The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 6: Chapter 5 — The Quiet Ones

Read chapter 6 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Chapter 5 — The Quiet Ones The streets grew steeper as Yara climbed, the stones underfoot turning from brick to pale marble streaked with soot. The fires below had burned themselves down to smoke, and the smoke drifted upward through the narrow ways, a gray tide licking at her heels. The air smelled of iron and wet plaster, a scent that clung to the back of her throat until every swallow tasted like dust. She moved more slowly now. The spear felt heavier with every step. Her side throbbed where the goblin's spear had hit. The barrier had stopped the point, not the impact. Runewick's upper wards had once been proud places with broad steps, carved lintels, and courtyards built for parades. Now every doorway had a barricade, half-fallen or a prayer scratched into it. She passed a bakery where the ovens had exploded outward; the scent of burned flour mixed with the sweetness of fruit that had burst inside its jars. A child's shoe sat on the counter beside a lump of dough that had baked itself solid in the heat. The simple domesticity of it stung more than the sight of bodies. Bodies were scattered everywhere. A rhythm, every few houses: a Guard collapsed against a doorway, a merchant clutching a ledger that had turned to pulp, a creature with too many joints folded into itself. The dead of both sides shared one thing: confusion etched into what was left of their faces. And where the creatures lay, fine gray powder pooled in the creases of cobblestones, drifted in small eddies when the wind found them. The same powder that coated her lungs with every breath. The same dust that clung to the back of her throat. She swallowed once, tasting chalk and ash and something that had been alive this morning, and kept climbing. The green had been with her since she woke up, subtle enough to dismiss as smoke-light or imagination. A tint at the edge of things. But as the streets rose, it stopped being subtle. It lived in the marble now, a faint luminescence bleeding up through the stone from somewhere below her feet. It caught in the pooled powder around the creature-corpses. It edged the smoke above her in colors that fire didn't make. They broke the seal. The voice made her stumble. She caught herself on the wall, heart hammering. "What are you?" They brought a key. How sweet. "Why are you talking to me? I'm just another street rat. Hellborn. Why talk to me?" No answer came. She made herself keep moving. Halfway up a switchback, she found a line of Guard shields stacked against a wall, their sigils scorched black. Someone had tried to make a stand here. The paving runes beneath the pile still pulsed faintly blue, a ward that had held for a time before fading. Beside them, a man in uniform lay with his head resting against a stair, mouth open as if he'd died mid-command. Yara crouched. The uniform was cleaner than most, suggesting he hadn't been here long. When she reached for the flask at his belt, his eyes opened. She jerked back, nearly losing her footing on the ash-slick step. He didn't move beyond that; the eyes merely rolled toward her, unfocused. His voice came in a whisper that sounded more like a memory than breath. "Sir?" The word came automatically, muscle memory deeper than pain. His eyes tried to focus on her face and failed. "Still...on post, sir." Yara crouched lower, kept her voice quiet. "Report." Something in him straightened at the word, old training surfacing. "Bells stopped. Was on wall duty when—" He coughed, a thin trail of blood following. "When they stopped, chanting started. Couldn't tell...ours or theirs. Sound came through the stones." His breathing hitched. Each word costs more now. "Then green came. Bright as—" He blinked slowly, losing the thought, finding it again. "Forge glass. Whole hill breathing. Green." "The temple?" she prompted. A fractional nod. "Priests called it...light of mercy." His lips cracked into something bitter. "Pulled air from our lungs. Men dropped their weapons. Clutching chests like—like it