For a moment after the crash, the square did nothing but breathe dust.
Grit hung in the air, turning the twilight thicker, granules glittering in the strange sky. The toppled building lay across the cobbles like a dead giant, its broken spine pinning the fused monster beneath. Limbs and faces protruded from between shattered beams, twitching weakly as if trying to claw free and realizing too late that weight and gravity were no longer suggestions.
Cassian's lungs burned with every breath. His ribs felt like cracked pottery bound together by spite alone. He tasted blood. The world swam at the edges of his vision, but it stayed anchored—sharp where it needed to be.
He watched the mess he'd made.
The leviathan of abandonment writhed, trying to lift itself. A mass of arms strained, digits lengthening, fingers clawing grooves into the stone before breaking. The building didn't move. The weight was too much. Ruin, properly applied, was merciless.
Around it, the smaller creatures that had peeled off its body scrabbled toward the ring around the well. The defenders met them with hoarse shouts and the clang of steel. Sade's cleaver rose and fell in vicious arcs. Maeric's sword carved neat lines of light through gray flesh. Lyra's baton cracked silently-grinning wrists, her knife puncturing soft joints that weren't quite where anatomy said they should be.
One by one, the lesser monsters dissolved into tattered fog, their stolen faces stretching, thinning, then vanishing.
The Nightmare's pressure eased a fraction.
The fog at the edges of the square stopped advancing. It churned in place, thick and impatient, as if waiting to see what they did next.
"Keep hitting it!" Maeric shouted, voice raw. He jabbed his sword into the pinned giant's reaching limb, sawing through the tangled mass until it unraveled into smoke. "Don't let it get up!"
"It isn't getting up," Cassian said.
He wasn't entirely sure how he knew that. He just did. His new vision—Ruin-Sight—painted the scene in invisible fractures and stress lines. The fallen building's weight was distributed exactly wrong for the creature. Every attempted push tightened the pressure against its core instead of relieving it. Every twitch brought it closer to collapse.
The Path's new awareness was like having a second set of eyes, one that didn't care about color or shape, only failure.
He let the others hack and stab until the fused thing's motions slowed to a series of spasms, then to occasional shudders, then to nothing at all. It didn't dissolve like the smaller ones. Not completely. Its mass sagged and flattened, sinking into the ground as if the cobbles were sucking it down. Faces along its surface blurred, stretching into gray smears.
Something gleamed where its "chest" met the stones.
Cassian saw it at the same time Maeric did.
It began as a pinprick of light, buried in shadow. Then the darkness around it thinned, peeling away like burnt paper, revealing a crystalline core rising from the monster's corpse.
The Shard grew as it rose, until it was the length of Cassian's thumb and twice as thick, suspended a handspan above the cracked cobbles. Its surface held not one color but several, layered: dull iron-gray under a film of sickly white, with veins of black running through like hairline fractures. Faces slid under its outer layer, not distinct—just impressions of eyes and mouths and cheeks pressed against glass.
A sense of weight came with it. Not physical mass—nobody's boots slipped, the stones didn't sink—but conceptual heft. It was as if some piece of the Trial's meaning had been squeezed into a tiny, sharp form.
The survivors by the well whimpered and clutched each other tighter. The child who had almost been taken hid her face in the old woman's shawl, shoulders shaking.
Maeric took a step toward the Shard.
"Careful," Lyra warned, but she didn't try to stop him. Her knuckles were white on her baton. Blood smeared the side of her jaw where something had grazed her; she hadn't noticed.
"It's ours," Maeric said. He spoke more to himself than to anyone else. "We bled for it. We can't face the next Trial empty-handed."
Cassian pushed off the leaning wall and took a step toward the center of the square. His chest protested. He ignored it.
"Touch it now and you won't be able to hide what it does to you," he said.
Maeric glanced back at him, brows snapping together. "You think it'll corrupt whoever grabs it?"
"I think everything in here has a cost," Cassian said. "We don't know if that cost is best paid now, in front of everyone—including whoever is watching us—"
He glanced up, not at the sky, but at the invisible direction the Engine's attention seemed to come from.
