They reached the outskirts without ever seeing the city arrive.

  One moment there was the seemingly endless marshlands.

  Black water, reed-choked channels, the rot of the damp.

  But their trek brought them to drier land.

  The ground hardened beneath their boots.

  The fog thinned in reluctant strands, revealing stone where there should have been none.

  Illara and Matthias crouched.

  “Why did we not see it?” she whispered.

  “I am beginning to think this island let us see what it wants us to see,” Matthias said.

  “I do not think you are too far from the truth,” Illara muttered.

  A broken column rose from the mire.

  Too wide to be hewn by hands, too tall to be erected by those who feared the sky.

  Illara peered from behind the slab of fallen masonry, its surface long overgrown and slick with lichen.

  Cold enough to numb her palm through leather.

  She beheld the Nameless City beyond.

  A black city of night encircled by high black walls.

  It was monolithic.

  Blocks of black stone as large as cottages stacked in silence, their seamless edges steeped and angled.

  Too natural and too old to be mortal.

  The towers were dark and unlit.

  They stood as silent, eternal sentinels long before the world had been shaped.

  Matthias knelt beside her, hood drawn low.

  A shadow in the dark.

  He stared at the walled city, then at the streets beyond.

  His gaze tightened.

  “How,” he murmured, “did we not see this on the approach?”

  Illara didn’t answer at first.

  She was listening.

  The city was not deserted.

  It was alive.

  She could hear boots on stone, metal shifting, a muffled call that echoed and resounded off its walls.

  It felt populated in the same way a hive feels populated.

  The hiss and chatter.

  Pale Coil.

  “Perhaps,” she said finally, “perhaps the forest and the mist obscured it.”

  Matthias glanced at her. “You think it hid itself.”

  She nodded.

  “I think it decided to reveal itself when we were permitted to arrive.”

  He looked back out over the black geometry.

  The fog clung to the edges of the walls, it did not drift into the city proper.

  As if the air itself obeyed an old boundary.

  “We were allowed to see it,” he said. “It showed itself.”

  Illara’s mouth went dry.

  “The island has been doing it since the shore. It lets you see what it wants you to see.”

  She stood up then.

  “It keeps the rest folded.”

  Matthias’s fingers flexed once against the stone. “Like a seam.”

  “Yes, it folds between worlds,” Illara whispered. “as my Mistwalk, as your shadow-fringe.”

  “You speak as it is alive,” the Nightblade said.

  “Perhaps it is,” the Mistwalker returned, a pause, “or perhaps we should think of it as such.”

  For a heartbeat, neither of them spoke.

  The city loomed, patient and indifferent.

  In the distance, a shadow crossed a high walkway—tall, heavy, deliberate.

  Pale armor caught the faintest smear of light and swallowed it again.

  Illara crouched.

  “Pale Coil,” she whispered.

  Matthias’s voice dropped further. “We’re not walking through that openly.”

  Illara gave him a look that would have been a smile if her eyes weren’t so tired.

  “We’re Astrastars.”

  “Still,” he replied, “we do not know if their wards negate our walks.”

  She exhaled once, slow.

  The mist around her curled hesitantly.

  “I think not,” she said softly, “the creature in the grove could not see us.”

  “A fair observation,” Matthias assented.

  “If they have watchers, they’ll be watching for bodies. Not absence.”

  Illara’s hand brushed the edge of her cloak.

  The wards embroidered there—old work, star-threaded—caught faintly against the dark.

  “I will be beside you,” the Nightblade said as he stepped into the fringe, “every step.”

  Illara breathed out.

  She let her breathing slow, then slower still.

  She melded into the mists.

  The air enfolded her.

  The mist enshrouded her.

  The world softened at the edges.

  Mist gathered around her ankles without wind, thin and translucent.

  Threading itself through the seams of her armor.

  Her outline became indistinct. Difficult for the eye to agree upon.

  A trick of perception, a refusal of certainty.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Beside her, she felt Matthias’s presence.

  Stay close.

  His voice seemed to come from behind her and ahead of her at once.

  Illara nodded, “try to keep up.”

  A chuckle.

  They moved.

  Two ghostly presences drifting through an island of ghosts.

  The ground rose into the first tier of the city’s outer works.

  Broken steps slick with algae, black stone sweating with cold.

  The Pale Coil sentries flicked their forked tongues and one caught a roaming insect.

  Illara and Matthias passed, silent as ghosts.

  They crossed the arched gate.

  No carvings marked the threshold.

  No banners. No declarations.

  The city loomed large and stretched into twisting, deserted streets.

  Twilight had befallen the Nameless City.

  Illara thought it had never seen the daylight.

  She drifted forward in the mist’s skin, her footfall a brush upon the air.

  The air tasted metallic here, old rain trapped in stone.

  She felt the sightless eyes of the city upon her, but she dismissed it.

  Matthias drifted beside her, a presence she felt more than seen.

