The ash made every step a fight.
Yuna had been walking for what felt like hours. Maybe it was hours. Maybe it was twenty minutes. The violet sky never changed, the three moons never moved, and time had lost all meaning in this place.
Her legs burned. Her left shoulder throbbed where she'd hit the ground, and something in her ankle had twisted during the crash landing. Not broken, but angry. Every step sent pain shooting up her calf.
She kept walking anyway.
The golden light on the horizon was her only landmark. Artificial light meant people. People meant answers. Maybe help. Maybe a way home.
Or maybe just someone who could tell her where the hell she was before she collapsed.
The ash wasn't like sand or dirt. It was soft, almost powdery, and it shifted under her feet with every step. Her canvas sneakers filled with gray dust within the first hundred meters. Now the ash had worked its way through her socks, between her toes, leaving dark stains on her skin that felt vaguely oily.
She tried not to think about what she was walking through.
Tried not to think about the armored corpse she'd seen earlier, the one that had crumbled to dust the moment she touched it.
Tried not to think about how long that body had been lying there, waiting to dissolve.
The wind picked up. Cold, carrying the smell of copper and something older. Something wrong.
Yuna pulled her jacket tighter and kept moving.
One foot. Then the other. Then again.
Her mother had taught her that. When the treatments stopped working and the hospital bills kept climbing, when Yuna wanted to scream or cry or give up entirely, her mother would squeeze her hand and say: One step. Just one more step. You can always take one more step.
She'd been right. Even when everything else failed, Yuna could still put one foot in front of the other.
So she did.
The wasteland stretched endlessly in every direction.
Black mountains lined the horizon like broken teeth. The ash plain between them was flat, featureless, interrupted only by occasional rock formations that jutted up from the ground at strange angles.
No plants. No animals. No sound except the wind and her own labored breathing.
Just gray powder and violet sky and those three impossible moons hanging overhead like they were watching her struggle.
Yuna's throat was dry as sandpaper. She hadn't had water since the hospital, before the portal, before any of this. How long ago was that? A day? Two?
Her body was running on fumes and desperation.
The golden light grew slowly closer. Agonizingly slowly.
She could see shapes now. Buildings, maybe. Walls. Something rising out of the ash that wasn't natural rock.
Civilization. Or what passed for it in this place.
Just a little farther. One more step. Then another.
Her foot caught on something buried in the ash.
Yuna stumbled, caught herself, looked down.
Stone. Actual stone, not ash-covered rock. Flat and rectangular, fitted together with other stones in a deliberate pattern.
A road.
She was standing on a road.
The realization hit her like a physical blow. Roads meant travel. Travel meant people. People meant she wasn't alone in this nightmare.
Yuna laughed. It came out cracked and desperate, but it was still a laugh.
She followed the road toward the light.
The second body almost stopped her.
It was lying face-down in the ash, half-covered by drifting powder. This one was fresher than the first. The armor was still intact, dark metal plates over leather, and the flesh hadn't mummified yet.
Yuna stopped three feet away. Stared.
Human. Definitely human. The proportions were right, the shape of the hand reaching toward the road like the person had been crawling before they died.
But the skin was wrong.
Gray. Not ash-gray, but actually gray, like the color had been drained out of it. And there were cracks running through it, thin black lines spreading from the chest outward like a shattered window.
What happened to you?
Yuna didn't touch this one. Didn't want to see it dissolve like the last.
She stepped around the body carefully and kept walking.
The road led her past more of them.
Three more bodies in the next two hundred meters. Then five. Then she stopped counting because counting meant looking and looking meant seeing those gray faces, those cracked skins, those hands reaching for something they never reached.
Whatever had killed them, it had killed a lot of people.
And it had done it recently.
The golden light was closer now. Close enough to see the walls clearly. High walls, thick and made of dark stone, with towers at regular intervals. Torches burned along the top, casting that warm glow across the wasteland.
A fortress. Or a city. Something built to keep things out.
Yuna walked faster. Her ankle screamed. She ignored it.
The road widened as she approached. More cobblestones visible beneath the ash, more signs of actual infrastructure. She passed what might have been a waystation once, now collapsed into rubble. Passed a signpost with symbols she couldn't read, pointing toward the walled settlement ahead.
Almost there. Almost safe.
She was maybe two hundred meters from the gates when the voice came.
"Stop where you are."
Yuna froze.
The voice came from her left. Female. Hard. The kind of voice that expected to be obeyed.
She turned slowly, hands raised on instinct.
A woman stood ten feet away, half-hidden behind a rock formation that Yuna had walked right past without noticing. Tall. At least six feet, with dark skin and silver hair pulled back in a tight braid. She wore armor that looked functional rather than decorative: dark leather with metal plates at the shoulders and chest, a sword at her hip, a bow across her back.
Her eyes were the color of storm clouds, and they were locked on Yuna with the focus of a predator assessing prey.
"Who are you?" the woman demanded. "How did you get here?"
The words were foreign. Sharp consonants, flowing vowels, nothing like Korean or English or any language Yuna had ever heard.