"—or later, when it's more… useful."
Maeric's jaw flexed. Pride warred with a grudging awareness that the last time the Nightmare had presented them with a choice, Cassian's answer had kept them alive.
He stepped back from the Shard, though he didn't look happy doing it.
"Fine," he said. "We'll decide after we get out of this. If we get out of this."
"That's the spirit," Lyra said.
Cassian limped closer to the Shard until he was within arm's reach. He didn't touch it. Not yet. The cold weight of the smaller Shard he'd taken from Kerr's disappearance still sat in his palm, pressing against his skin like a promise waiting to be collected.
Up close, the larger Shard's texture was wrong. Its surface wasn't smooth like glass or rough like uncut crystal. It looked almost… brittle, with fine fracture lines crisscrossing it in a pattern too complex to be random. Where other Shards he'd seen were solid, this one seemed to have a hollowness at its center, a gap where something should be.
"Broken burden," he murmured. "Or a burden that breaks things."
"What?" Lyra asked.
"Nothing."
He straightened—slowly, ribs screaming—and turned toward the cluster of survivors.
They huddled close around the well. Most of them were women and children. A few older men with sunken cheeks. The old woman who'd spoken to them first clutched the edge of the well with both hands, as if anchoring herself to it could keep everything else from sliding away.
"You did it," she said. Tears tracked through the grime on her face. "You stopped the big one. They never stopped it before."
Cassian's fingers twitched.
They never stopped it before.
"Before?" he asked. "How many times?"
Her gaze skittered away, like a rat avoiding light. "Many. I… I don't know. The bells ring, the monsters come, the houses fall. We die. Then we're back here. Sometimes there are more of us. Sometimes fewer. We wait. We always wait."
"Wait for what?" Lyra asked.
"For the wagons," the woman said immediately. "For the priests to send help. For you." Her voice cracked on the last word.
Cassian scanned the survivors. There were too many gaps in their story. Too many seams.
He walked closer.
The child who had almost been dragged away flinched as he approached but didn't run. Her eyes were too tired for that, too used to seeing horrors repeat. A bruise ringed her wrist where the creature had grabbed her. It looked too neat. A little too round. Like a painted ring rather than damage from fingers.
"What's your name?" Cassian asked.
She hesitated. "L… Leena."
He watched her lips form the syllables, saw the way her eyes flicked to the side as if checking for approval.
"Leena," he repeated. "Have you ever gone beyond the square?"
She blinked. "We… we can't. The fog—"
"Not now." He gestured around them. "Before. In the time between the bells."
Her brows drew together. She looked at the old woman, then up at the sky, as if the answer might be written there.
"I…" Her eyes went distant. "We wait by the well," she said, voice flattening. "The priests said—"
"The priests said if you wait here, they'll come," Cassian finished. "Yes, I heard."
He reached out.
Lyra moved as if to grab his wrist. Stopped when she saw what he intended.
Cassian took Leena's forearm gently in one hand. With the other, he drew the edge of his sword across her skin.
Not deep. Just enough to open a line of red.
She gasped more in surprise than pain.
Maeric was there in three strides, fury snapping through his words. "What in the Dawn's name are you doing?"
"Watch," Cassian said.
Leena stared at her own arm, lip wobbling. Blood welled along the shallow cut. Then, as Cassian watched, the droplet at the center of the line… stuttered.
For a heartbeat, the wound split, showing two different positions at once: one further along her arm, one closer to her wrist. Then the world around it blurred, like a bad painting smudged by a careless hand, and when it cleared, the cut was gone.
No scar. No blood. No sign.
Leena blinked, then burst into tears, clutching her now-unmarked arm.
"I—I—" she stammered. "It… it hurt—"
She had felt the pain. That part was real enough. The damage wasn't allowed to remain.
Maeric's mouth snapped shut. His eyes went from the girl's arm to Cassian's face.
"What did you do?" he demanded.
"Proved a point," Cassian said. His own ribs throbbed in time with his heartbeat. The ember in his chest—his new Path—smoldered, feeding him steadiness he shouldn't have. "They're not people. Not the way we are. The Trial can't let them change. They're props. Anchors. The scenario needs them to be 'the ones left behind' or the title doesn't work."