  She glanced to see the Nightblade emerging from the fringe, his armor caked with frost from fringe-walking.

  His hand briefly touched her shoulder and he vanished into the fringe again.

  Mistwalker and Nightblade halted behind a fallen buttress, its edge jagged as a snapped tooth.

  Beyond it, the street opened into a wide corridor between buildings that rose like cliffs.

  The stone smooth, seamless.

  There were no homes here. No windows. No warmth.

  Only dwellings. Cold and sparse.

  There, standing along the corridor, two sentries.

  Two hulking Pale Coil guards, tall as war-statues, plated in pale armor.

  Their helms elongated, their hauberk more battle harness than scales.

  Their silhouettes imitated the shadow of men, unhunched and upright.

  Each of them brandished heavy polearms with hooked heads, darkened edges drinking the light.

  They stood.

  They watched.

  Not the street. Not the fog.

  They watched unblinking.

  Illara’s throat tightened. Enshrouded by the mists as she was she suddenly felt open and exposed.

  Her breath came heavier, betraying her.

  Matthias leaned close enough that his whisper brushed her ear like a shadow.

  “They are not looking at us,” he whispered.

  Illara’s gaze stayed fixed on the sentries. “of course not.”

  Matthias’s voice was flat. “We are Astrastars.”

  He was right.

  No mortal magic could pierce Astrastarian rune-craft.

  Illara exhaled slowly.

  The mist around her thickened.

  She took a stride.

  Matthias’s shadow glided beside her.

  They edged closer.

  The Pale Coil sentries remained motionless, hulking and absolute.

  The city breathed down upon them.

  Slow, intrusive, and hungry.

  Then Illara moved.

  The quiet stirring of dismissive fog.

  Of mists.

  She stepped out from behind the fallen buttress and into the corridor between the monoliths.

  Her boots threaded the dew-slick stone soundlessly.

  The sentries did not turn.

  They stood still as pillars of pale armor and stone.

  Their polearms planted, helms angled toward the empty corridor before them.

  Illara drifted, a handbreadth between them.

  The Pale Coil stirred.

  A flaw in the breath of the world.

  Illara’s pulse quickened, hard enough she feared it might echo.

  She drew in a breath and let it out through her nose, slow, controlled.

  Mistwalking did not grant her invisibility.

  It distorted the minds and clouded the sights of her assailants.

  An afterthought. A recollection the mind refused to hold.

  But sound would still betray her.

  But Illara was silent, her strides were sure and true.

  Two strides between the sentries and she slipped past.

  Matthias hovered beside her in the shadow-fringe.

  A cold seam stitched into the air.

  He emerged out of sight, behind the sentries.

  His armor trailing frost from the fringe, for too long he lingered.

  Illara’s lips barely moved.

  She kept moving.

  She kept her gaze forward and walked away.

  The corridor widened. The air shifted. The pressure eased, not because they were safe, but because they had crossed a boundary the city considered internal.

  Illara knew she and Matthias could all too easily slew two sentries.

  But that would rouse the entire city.

  The sentries remained behind them.

  Two unblinking lizardmen guarding a threshold where their sights were turned outwards.

  Illara exhaled only when the black stone opened into a wide square.

  A plaza.

  Not a town square, not a place built for laughter or gathering, but a broad plaza carved between monolithic buildings that rose like cliffs around it.

  The stone beneath was polished black, slick with condensation, reflecting nothing.

  Vague smears of motion and pale shapes moving like slow fish beneath a frozen surface.

  They heard hisses, low voices.

  The sounds were not from the throats of men, elves or dwarves.

  But lizards.

  Reptiles.

  Stalls had been erected across the plaza in uneven lines: crude sheds of bone-lashed timber, stretched hides, and scavenged planks that looked almost insulting against the city’s ancient grandeur.

  The contrast was stark.

  The city was eternal masonry in perfect constellation.

  The market was a haphazard necessity.

  As though the Pale Coil merely dwelt in the ruins of a once-great city but they had not the artisanry or craftsmanship to maintain it.

  It was busy, inhabited, functioning with the mundane rhythm of commerce.

  Illara realized that the island seemed to dwell in eternal twilight.

  The hour that passed for day was not greeted with warmth or sunlight.

  But eternal twilight.

  It brought activity.

  Illara sank instinctively into the pool of shadow cast by a towering fa?ade.

  The mist around her thickened, eager.

  Matthias emerged from the fringe, his armor emanating the chill of shadows.

  The Nightblade blended into the shadows as he took a reprieve from the fringe.

  “What is this?” he said softly.

  “A market,” Illara breathed. “A bazaar.”

  “Here? Now?” he hissed.

  “Perhaps it is daytime.” She muttered.

  She watched from the shadow line as Pale Coil moved between stalls.

  They were larger up close than they had been in the Broken settlement.