But she understood them perfectly.
And when she opened her mouth to respond, the words that came out were in that same impossible language.
"My name is Yuna. Yuna Veylan. I came through... there was a portal. In Seoul. The sky opened and I fell through and I don't know how I got here or where here even is."
The woman's eyes narrowed.
"Seoul," she repeated. "Earth."
"Yes. I'm from Earth. Is that... do you know what that is?"
The woman didn't answer immediately. Her hand rested on her sword hilt, not drawing it, but ready.
"You crossed the Veil," she said finally. "The barrier between dimensions. That makes you a summon."
"A summon?"
"Someone pulled from another world to serve a purpose here." The woman's expression didn't soften exactly, but something shifted in her eyes. Recognition, maybe. Or resignation. "The Veil doesn't open randomly. If you're here, someone wanted you here."
Yuna thought about the portal tearing open above Seoul. The violet light reaching for her like hands. The feeling of being chosen, or taken, or both.
"I didn't ask for this," she said quietly. "I didn't want this."
"They never do."
The woman finally released her sword hilt. Stepped closer, studying Yuna with an intensity that made her feel like a specimen under glass.
"You're injured. Exhausted. How long have you been walking?"
"I don't know. Hours, maybe. The sky never changes."
"It doesn't." The woman glanced toward the settlement. "You're lucky you made it this far. The Reach isn't safe for travelers, especially not after dark."
"What happens after dark?"
The woman was quiet for a moment. Then: "The Unraveling hunts."
Before Yuna could ask what that meant, a sound cut through the stillness.
Distant. Low.
A howl.
But wrong somehow. The audio equivalent of those impossible geometries she'd seen in the portal. A noise that made her bones vibrate and her hindbrain scream danger in a voice older than language.
The woman's hand snapped to her sword.
"We need to move. Now."
"What is that?"
"Nothing you want to meet." The woman was already moving, striding toward the settlement with the easy speed of someone used to covering ground fast. "The gates close at dusk. We have maybe ten minutes."
Yuna looked at her battered legs, her twisted ankle, her body running on nothing but fear and adrenaline.
"I don't know if I can run."
The woman glanced back. Her expression was unreadable.
"Can you try?"
The howl came again. Closer this time.
Yuna thought about her mother. About one more step. About all the times she'd kept going when giving up would have been easier.
"Yes."
The woman nodded once. Sharp. Approving.
"Then run."
She took off toward the gates.
Yuna ran.
Her ankle screamed. Her lungs burned. Her legs felt like they were filled with sand instead of muscle.
But she ran.
The woman stayed a few paces ahead, moving with a fluid efficiency that Yuna couldn't hope to match. Every few seconds she glanced back, checking that Yuna was still following, still upright, still alive.
The howling grew louder.
Yuna didn't look back. Didn't want to see what was making that sound. Just focused on the gates ahead, the torches burning along the walls, the dark shape of the entrance growing larger with every step.
One hundred meters.
Fifty.
Twenty.
The gates were massive. Thirty feet high at least, made of dark metal reinforced with bands of something that glowed faintly in the torchlight. They were open, but barely. A gap just wide enough for two people to pass through side by side.
Guards stood on either side. More armored figures with weapons drawn, faces tight with tension.
"Captain!" one of them shouted. "Something's moving in the Reach!"
The woman with silver hair didn't slow down.
"I see it. Get ready to close the gates the moment we're through."
She reached the entrance first, slipped through the gap, then turned and reached back.
"Take my hand!"
Yuna grabbed it.
The woman pulled her through the gap with surprising strength, and Yuna stumbled into the settlement just as the guards heaved against the massive gates.
Metal groaned. Hinges screamed.
The gates slammed shut with a boom that echoed off the walls like thunder.
Outside, something hit the metal hard enough to make the entire wall shudder.
Then again.
Then silence.
Yuna stood in the torchlight, gasping for breath, hands on her knees, every muscle in her body shaking.
The woman with silver hair watched her for a moment. Then she did something unexpected.
She smiled.
Just a small one. Barely there. But real.
"You made it."
Yuna looked up. Still gasping. Still trembling.
"What... what was that thing?"
"A void-hound. Scout creature for the Unraveling." The woman's smile faded. "They don't usually come this close to the walls. Something stirred them up tonight."
She looked at Yuna with those storm-gray eyes.
"Something like a new summon crossing the Veil."
Before Yuna could process that, the woman turned and started walking deeper into the settlement.
"Come. You need water, food, and medical attention. In that order."
Yuna straightened on shaking legs.
"Wait. I don't even know your name."
The woman paused. Glanced back.
"Mara. Captain of the Reach Guard." She tilted her head slightly. "Welcome to Valdris, Yuna Veylan. Try not to die in the first week. It would be a waste."
Then she walked away.
Yuna stood there for a moment, surrounded by torchlight and stone walls and the distant sounds of a world she didn't understand.
Then she followed.
Because there was nothing else to do.
And because, for the first time since the portal swallowed her, someone had called her by name.
[END CHAPTER 2]