Embers and Echoes

Time passed, but not like it used to.

They stayed low for three days.

Zhurong's forge-smothered workshop, carved into the base of a decommissioned smelter, was hot, hidden, and full of strange comforts. It smelled of mineral ash, melted herbs, and warm steel. The kind of place that shouldn't feel like home—but did.

The first day was all recovery.

Nyxia slept like a stone, waking in fits, soaked in sweat, as echoes of burned memories clawed at her skull. Her limbs felt too long. Her skin too tight. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw flickers of people she had never met, screaming words she somehow understood.

Zhurong said little.

He left jars of cooled broth by her bedside and gently reapplied the ember wax he used to calm the veins around her mark. His hands were warm but careful. He asked no questions.

Boo filled the space with sarcasm, pacing, muttering, checking weapons she'd already cleaned twice. But her eyes kept straying to Nyxia. Watching.

The silence between them all wasn't awkward.

It was reverent.

By the second day, Nyxia forced herself to move.

"I need air," she said.

Zhurong offered no protest, but warned her: "Don't stray far. The mark might still be... tender."

She didn't answer. She left through the back tunnel, slipping through cracked steam vents until Thros'len gave way to moss-draped ruins and blackstone paths tangled in fungal bloom.

Loque'nahak was waiting.

The spirit beast had curled beneath a dead tree, half-hidden in mist, his breathing shallow but steady. His wound—taken during the voidroot ambush—was healing, but slowly. Nyxia knelt beside him, one hand on his fur, feeling the tremor of each breath.

"I'm still here," she whispered.

Loque opened one eye.

And then closed it again.

Back in the city, Boo was throwing daggers at a chalk outline on Zhurong's wall.

"Is this supposed to be a void cultist or your ex?" Zhurong asked from across the room.

"Same difference," Boo replied, letting another dagger fly.

Zhurong leaned against his counter, arms crossed. "You're twitchy."

"I'm always twitchy."

"You're scared."

Boo turned slowly. "Wouldn't you be?"

He met her gaze evenly. "I am."

That night, Nyxia sat up with a hot cloth pressed to the back of her neck, staring at the faint Veil mark glowing near her collarbone.

"I don't know what it wants," she murmured.

Boo sat nearby, cross-legged on a crate, sipping spiced tea that Zhurong insisted helped with stress. "It? You make it sound alive."

"It might be," Nyxia said. "I don't know. It's not... words. It's pressure. Pull. Like... like something's watching the world and pulling the wrong strings into place."

"Sounds like fate," Boo muttered.

"Sounds like trouble," Zhurong added, sliding a book across the table toward them. "Found this in the deep archives. Mentions something called 'The Thread That Stitches Unwilling Hands.' Doesn't say much else. Just... that when the world teeters, certain people wake up changed."

"Like us," Boo said.

"No." Nyxia shook her head. "We didn't wake up. We were taken."

That sat in the air a long while.

By day three, Boo and Zhurong had started a reluctant rhythm.

She teased. He deadpanned. She stole one of his fire-daggers and claimed it was for "balance." He let her.

Nyxia returned from visiting Loque with new cuts on her hands—root burns, where Veil flowers had grown around the beast. Zhurong treated them without comment, but his jaw tightened.

"You keep touching the wounds," he finally said.

Nyxia looked up. "I have to know if they're healing."

"Are you?"

She didn't answer.

That evening, all three of them sat around a shallow flame pit Zhurong had carved into the stone. He was cooking something fragrant. Boo was braiding thin cords of metal and muttering about trap designs. Nyxia was sketching the runes she'd seen in her dreams.

"What if it's not fate?" Boo asked suddenly.

"What is it then?" Zhurong replied.

"A lie. A trap. A test we're meant to fail."

Nyxia looked at the fire.

"I don't think the Veil is a liar," she said. "But it doesn't care who we were before."

Later that night, as they prepared for sleep, Zhurong laid a weathered map out across the floor.

"Dustwallow Marsh," he said. "Something's building there. Cultists. Old magic. My contact said there were whispers in the water. Then he went quiet."

Nyxia studied the map.

Boo ran her fingers along the edges.

"Guess we're not dying here," she said. "Not yet."

And somewhere beneath the city, where the stone was cracked deepest, another flower bloomed.

Not white this time.

But red.

Its petals curled inward.

And it whispered:

"The fire wakes."