, someone screaming. The warmth inside him surged, desperate.
"Stop," he whispered to nobody. "Please."
Fire gathered in his palm.
The air around his fingers warped. Little curls of orange light licked his skin, tasting him.
Manraj jerked his hand back, heart pounding. He forced his fingers flat against the mattress, feeling the cheap fabric under his palm, counting the threads like they were prayer beads.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Zoya's voice came back to him, quiet but immovable.
You did. I just reminded you you were still human.
He clung to that line like a ledge.
"Human," he said out loud, testing the word against his teeth. "I'm still human."
The fire flickered, offended.
---
Sleep did not come.
He lay in the dark, watching shadows crawl across the ceiling as cars passed outside. Every time his eyes drifted closed, the alley returned—the fox bowing, the shadow peeling off the wall, Azhar stepping forward like he'd been waiting at the edge of Manraj's life for years.
You're remembering too early. They won't like that.
Who were they?
Manraj rolled to his side and stared at the wall where damp had eaten into the plaster. Were there more like Azhar? More shadows that knew his name before he did?
He dug his phone out of his pocket.
The notification bar was empty. No missed calls. No messages.
His thumb hovered over Zoya's contact for a full thirty seconds before he locked the screen and dropped the phone onto his chest.
"What would I even say?" he muttered.
Hey, thanks for stopping me from accidentally exploding the neighborhood. Also, a man made of shadows called me brother and my brain tried to unzip itself—coffee?
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
The silence of the room felt wrong. Too thick. Too held.
"Stop watching me," he said to the darkness, even though he knew—on some level—that if anything wanted to watch him tonight, walls weren't going to help.
---
Across the city, on a rooftop slick with rain, Azhar stood with his hands in his pockets and his jaw tilted up to the sky.
Noxian lounged at his feet, nine tails curling lazily, eyes half-closed. Shadow steam rose off the fox's fur and drifted into the air like smoke that refused to obey gravity.
"You were too direct," a voice croaked softly.
Morrigan settled on the broken edge of a parapet—a crow with eyes like burnt gold, head cocked.
Azhar didn't look at either of them.
"He needed to hear it," he said. "He needed something stronger than the lie."
The crow fluffed its wings. "He dreams already. Surtr will feel it."
"I know," Azhar said.
He sounded tired. Not of the world—of the weight of it.
Noxian lifted its head, ears twitching. The fox's voice slid into Azhar's thoughts, soft and amused.
He still smells like fire and fear.
Azhar's mouth twitched.
"So did I," he murmured. "Once."
He finally looked away from the sky and toward the cluster of buildings where Manraj's small room glowed faintly behind thin curtains.
"You're early," Morrigan said. "The balance isn't yet—"
"Broken?" Azhar finished for her. "You heard him. He's already cracking."
For a heartbeat, something raw crossed his face.
"How many times did I replay it, Morrigan?" he asked, voice low. "All those nights. All those years. Him burning. Me choosing. Surtr's hand—"
Noxian nudged his leg.
Enough, the fox whispered. He's not the only one remembering.
Azhar exhaled slowly.
"Forty days," he said to the dark. "That's all we have."
Neither fox nor crow argued.
The rain answered instead, tapping its own countdown onto the broken concrete.
---
Zoya didn't sleep either.
Her small apartment looked like it had been hit by a storm that only targeted paper. Open notebooks, half-erased sigils, printouts of old myths, scribbled diagrams—everything she'd been quietly collecting now lay thrown across the bed and floor like the inside of her head.
She stood at the window, watching water streak the glass.
Her hand still felt the heat that had lived under Manraj's skin—fierce, wild, barely restrained. Not normal. Not human. And yet, when she'd touched him, it had listened.
"Silence," she murmured to herself.
It wasn't fire. It wasn't shadow. It was absence—an ability that didn't show up in any of her research as an "element" at all.
She turned back to the mess on her bed.
Circles. Runes. Old languages. Diagrams of three beasts—one made of flame, one of night, one blurred out as if ink itself refused to mark it.
Zoya picked up a sketch she'd done months ago. A woman made of frost and starlight. Eyes bright, expression unreadable. No name beneath the drawing, just a question mark and one word in the corner:
Eirys?
"You're late," Zoya muttered to the paper. "He's waking up without a manual and I am improvising."
Her phone lit up again with nothing.
No new messages.
She typed a draft for the third time:
> Are you okay?
Deleted it.
Typed again:
> We should talk tomorrow.
Deleted that too.
Finally she settled on:
> If anything feels wrong tonight, do not try to handle it alone. — Z
She stared at the screen, then hit send before she could change her mind.
Across the city, in his dark room, Manraj's phone buzzed against his chest.
He looked at the message, at the simple bossiness of it, and felt something in him loosen.
"Okay," he told the screen.
He didn't reply. But he kept the phone in his hand this time, fingers curled around it like an anchor.
---
Sometime between one breath and the next, the night thinned.
The fire inside his chest never fully went out, but it dimmed enough that his eyes grew heavy. He drifted somewhere between waking and sleep, hanging in that strange space where dreams start to bleed into memory.
He saw a circle of light again. Heard a child's voice screaming Azhar's name. Felt a hand wrench his own away from the center.
A third presence pressed at the edge of the scene. White. Vast. Angry. Kind.
He was supposed to be mine, a voice said—not in words, but in meaning.
Everything went white.
Manraj jolted awake, heart slamming against his ribs.
The ceiling stared back at him.
Outside, the sky was no longer black, just a very dark blue—edges fraying into the first hint of morning.
He dragged a hand over his face and let out a breath that shook.
Sleep had never really come.
But morning had.