Bracing a hand against a table, he pushed himself upright and pulled open one of the drawers. He glanced inside, then let out a quiet breath.
“As I thought.” He turned to Neru. “This is the Apotheka. Strictly speaking, this is where we were supposed to end up.”
Neru recalled the lies they’d spun at the gate and gave a crooked nod.
“Looks like it’s still Level Four,” she said. “I don’t see anything lit. Where are the healers?”
“Normally, there’d be someone here no matter day or night,” Elios replied. “But with the alert, they were probably evacuated.”
“Damn,” Neru muttered. “If they were still here, we could leave with them—patients and all.”
Then she cast him a sidelong look, concern softening her voice. “Or at least they could’ve treated your injuries properly this time.”
Elios exhaled and shook his head. “The bone membrane there is thick, and the other ribs can hold the frame. No need to reset anything—give it proper nourishment and it’ll knit on its own in a few weeks. My wrist, on the other hand, was treated almost too well. The range of motion is a bit stiff, but the load tolerance is better than I expected.” He paused. “It saved my life just now. Your left ear is actually harder to treat.”
“You get hurt a lot?” she asked, genuinely curious. He spoke like someone who’d spent far too much time on the receiving end of treatment.
Elios pulled several bundles of herbs—green, red, and dark-veined—from different drawers, dropped them into a mortar, and began to grind them together.
“When I was a child, I wanted to be a healer,” he said. “Mixing remedies. Saving lives. It sounded noble. And I had a knack for it. One medical book my great-grandfather left behind was enough to captivate me.” His hands kept moving. “Until I turned ten.”
The paste in the mortar was already reduced to pulp, yet he didn’t stop.
“When I was ten, my father contracted Red Bloom—a rare condition that made him grow red like a demon. Someone malicious spread rumors that he’d offended the divine and been cursed. The village turned on him. They locked him in a shack and left him there to be eaten alive by the illness.” His voice stayed level, but something tight crept into it. “I clutched that book and ran circles around the hut for three days and nights, begging them to read it, to see that it was a disease, not a curse. Most of them couldn’t read. Those who could were too proud to admit they were wrong—or too afraid of trouble. So they pretended not to hear.”
He finally slowed the pestle.
“By the time my mother managed to bring a real, reputable healer to the village—someone who proved my father innocent—he had already died of thirst inside that shack.”
Neru listened in silence. So that was the whole story.
But Elios wasn’t finished.
“After that day, I threw the book away. I abandoned the dream of becoming a healer. I borrowed money, trained for fifteen years, and became an explorer with a name people recognized. Later, I applied to the Seeker Corps—for one reason only.” His eyes didn’t lift from the mortar. “To grant truth the power it deserves. Before it, ignorance must retreat, deception must pay a price, and cowardice must face the question. I wanted…justice.”
His hands finally stilled. He looked up.
“Shit. Talked too much.”
Neru shook her head and gently took the mortar from him. “Not at all. Tell me how to use this paste.”
Elios hesitated, then quietly removed his outer coat, exposing shoulders drawn tight as a drawn bow. He turned around and pulled up his shirt. The muscles across his back shifted and knotted under the fabric like stone straining to tear free.
“Help me spread it over the bruised areas,” he said. “The broken ribs make it hard to lift my arm.”
Neru did as asked without comment, pressing the cool herbal paste into darkening patches of skin. The scent of crushed leaves rose sharply in the still air.
Elios fell silent for a moment, then spoke again, voice low.
“What I sought, I thought it peaked here,” he said. “I thought I had managed to bring the light of higher knowledge a little closer to the common world, exposing more darkness. That, with its power, we would cut down the ignorance that killed my father.”
His jaw tightened.
“Turned out that brilliance was just a shell… hiding some lies even filthier inside. And I might be nothing more than another fool cheering for it. Feeding it. Not much different to the crowd I despised.”
Neru found a clean strip of bandage and wrapped it firmly over the poultice along Elios’s left ribs.
“Better now?” she asked.
He nodded and tested his arm, lifting it carefully. She smiled faintly.
“Told you. Spitting it out helps. Once you hear your tangled thoughts out loud, you’ll realize how stupid they are.”
Elios froze for a heartbeat, then seemed to catch up to the moment and let out a quiet chuckle.
“So that’s what this was about,” he tapped his chest. “Indeed. It does feel lighter,” he said. “What about you, then? What betrayed you?”
Neru poured a little of the dark tincture over the bandage, her eyes flicking up at him.
“Haven’t figured it out?” she said. “ A Seeker should be sharper than that.”
