The veil behind him sighed shut.
It wasn't a door, not really. It didn't creak or clatter or scream. It simply… stopped being open. The air behind Lucian shimmered once, like breath on glass, then stilled.
Lucian exhaled slow and steady, letting the last of the fog trail from his coat like smoke rising off something that had just survived fire.
He got off of his bike that had done a very good job inside the shroud. And now there was no path ahead for it, there were only ruins.
He was alone, in this place, again.
There were no ghosts, no maps. No more Viktor's runes whispering on his skin.
Just ash beneath his boots and the broken, breathless skyline of the Blackthorn Slums ahead. Rusted rooftops, collapsing smokestacks, and the skeletal spires of buildings long since eaten hollow by fire and famine.
The Blackthorn Slums were where Duskvalen went to forget what it had done.
The shroud at his back still pulsed, low and deep, a heartbeat in reverse. But the decomposed skeleton of a once glorious city in front of him was quiet.
Too quiet.
Lucian's gloved hand reached down and touched the charm at his side, The Mourner's Name, still humming faintly. It had done its work getting him here.
And now, it was his turn.
He stepped ahead into the ruin.
The slums had once been part of something proud. Something bigger than the whole Duskvalen. A place where the seat of the empire resided. An untouchable island, on high grounds, from where the faraway places were visible. But everything was now shadowed by the shroud.
Lucian could see it even in ruin, the tall bones of architecture meant to reach the divine now strangled by soot and silence. The wind here didn't move like it should. It coiled around the edges of buildings as if trying to sneak away unnoticed.
Lucian walked slowly. Carefully.
Not because he feared attack; no one sane attacked here.
But because every corner of Blackthorn felt sacred in the way gravesites did. And like all sacred places, it was a lie built on pain.
The first figure he passed was a man too thin to cast a full shadow. He leaned against a wall with one leg twisted backwards, not broken, just left that way too long. His eyes followed Lucian, empty but aware.
Further in, a group of children sat beneath a canopy of shattered tarpaulin. They played a game with bones, actual bones, clicking them together in a rhythm Lucian couldn't place.
One girl, no older than nine, offered him a broken doll. Its stuffing had been replaced with shaved ash, and the smile on its face had been carved upside down.
Lucian took nothing. Said nothing. He kept moving.
These weren't people anymore, not in the way the Capitol would recognize. They were leftovers, names erased not by death, but neglect.
"They tried to cross the wall once," a voice had told him long ago. "Tried to leave Blackthorn. The Dominion sent them back in bags." That wasn't entirely true; it couldn't be.
Some tried to escape the Shroud too, believing that beyond it was freedom, a myth carved into the minds of the broken. But the Grayscale devoured them whole, body and memory alike.
Lucian passed a barricade near a fallen checkpoint. It bore a rusted plaque that read:
"CITIZEN PASSAGE FORBIDDEN – BY ORDER OF THE DOMINION"
Under it, scrawled in charcoal: "We went East to find bread, and found fire."
Lucian felt it in his gut. Not anger. Not guilt.
Just recognition. This was where Darius Vale had run. Where death lingered long enough to bleed into the stones. And where Remnant Sight might still find something worth chasing.
Lucian slowed as the wind changed.
There was a pull in the air, faint and metallic, like the edge of a thought that had never fully formed. His boots stopped just past a collapsed archway. The place was once the outer gate of a transit station now buried beneath the slow crush of time and sorrow.
The moment felt right.
Lucian dropped to one knee and pressed two gloved fingers into the dry, ash-laced soil.
He closed his eyes.
And the Remnant Sight stirred..
It didn't crackle or roar. It simply... arrived, like a second veil settling over the world.
The ash no longer felt dry, it felt sticky. The stones beneath him pulsed faintly with emotion, as if someone had died with their soul caught on the edges of a scream.
Remnant Sight was not magic in the way fire was. It didn't burst. It pulled. Tugged memories out of stone, dragged whispers out of wall-stains. In its infancy, it had barely brushed the present. It could work only for a memory not older than an hour.
Lucian had once needed fresh blood, the sound of a scream, or the nearness of death to catch a trace. At first, it was only minutes-old echoes — fractured, inconsistent flashes of emotion lingering like steam over boiling water.
But now?
With Mourne at his side and power gathered from the lives he'd taken, and from other sources, the Sight had grown. Incrementally. Painfully.
He could feel hours, sometimes a day, if the memory was raw enough.
And Blackthorn never healed. But still, it would allow only fragmants.
First came a sound. A breath. Then a flinch. Not his. Someone else's, a ghost of motion layered just beside reality.
Lucian opened his eyes. They shimmered faintly blue.
The station lit with flickering echoes, very subtle and unclear.
Footsteps, mismatched, heavy, pounding across the broken stones. A man, blurred and gasping, limping across the square. His coat flared out behind him. Something cradled to his chest, swaddled in stained cloth.
Darius Vale.
A trail of red mist followed him, but it wasn't blood that anchored the vision. It was fear. Behind him was another figure, faint and formless. A third shadow.
Then — nothing. The vision faltered, broke into static.
Lucian clenched his jaw. He pressed deeper.
His vision spiked again—
And his temples throbbed like thunderclaps. His nose bled. A line of red dripped across his upper lip. Still not enough.
Then he saw it.
Something glinting in the ash.
Half-buried beneath an overturned slab of ferrocrete. Not from the vision, but real, tangible.
Lucian wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve, stood, and lifted the slab aside.
Beneath it was a small shard, no larger than a coin. Black as night, but laced with silver veins, like a frozen flash of lightning. It pulsed faintly in his palm, not with life, but with memory.
He didn't recognize the material. But the moment he touched it, the ground shivered beneath him. The Sight surged again, this time uncalled. Controlled.
Darius's blurred face snapped into clarity. His breath, shallow. His eyes, wide with desperation. Lucian could see every crease in his coat, the strain in his shoulders, the fear.
Then, just before the echo collapsed again...Lucian heard something. Not a word. But a name, felt more than spoken.
"She must not be found."
Lucian blinked hard and pocketed the shard, feeling its cold weight settle near Mourne. He didn't know what the stone was, not yet, but it was resonating with something inside him.
A bridge. A lens.
Or a price.
He touched the dagger at his hip, feeling it vibrate softly, greedily, as if the stone had fed it something, too.
He would name the shard later. When it earned one and when he had found out what it was.
For now, there was only one direction to go.
The echoes led uphill, to the sunken chapel that still bled.
And where death lingered, Lucian always followed.