We moved at dawn.
Not out of hope, but out of necessity.
The chapel walls were no longer. Not truly. They flexed sometimes when the wind caught them just right, like the stone wanted to remember it was once something softer. Something living.
Marin said it first.""We can't wait here anymore."
And I agreed. Because survival wasn't about fighting harder; it was about recognizing when the battlefield had already shifted—and when you weren't standing on solid ground anymore, but on something else's spine.
We packed light: two days' worth of water, field rations we didn't trust, rope, bone knives, and one firearm each. No maps. No illusions. The city we knew had changed. The rules had changed. And paper couldn't catch a ghost.
We moved northwest first, toward the firehouse ruins and the empty boulevard that had once divided Tacoma into neat urban grids. It was no longer neat, urban, or even recognizable.
The first thing we noticed was the air. It wasn't foul or rotten; it was clean—sterilized. It felt too sharp in the lungs, like breathing in the ozone after a lightning strike. Marin touched the broken fence as we passed. She wiped her fingers together—no rust, no grime—only fine white ash that melted into her skin and disappeared.
The second thing we noticed was the quiet. It wasn't a usual quiet, nor the absence of traffic, life, or noise. This quiet wasn't passive; it was held, structured. Each step we took didn't echo outward; it folded inward, like sound itself didn't want to leave a footprint.
The buildings had changed, too. They were not rebuilt or fixed; they had been rewritten. Where there had once been storefronts and boarded-up laundromats now stood angular frames of glass and bone-white composite—built not for people, but for function. No windows. No doors. Just empty walls, open to the wind that didn't move.
It was beautiful, in the way that teeth are beautiful just before they close on your throat.
We didn't speak much. Communication became signal-based, utilizing hand gestures, eye contact, and breath control to convey meaning. Old field habits—ones neither of us had needed to dust off until now—because anything we said aloud here felt like it wouldn't stay ours.
At the intersection of 14th and Commerce, we found the first sign: a statue, or something pretending to be one. It stood nine feet tall, with a smooth surface like marble but too soft, too pliant. A human form—genderless, faceless—stood with arms extended upward toward a ceiling that no longer existed.
On its chest: Δ∆Δ, the same triple-symbol burned into the trunk of the tree we'd destroyed. Here, it was carved deeper, more deliberate—an announcement, not a whisper. I circled it carefully. The material didn't react to light or touch, but when Marin drew too close, it shifted. Not visibly, but audibly—a faint chime from within the hollow of its form. The same bone-bell sound we had heard the night before, only now it carried a resonance, a direction, a pulse.
We moved on, following the sound like a breadcrumb trail through the maze of ash and polished ruin. We passed hollow structures that bent light strangely, found stairways that led nowhere, bridges suspended over streets that ended in midair—broken into perfect halves like snapped vertebrae.
Reality wasn't sick here; it was disinterested. It didn't decay or heal—it forgot.
At noon, we arrived at the plaza, which had once been a park but was now reduced to the skeletal remains of the old Tacoma Civic Center. But now? It was a basin—sunken, smooth, paved in a spiral pattern of stone and black iron veins that pulsed faintly when we walked over them. At the center stood a platform, and on the platform—an empty throne, waiting, facing outward, facing us.
We didn't approach; we didn't need to. The air around it was thicker, sharper. Breathing in that close made our gums ache and our vision tunnel slightly. It wasn't a throne for sitting; it was a conduit—a mouth without a body, a prayer without a voice, a seed waiting.
Marin said it under her breath, barely audible: "This place isn't being ruled."
I glanced at her. "It's being offered."
We pulled back slowly, respectfully. We didn't turn our backs on the plaza; we didn't give it a reason to reach fout tous, because places like that didn't need doors to find their way inside—they just needed an opening.
The return trip was slower, the air heavier, and the world less willing to let us go. The streets seemed longer, and the walls leaned in closer. Twice, Marin lost her bearings—even with her unshakable field instincts. Twice, I felt my hunger rise without a trigger. Not for food, but for direction, for structure, for the simplicity of clean, unbroken lines.
The new influence wasn't just environmental; it was architectural and psychological—a rewrite not of flesh, but of choice. Back at the boundary line, near the old iron fence that marked the transition from the old to the new order, we stopped to rest and drink stale water. Marin pulled a piece of chalk from her pocket. She scratched a new symbol onto the pavement: a triangle pointed upward, and a triangle pointed downward, overlapping—a crossroads, a decision. Neither clean nor easy.
She didn't speak, but her meaning was clear: we couldn't stay at the crossroads.