Some of the survivors stared at him, confused. Others didn't seem to hear him at all anymore. Their eyes were fixed on the fog at the edges of the square, as if awaiting their cue.
"You cut a child," Maeric said, voice low. "To make a point."
"She is a thing that looks like a child," Cassian said, equally quiet. "A script stuffed into a shape. And we are standing on a stage this place has used over and over."
He nodded toward the cracked building he'd collapsed.
"You saw the way it moved," he went on. "The way everything was positioned. The square, the well, the houses. The monsters didn't come from random directions. They came from where they were supposed to come from."
"So what?" Maeric snapped. "We still had to stop them."
"Yes," Cassian said. "And now we have. For this cycle. For this run." He looked at the survivors, then back at Maeric. "What do you think happens if we stay here?"
Maeric opened his mouth. Closed it.
From the fog, a faint murmur rose—multiple voices, overlapping. The tone was almost pleading.
Lyra rubbed the bridge of her nose with bloody fingers. "We hold the square, they keep sending monsters until we drop," she said. "We're already tired and half-broken. Next wave, maybe we get another big thing. Or two. Or something worse."
"The Trial wants to see how long we can hold," Cassian said. "How much we'll sacrifice to defend a group that can't leave this pattern. Defend, retreat, die. Reset. Run again. Meanwhile, it gets Shards from every death. Data from every decision."
Sade snorted, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. "You talk like the fog's got a ledger."
"It does," Cassian said. He thought of the voice in the ash-place, of "Iteration" and "Protocol." "We just don't get to see it."
Maeric folded his arms, the set of his shoulders rigid. "What's your alternative, then? Abandon them? Walk off into the fog and hope it doesn't tear us apart?"
"Yes," Cassian said.
The word dropped between them like a stone into still water.
Lyra stared at him. "You could soften it a little."
"Why?" he asked.
She had no good answer for that.
The bell tolled again.
This time, the sound was warped. The first strike came clear, low and heavy. The second arrived half a beat early, clashing with the echo. By the third, the tone had split—two notes grinding against each other painfully.
The fog reacted.
It pushed into the square in slow, hesitant waves, like a tide unsure if now was the time to commit. Figures moved within it, but they didn't advance fully. Cassian felt the weight of attention pressing down on the scene.
The Engine was watching. Not just running, now. Paying attention.
"We don't have time to argue," he said. "The Trial has a name: The Ones Left Behind. That's the hint. The condition isn't 'save everyone.' It's 'decide who you're willing to leave.'"
Maeric's jaw clenched so hard a line jumped in his cheek. "You're assuming—"
"I'm following the logic," Cassian said. "Either they're meant to be saved, in which case the Trial will present us with a genuine way to take them out that doesn't look like suicide…" He gestured toward the fog. "…or they're not. In which case every obvious attempt to drag them beyond their role will be punished."
"They're people," Maeric said. It sounded more like a plea than a statement.
"They're patterns," Cassian said. He didn't raise his voice. "We can't take them with us any more than we can carry the street. We can die with them, if you prefer that. I don't."
Sade grunted. "I didn't come all this way to feed a story."
Someone else—one of the scar-knuckled men—shifted his grip on his cudgel. "If we stay, we die. That's all I need to know."
The others looked between Cassian and Maeric, eyes wide and hollow. They weren't philosophers. They were tired people who'd just survived a fight they hadn't expected to see the end of. The idea of immediately stepping into more unknown was a hard sell.
Dying again defending a well full of illusions was harder.
Lyra chewed her lower lip. "If we go into the fog," she said slowly, "we might find something else. A gate. A Warden. A… whatever. Something new. If we stay, we get more of the same."
She looked at the survivors. Her eyes softened for a heartbeat, then hardened again.
"I'm not noble enough to die for a story," she said. "I'm with him."
Maeric stared at her like she'd betrayed something. Maybe she had. Maybe that was necessary.
"The Trial's not going to like this," he said.
"The Trial can file a complaint," Cassian replied.
He turned his back on the well.
