“What if there isn’t a way out?” Khani asked.

“Then I’m fucked. I’m going to look for one anyway.” Alonne stood up, looked out at the dais. Then came a crunch, and a shudder. The song was eerie, unlike anything he had ever heard before. Alonne turned towards the exit and saw the light of torches racing towards both of them.

“Shit,” he glanced down and saw a staircase opening, the stone peeling back as if somehow only they had discovered its secrets. It was welcoming them deeper. Alonne vaulted through the opening, sprinting into the depths. Bioluminescent mushrooms lined the path, his hair a glimmering mane in his trail.

Alonne dashed around a corner and poked his head out the other side, panting. There was no sign of Khani.

“Are you going to just stand there?” Khani’s voice came from behind him.

“How are you—” Alonne turned around to see his new companion’s silhouette slinking through the darkness like a panther. He had slipped ahead without making so much as a sound. The clattering of the jailers’ armour was at their heels, flames lashing at the Palisade’s depths. How had they known to find them? Had they come back to inspect whatever they had triggered in the dais?

What if they hit a dead end? How could they escape when they were burying themselves deeper within this tomb? As Alonne heard the guards closing in, he felt Khani’s hand entangle with his again.

“Come on.” Khani tugged him with thought-shattering force, and he was dashing alongside the other man as quickly as he possibly could, climbing over fallen stone pillars and the thick roots of the trees that grew to the center of their world. As they fled, the path branched, and Khani yanked them both down the branching path to the left, through the mouth of a narrower tunnel sloping further into the depths. He let go of Alonne’s hand and closed his eyes, chanted a litany of indecipherable words beneath his breath. A seemingly tangible wall of stone rose, the same texture as the sandstone chamber, to obscure their way forward from the man thoroughfare. It was a blurry glamour that would trick lesser minds into believing there was but a single path to follow.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Alonne stopped to marvel at a real-life display of the supernatural. It had been harmless, more or less—Khani had harmed no one, had only uttered ancient words aloud to shape the world to his liking. “How did you do that?”

“Magic.”

“I know that.”

“We have no time to talk,” Khani nodded towards the passage through which they’d came, the voices of the jailers echoing through the otherwise forgotten chambers.

They ran for hours, chasing safety through the mushroom-lit halls. They collapsed near a pool of standing water. Alonne was desperately scooping handfuls down his throat.

“Should you be drinking that?” Khani asked.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Alonne looked up from the pool, thin fingers dripping wet.

“That water’s probably dirty—who knows how long it’s been sitting there?”

Alonne took another couple of drinks. It wasn’t sparkling mountain spring water, but it was better than nothing. “You need water to live. A lot of it. I’ve got a strong stomach—I’ll be fine.”

“Suit yourself,” the man said, and he leaned himself back against the wall to rest for a moment.

Alonne took a few moments to splash the spring water on his face, and rinse it through his hair, just trying to fight back all the dirt and scales. Once he tied it up with a string, he regarded his reflection in the pool. Pale as a sheet and dotted with freckles, his features were porcelain and glowing even beneath the grime.

Once upon a time, his sister, Mithra, had teased him about his fair complexion and his hair, accused him of preening himself like a woman. The memory brought tears to Alonne’s eyes. He turned away from the pool, from Khani, and went to sit in a corner, hugging his arms close to himself.

Two weeks ago he’d been hard at work in the crawl spaces beneath a winery, catching and exterminating the rats that plagued their facilities. Whenever Alonne had caught wind of a dirty job, he had at least made an attempt to do it, because whenever he was faced with a fetid bedpan, or a bloated rat carcass, or a bed-ridden elder, there was nothing that could shake him. He would show up on time, bright and early, and take care of whatever needed to be dealt with. In the city, there was always a wretched, festering mess that required someone’s attention.

He wondered if in the distant future he’d ever be able to go back to that life. It had not been clean, or glamorous, but it had been work—a way to keep a roof over his family’s head, food on the table. It was only then that he allowed himself to remember, and lament, the fact that he had no family to return to.