The outline in the fog looked like my old master. The white eyes proved it wasn't him anymore.
He stood where the alley narrowed, his posture twisting something sharp in my chest. Straight back. Weight balanced. Left foot half a step forward. I'd copied that stance a thousand times, back when lessons meant survival, not death.
The fog curled around him, reacting in ways it never did for ordinary hunters. It didn't cling or resist—it obeyed. That was the first rule cracking apart. The fog didn't submit. Not unless it had already taken something in return.
"Don't," I said quietly, though I didn't know who I was warning—him, or myself.
His head tilted. Too slow. Too deliberate. When he stepped forward, there was no sound. No scrape of stone. No breath. I remembered what he used to say when I asked how to move unseen.
You don't silence yourself, he'd told me. You convince the world you were never there.
The fog parted for him.
That was the second rule shattering. The fog listened. The fog remembered. But it never yielded. Not to anyone still human.
My fingers tightened at my side. I could feel the patterns shifting, the mist reacting to his presence like a trained animal recognizing its handler. Whatever had taken him hadn't erased what he was. It had refined it.
"You taught me never to hunt what you can't escape," I said, backing away slowly, moving with the fog the way he had drilled into me. "So tell me—can you still escape this?"
The white eyes didn't blink.
He moved before I finished the thought.
The fog collapsed inward, slamming my chest like deep water. I staggered, boots scraping stone, vision blurring as the mist thickened until it felt solid. This wasn't pursuit. This was containment. He wasn't hunting me—he was ending the lesson.
I broke the first rule.
I pulled the fog instead of moving with it.
Pain lanced through my skull as the mist resisted, shrieking soundlessly as it tore from its pattern. The ground vanished beneath my feet. I fell hard, coughing as cold burned my lungs. The fog recoiled, rippling violently—and for the first time, it noticed me.
My old master stopped.
That was worse than him advancing.
"You never force it," his voice said—not aloud, but inside the fog itself, layered and wrong. "You listen."
I pushed myself up, blood dripping from my nose, hands shaking. The alley walls were gone, swallowed by mist. No escape route. No blind corner. Just him, standing perfectly still, white eyes locked on me like I was a flaw that needed correcting.
I broke the second rule.
I used his pattern.
I mirrored his stance, his timing, the subtle shift of weight he'd drilled into me years ago. I moved exactly as he would have—as he taught me to. The fog surged again, confused, dragged into a rhythm it recognized but no longer understood. For half a heartbeat, the pressure lifted.
He tilted his head.
Approval. Or disappointment. I couldn't tell.
"That path ends in death," he said, stepping forward as the fog closed ranks behind him. "It always did."
I felt it then—the truth every shadow hunter learned too late.
Some fights weren't meant to be survived.
They were meant to be endured.
The fog-blade never touched me.
That was the cruel part.
It passed through my shoulder like cold breath, painless for half a second—then the world howled. My arm went numb instantly, fingers spasming as if they no longer belonged to me. I collapsed to one knee, vision fracturing as the fog surged into the wound instead of blood.
I screamed. Everyone does the first time.
The fog doesn't cut flesh.
It erases permission.
It stripped something away—memory, instinct, a piece of me I didn't know had a shape. My old master turned away.
"Live with it," he said, fading back into the mist. "If you can."
The alley returned. The walls. The stink. The silence.
I dragged myself upright using my left arm, teeth clenched against the tremor running through me. The fog lingered around my ruined shoulder, curling too close, too curious.
I understood then what I'd lost.
I hadn't been maimed.
I had been marked.
The fog would always recognize me now.
And every time I used it again—it would take more of me.
[Next chapter: The Fog Remembers]