Elios frowned, thinking, then spoke slowly.
“Your betrothed… He broke your heart?”
“Worse,” Neru tightened the wrap and met his gaze, her voice calm and cold. “He broke my trust.”
“Sounds the same to me. What happened?” Elios asked.
Neru almost answered. Almost.
But she stopped herself.
What was the point? She wasn’t here to be heard, or understood. She was here to take back what had been stolen. Oversharing—even by accident—had consequences. Hadn’t the matter with Emano taught her that already?
“If your injuries are stable,” she said instead, “then we should move. The longer we stay here, the more exposed we become.”
Elios held her gaze for a few heartbeats, as if searching for something unspoken, then looked away toward the window they had crashed through.
“From the outside, they won’t be able to pinpoint us exactly,” he said. “But they’ll have narrowed it down to the southeast side of the Tower. We need to cross to the opposite sector before this place gets locked down.”
He stood up. Neru raised a hand.
“Wait. We’re standing in a stockpile. Before we leave, is there anything we can make use of?” Her eyes flicked around the room. “You know your medicine well enough.”
“In this circumstance?” Elios shook his head. “Unlikely there’s—”
Neru clenched her jaw. Trust, she thought, had to be spent sometime. With that, she reached into her coat and drew out a pellet of dream-dust.
“What about something like this?”
Elios took it, turned it over once, then raised it toward his nose. Neru caught his wrist.
“Don’t. You’ll pass out.”
He jolted up, then shot her a look—clearly dredging up unpleasant memories. Still, he crushed the pellet, spread the residue onto a small scale, and warmed it gently over a flame, studying the reaction.
“Tedious thing,” he said. “But I recognize a few components. Medicinally speaking, they interact cleanly—there’s a kind of internal consistency to the effect.”
He grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled quickly, listing names until the ink nearly ran dry.
“Find me these,” he said, handing it over. “The last two are harder to source—I’ll handle those myself.”
Neru took the paper. Twelve items. Her vision swam slightly.
This was ‘a few’? No wonder Blackfeet always warned her to use them sparingly. Her mind was still running through contingencies, but her body had already moved.
Neru whispered the names of the reagents under her breath, fixing them in memory, then let her hands and feet take over. Drawers slid open in rapid succession. Fingers hooked, lifted, discarded. Her eyes skimmed endless rows of cabinets with ruthless efficiency. Luck—or instinct—favored her this time. Within moments, she had everything.
“What next?” she called softly. “There’s too much. I can only carry one large sack of each.”
“They should be ground down,” Elios said, tilting his head as he listened to the ceiling. “But we’re out of time.”
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She heard it too now—bootsteps, hard and hurried. No longer casual sweeps. They were converging. Close.
“Pile everything together,” Elios ordered as he heaved two bulging sacks—each the size of a small hog—across the floor. “Mix it roughly. Dump it all in front of the door.”
Neru complied without question. She already knew what he was planning.
Elios tapped the cloth mask on his face. “Add two more layers like this. Soak them in that purple solution first.” Then, without looking at her, “And hand me some antidote.”
“I only have this one,” she placed a small green crystal on the table. “To counter dream-dust’s effect, keep it under the tongue.”
Elios drew his falchion and brought it down in a single decisive strike.
Clang.
The table split cleanly in two. His blade chipped slightly, no larger than a grain of rice.
The crystal remained unscratched.
“What in the hell is that made of?” Elios stared.
“No idea,” Neru said. “I’ve tried before. Absurdly hard. But—” She hesitated.
Above them, a bell began to toll, like the tapping of a colossal finger against the Tower’s spine.
“All yours. I won’t need it,” Neru made up her mind, tossing the stone at him. “Just execute the plan.”
Elios worked without pause, dragging sack after sack of reagents into a single mound at the mouth of the corridor, while Neru sprinted to the window and wrenched it open. Night wind slammed into her face, sharp and biting.
Southern wind. Thank the gods.
She ran back at once. “Wind’s with us.”
Elios nodded, seized a barrel of fish oil, and upended it over the piled herbs. The stench hit instantly. Neru struck the spark.
A single flare leapt—then exploded upward into a towering column of fire, savage and roaring, clawing all the way to the rafters.
Neru squinted through the heat, uneasy.
“Will we end up burning this entire place down?”
“Not a chance,” Elios said without hesitation. “The Tower has layered fire-suppression measures built into every Level. If the Arcane systems here weren’t already down, this flame wouldn’t even have risen past our heads before being smothered.”
That made sense. Whoever had designed the Tower would have accounted for fire as the most obvious threat. Still—
No one ever talked about smoke.
