The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 3: Chapter 2 — The First Green

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Chapter 2 — The First Green The first thing she knew was the taste of lime and blood. The second was the weight on her leg. When Yara opened her eyes, the world was wrong—too still, too bright, air thick with a shimmering dust that turned every breath to grit. The ground above her head had folded in, and the roof beams were angled down at the wrong angles. Most of it had come down on her. The market's noise was gone. In its place came the slow crackle of fires starving for air. She didn't move at first. A dull ringing filled her skull, even and relentless. When she tried to sit, pain flared down her calf. Rubble pinned her ankle; stone and wood wedged together like they'd been poured there. She pushed with both hands until something shifted and the weight rolled aside. The scrape burned, but the pain meant alive. She pulled herself upright, coughing gray powder. Her sleeve left streaks of soot across her mouth. The smell in the air was sharp. Metal and dust, wet clay, a ghost of yeast from the baker's stall that no longer existed. Every smell she'd known of the city had changed. Light filtered through a crack in the roof. The sky was a weird green, pulsing with its own heartbeat. The dust floated through it thick and slow, each mote holding the color. Yara steadied herself against the wall. Her right horn was sticky with blood where something had grazed it. Each breath was dry and dusty, making the next one harder and faster. She covered her mouth, breathing through her hand, counted them until the trembling in her hands eased and the darkness around her vision receded. Runewick's lower market—her market—was gone. The stalls, the laughter, the noise of haggling, it had all been pressed flat beneath the explosion. What remained were colors stripped to ash. The dust muffled the remaining sounds of the market; everything was off, missing half the notes. She climbed through a hole in the wall and stepped outside. The street she remembered was a scar now, lined with wreckage. Canvas awnings hung in shreds. A toppled cart spilled flour across the stones, the ash falling through the green light, slow and gray, a ruin's snowfall. A hand protruded from beneath the wheel, fingers gray, knuckles white around a coin that would never be spent. She looked away. The hum she'd heard before the blast was still there, deeper now, buried in the bones of the city. It wasn't a sound so much as a feeling, a pulse beneath her soles that kept uneven time with her heartbeat. The fire suppression runes flickered when she stepped on them, blue lines bleeding into green, then dying away. The wrong-colored sky seemed to be coming from up the hill, closer to the center city. Every pulse came from the direction of the temple hill. She wiped the dust from her mouth. "Find people," she muttered, voice raw. "Find water. Then figure out what that is." Talking made the silence feel smaller. She limped across the ruined square. A broken sign swung from one hinge, tapping softly against the wall. Each sound, stone settling, fabric fluttering, made her flinch. Somewhere, a roof beam cracked and collapsed, sending up a sigh of ash. The fountain near the stairs still trickled. The water was cloudy but wet, and that was enough. She knelt, cupped a handful, and drank. It tasted faintly of copper, the tang of coins and blood. She drank again anyway until her stomach cramped. Movement flickered at the edge of her sight. Shapes, five, maybe six, moved along the upper street, their outlines blurred by heat and smoke. Robes scorched black. Staff in their hands. She pressed herself against the fountain's rim and waited, breath shallow. They passed slowly, heads bowed, chanting in voices too low to carry words. The sound didn't echo; it resonated, matching the hum in the stones. The runes carved along their staffs pulsed green, and when she followed the light upward, it ran in a thin, unbroken line straight to the temple's crown. Fed it. Or fed from it. Cultists. She knew the