He didn't do it out of cruelty. He did it because the moment he stopped looking at the survivors, they were easier to treat as what they were: fixtures. Set dressing.
Tools.
"The fog is thinner there," he said, pointing toward the segment of the square's edge where the mist had been slowest to advance. Even now, it curled inward cautiously, its tendrils thinner, like fingers dunked into hot water and pulled back. "Did you notice?"
No one had, but when they looked now, they saw it.
"How—" Lyra began.
"I watch for weak points," Cassian said. "That's what I do now. That's what the Path made easier. Weak walls. Weak joints. Weak rules."
Sade nodded once. She didn't need more explanation.
Cassian moved toward the thin section of fog.
As he went, a hand grabbed his sleeve. Small, desperate.
He looked down.
Leena stared up at him through tear-swollen eyes.
"You're leaving?" she whispered. "They said… they said if we waited by the well, the priests would send someone to take us away."
"They did," Cassian said.
Her gaze trembled. "You're not—"
He gently pried her fingers from his sleeve.
"No," he said.
Her face crumpled. She opened her mouth, a wail building.
The old woman from the house called out, voice cracking. "Please! You can't just go! The bells will ring again, they'll come again, and we—"
She choked on her own words. For a heartbeat, her movements glitched—hands lifting, then snapping back down, head turning one way then the other like a puppet tugged by two strings. Her eyes rolled, showing whites, then reset.
"I'm so tired," she whispered, voice suddenly small. "I don't want to do it again."
Cassian hesitated for the first time.
Just a breath. Just a heartbeat.
Then he stepped away.
He didn't apologize. That would have been a lie, and lying to constructs felt like a waste of effort.
"Form up," Maeric said hoarsely. He sounded like he was swallowing glass. "If we're doing this, we're not going to do it like cowards. Shields forward. Eyes open."
He moved to Cassian's side anyway, because whatever else he thought of him, he couldn't deny Cassian had a talent for staying alive where other people didn't.
"I will find a way," Maeric muttered, barely audible. "Next time, or the one after, I'll find a way to take them with us."
Cassian didn't bother arguing. If the world kept resetting this scenario, Maeric might get exactly what he wanted: infinite tries at saving ghosts.
The others gathered in a rough wedge, with Cassian at the point, Maeric to one side, Sade to the other. Lyra hovered just behind Cassian's right shoulder, baton and knife ready.
The survivors sobbed and clutched each other as the fog licked at the edge of the square.
The bell's echo shuddered, as if the mechanism striking it had misaligned. The sound grated along Cassian's nerves.
He took one breath.
Another.
The ember in his chest pulsed. Not comforting, but steady. His body still hurt. His ribs felt like splintered wood. But the Ashen Adaptation his Path had granted him worked quietly: his muscles had already begun to adjust to the kind of force that had nearly killed him. If he took another hit like that, it wouldn't be as bad.
Failure as rehearsal.
He found that thought… reassuring.
"On my mark," he said.
He lifted his sword.
The fog ahead shivered, as if aware of what he meant to do.
"Now."
He stepped into it.
The transition wasn't like stepping from air into water. It wasn't like anything his body had a word for.
For a split second, the fog wasn't just fog; it was a boundary. A layer where rules changed. The air went thick and thin at once, sound wavered, light bent. His skin crawled, not from cold, but from the sense that every part of him was being counted.
Behind him, feet pounded on stone. Bodies pressed close. Lyra's breath brushed his neck. Maeric's shield scraped masonry. Someone stumbled, cursed, was yanked upright.
The square behind them smeared, becoming an impression rather than a place. The survivors blurred into smudges of color and sound. The well stretched, narrowed, snapped back like a rubber band.
The Nightmare did not like this.
Cassian felt it.
Not as a voice. Not yet.
As pressure.
As resistance.
As the strain of a script being pushed somewhere it hadn't been written to go.
He gritted his teeth and pushed harder.
The fog parted just enough for him to see that there was something beyond it.
Good.
If there was beyond, there was a way out.
Behind him, the square vanished.
The Ones Left Behind stayed where they had always been.
Cassian led the living away from them.