The gale pouring in through the open window drove the smoke inward, herding it into the Tower like rats into a warren. It slithered through corridors and spilt into vast halls, turning distance into haze. Elios and Neru stood at the wind’s edge, watching the interior blur beneath a drifting veil, ears straining for a sign
Thud.
Something heavy hit the floor.
Then another. And another.
There it was.
Neru glanced at Elios and nodded once. The drugged smoke had taken hold.
They ran.
Elios led, Neru tight on his heels. Even with vision smeared by smoke, his steps never hesitated. About thirty paces in, the first cluster of guards came into view—strewn across the stone, mouths agape, snoring like beasts. Elios skimmed past, fingers flicking to check pulses as he moved. He didn’t stop. That was enough of an answer.
Elios lifted a hand and pointed upward.
Up, she nodded.
They’d agreed to keep words to a minimum—partly to keep smoke from their mouths, and partly because Neru was holding her breath. In this regard, as an adept inner force practitioner, she was confident that she could hold her own even against a tortoise.
The deeper they went, the more bodies they found. Too many. Neru counted past thirty before giving up. On any other night, in any other cornered flight with such high stakes upon her shoulder, she would have crushed their throats as she passed, ensuring no pursuit rose behind her. But a promise was a promise. And with Elios here, she felt—against her instincts—a steadiness she couldn’t name.
The smoke climbed, buoying them, masking them, carrying their ascent as they pushed fast toward Level Five. The way opened too easily. Too clean.
Neru felt a flicker of unease—an almost weightless sense that the night was letting them go without a fight.
The answer came almost at once.
A shriek of wind—nearly a roar—split the air as a war staff crashed down from above just as they crossed a narrow stair-bridge corridor. Elios twisted sharply to the right. Neru flowed forward, rolling twice in a clean, fluid arc. The blow missed them by a breath.
Crack.
Green stone exploded where they had stood, the floor shattering into jagged fragments. What chilled the blood was not the impact, but the absence—the instant the thunderous strike landed, the staff was already gone.
The wielder pressed the advantage without pause. A horizontal sweep, a vertical smash, then more—five strikes chained together with terrifying precision. Each blow carried the force of thunder and lightning, the air itself buckling under the weight of it. Only when he judged that the shock of ambush had failed—when their reactions proved faster than expected—did he finally halt.
Only then did Neru truly see him.
He wore nothing but coarse cloth. Bare feet planted on stone. Three torque rings hung at his neck—different sizes, different metals. In his hands was an iron staff as thick as a wrist, planted into the floor as firmly as a support pillar. His eyes burned bright beneath a deeply hollowed temple, the unmistakable mark of an expert who had mastered inner force.
At the same time, he studied them.
His voice rolled out from behind the thick cloth masking his face, low and resonant.
“Relying on drugged smoke to flee,” he said. “You disgrace the name of warriors.”
Neru snorted inwardly. And ambushing us from above without warning is bravery, is it?
Still—she did not underestimate him. Not for a heartbeat.
This man could resist the smoke and still speak freely.
Only two possibilities.
Either his internal force was strong enough to blunt the drug outright, or he carried the same kind of rare antidote Neru herself had gotten. Both possibilities were equally troubling. If it was the latter, then he was also a master of poisons—someone like Blackfeet.
Elios had been silent until now. Then he spoke.
“You’re not a Warden,” he said. “Who are you?”
That gave Neru pause. Elios knew the Tower. If someone of this caliber belonged to its usual forces, he should have recognized him.
The man’s eyes flicked toward Elios, disdain plain even through the cloth over his face. He let out a low, humorless laugh.
“You burned my stuff, right in front of the doors of my quarters," he said, “and you dare question me?”
A healer? Neru frowned. How could a healer be this formidable?
Before Neru could finish her thought, the man had already swept his leg and flicked a slab of stone from the tiled floor with the end of his staff, hurling it toward her. She dropped low in a reflexive dive, her hand sliding toward her dagger.
Locked.
Fool, she cursed herself in silence.
In that same instant, the man had surged toward Elios with the fury of an avalanche. The long staff in his grasp seemed to twist the very air as it moved. He brought it down in a brutal vertical arc, a strike meant to crush bone and spirit alike.
Elios slipped the first blow by virtue of nimble footwork, but the reprieve was brief. The second strike erupted upward from the stone floor itself. Elios stamped hard, arresting the iron staff’s ascent, right when the man’s elbow drove forward. The sound of impact bore no resemblance to flesh meeting flesh. It rang deep and heavy, like a sledgehammer breaking against mountain rock. Elios was hurled aside. He did not fall, yet even as both heels screamed across the stone, the retreat could not be halted.