  Taller, heavier, their armor more intricately-crafted, their posture disciplined.

  Not feral hunters. Not patrol thugs. These walked with the haughtiness of nobility.

  They carried bundles. They bartered.

  They spoke in low, clipped tones that sounded almost like a prayer.

  Illara looked to the stalls.

  The goods on display were not grain or fruit or cloth.

  Meat hung from hooks in long strips, dark and drying, glistening with salt.

  Whole carcasses were suspended by rope.

  Skinned clean, ribcages opened like flowers.

  Illara recognized wild boar, marsh-deer, lean things with too many joints that might have been goats once.

  Others she did not recognize at all, and her mind recoiled from the effort of naming them.

  One stall displayed rows of organs laid on black stone slabs, arranged with unsettling neatness. Another had bundles of sinew and tendon tied like cords.

  A third offered fat rendered into pale blocks, stacked as blocks of bricks.

  Meat, she thought as her stomach tightened.

  Near the center of the square, a rack of heads had been set up like trophies.

  Most were animals.

  Some were mortals.

  Men, elves or dwarves.

  Illara averted her gaze.

  She moved along the edge of the plaza, staying within the shadows cast by the immense buildings.

  The monoliths were carved in clean planes and towering angles, their surfaces polished so smooth they looked wet even where no water touched.

  No windows. No balconies. No signs of domestic life.

  Only mass, presence, and the oppressive suggestion that the city had been built to endure worship rather than weather.

  Matthias’s voice brushed her again.

  How far?

  “Too far,” she whispered.

  Do not concern yourself with me, Mistwalker.

  “Of course not, NIghtblade.”

  They threaded between shadow and stone, the mist around Illara softening her outline while Matthias remained a silent fracture beside her.

  She felt his strides locked on to hers as he stepped into the fringe.

  In the fringe, the lingering cold of shadows sapped even the vitality of the Astrastars.

  Illara moved quickly.

  She kept her gaze low, watching feet and shadows.

  Watching for the signs that they were seen.

  A Pale Coil passed within a few paces, carrying a haunch of meat slung over one shoulder.

  The rancid smell rolled after it.

  Raw, metallic, heavy.

  Illara held her breath until it moved on.

  Along one side of the square, cages had been stacked beneath a lean-to of stretched hide.

  The bars were bone and iron, lashed together with something that looked too much like tendon. Within them, movement.

  Her pulse spiked.

  The first cage held four Broken.

  The feral lizardmen she saw at the settlement.

  The ones were thin and trembling, their eyes wide and wild.

  They clung to the bars like drowning things, their mouths working soundlessly.

  Illara saw one reach out a hand.

  Pleading and desperate.

  It recoiled when a Pale Coil sentry glanced its way.

  The next cage held something vaguely humanoid.

  Illara’s breath caught in her throat.

  Two figures, gaunt, dirt-streaked, huddled in the corner of the cage.

  Their skin was pallid from lack of sun, their hair matted, their wrists raw where restraints had bitten.

  They did not look like native Arcanians from any cities Illara had known.

  Their garb was wrong, stitched from unfamiliar fabric, cut in a style Illara could not place.

  Her mind tried to make sense of it and failed.

  How did they get here?

  How long had they been here?

  The island had not been seen for five thousand years.

  Unseen.

  Perhaps, she thought, it moved.

  Mistwalked.

  Illara kept moving.

  She did not let her eyes linger on the prisoners.

  Mercy had a cost here, and the cost was exposure.

  She could not pay it.

  Not now.

  Not in the heart of a Pale Coil city.

  Illara, Matthias’s voice returned, sharper.

  “I saw,” she whispered, and the words tasted like ash. “Cages.”

  Broken?

  “And others.”

  A pause, brief and dangerous.

  Humans?

  “Humanoid,” she corrected, because precision was all she had left. “Not ours. I don’t know.”

  Do not stop.

  “I’m not.”

  They slipped along the plaza’s perimeter, shadows swallowing them between the monoliths. The market noise rose and fell behind them.

  Low barter, the wet slap of meat on stone, the creak of rope, the occasional sharp hiss.

  Above them, the city remained silent, its towers watching without eyes.

  Illara’s boots found a narrow passage between two immense structures.

  The shadows deepened there, thick enough that even her mist seemed to hesitate.

  She came out of her mist-shroud into the slit of darkness.

  They were far away from the open square.

  Behind them, the bazaar continued as if nothing had passed through it.

  No alarm sounded.

  No sentry called out.

  No Pale Coil turned their head to follow the whisper of mist.

  Matthias emerged, visibly cold, his skin a pale hue of blue.

  He took a breather.

  They made quick passage.

  The Astrastars moved as unseen shadows in a city that did not acknowledge them.

  For the first time since coming onto the shore, Illara felt the truth settle into her bones.

  The city had seen them.

  The island was letting them go deeper.

  The mists obscured the bazaar behind them.