He must not be allowed to free that staff.
The thought burned through Neru as she launched herself forward like a panther. Her hand reached the man’s nape before her feet ever touched the ground. As though gifted with a third eye, he tilted his head aside and escaped the killing grasp, turning with the motion to seize Neru’s wrist in his iron hold.
No matter.
If she could occupy his arms, bind him close, that dreadful weapon would be useless.
Against the expectation, the man wrapped in coarse burlap did not strike back. Instead, he carried his turning motion through, drawing Neru across his shoulder. Using her own arm as a fulcrum, he pivoted and cast her aside, the entire sequence flowing without pause, smooth as running water.
Neru’s reflexes flared like lightning, yet she managed only to drive a knee into the small of his back. It failed to break the technique already set in motion. She struck the stone, rolled twice, and came to a halt beside Elios just as he was forcing himself upright.
The man stood as before, unruffled, the staff held loosely in one hand. With the other, he raised his thumb in open approval.
“A sound tactic,” he said, his tone almost genial. “Quick to adapt, too. In my youth, I was never that good.”
There was no strain in his voice. It was clear her blow had done nothing to trouble his breath, nor had it shaken the strength rooted deep within him.
“Once more, then.”
He lunged, his strike coming like a lion’s pounce.
Elios answered instantly this time. The falchion screamed free, flashing through the air like a lightning made solid, forcing the staff up into a hurried guard, sparks shivering in the air between the weapons.
Neru knew the truth of it. In raw durability and brute force, Elios could not outmatch this man. Steel to steel, strength to strength, they would lose. There was only one path left. They had to strike first. Strike faster. Strike without pause. The enemy had to be drowned beneath blows until he could no longer breathe enough to answer them.
The shriek of metal rattled her bones. Neru moved with it, low and swift. She did not intrude into the killing arcs of either weapon. Instead, she dropped and slid across the cold stone like a scrap of cloth cast aside, aiming for what lay beneath his reach.
This time, she did not hold back.
Her heel drove sideways into the man’s left knee with savage force. She felt the shock travel up her leg as he lurched back, surprise finally cracking his composure. Elios seized the opening with a roar, surging forward and bringing his blade down in a cascading strike. In that instant, Neru understood just how deep his strength ran. The solid iron staff bent beneath the falchion’s weight, though the blade itself was scarcely heavy enough to justify such pressure.
The man dropped to one knee, teeth clenched, even as he laughed his praise.
“Strong.”
The green stone floor crackled and burst beneath his feet. Seeing his guard broken, Neru sprang upright, her hand cupped, poised to deliver a finishing strike to the side of his head.
And then she saw it.
A faint smile, glimmering in his eyes.
She could not stop herself. The hit connected. The man snarled, the sound tearing from deep in his chest. Beneath the coarse burlap, his muscles surged as if something monstrous had awakened within him. Flesh flushed red, glowing like heated bronze. The iron staff snapped straight again with violent force, and Elios’s falchion shattered, breaking cleanly in two.
At the same breath, Neru felt a shockwave—a pulse that ran from her reaching hand, straight to her heart. The unseen force struck at close range, crushing the breath from Neru’s chest and flinging her backwards as though she were a mere doll.
No—
No air left in her lungs.
Must. Not. Breathe.
No antidote right now.
Her vision fractured at the edges, stars bursting like cracks in glass. Her mouth fell open despite her will, the body screaming for air, even as she fought it with everything she had, terrified of drawing in the smoke that choked the air.
As she wrestled with that most primitive instinct, she felt a hand settle gently at the small of her back, steadying her before she could strike the ground. At the same moment, the cloth covering her face was ripped aside, and warm lips pressed against her own.
This taste…
Blood?
Neru’s eyes flew open. Something solid had been placed into her mouth.
Breathe.
Elios was kneeling on one knee beside her. One arm held her tight against his chest, anchoring her up. The other was locked beneath his arm, gripping one end of the iron staff with brutal force. At its far end, the man stood immovable, statue-still with a crease of genuine puzzlement.
“Clearly, that blow was no tickling,” the man said slowly. “And yet you still managed to wrench my weapon from me. That strength goes beyond the merely gifted.”
Elios did not answer. He seemed to be conserving breath, his jaw set, his eyes cut toward Neru, sharp and decisive.
She understood at once.
Carefully, she straightened, peeling herself from his support. When she was steady, she raised one hand toward their opponent, fingers curling in invitation.
“Once more, then?”