Chapter Text
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
Rayla is running.
The night is dark and moonless. The ground is uneven under her feet. Her breath leaves her lungs in heavy, laboured puffs.
Elarion is not beautiful. Runaan and Ethari used to tell her stories about it in her youth. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, this city was bustling and full of humans who built it on the foundations of dark magic. It was shining and bright, the biggest human city on the Xaidan side of the border before their expulsion, but there were atrocities committed here: magical creatures captured and killed and dragged back to the city to be used as ingredients for spells.
They promised her the stories were just stories. There were no monsters under her bed, no humans hiding in the dark, no mages who wanted her blood. Elarion is an empty city now, and it’s been empty since the fall of the Sol Regem. There is nothing in the city these days but silence and bones and overgrown weeds.
“Nothing there that can hurt you, Little Blade,” Runaan had said. “You are safe.”
Rayla wants to laugh. The slit in her wrist stings in the humid night air, but that’s nothing compared to the hell she’s lived through these past days. She can hear her own terror in the way that she whimpers, can feel its grip around her heart like ice. Her mind feels foggy, her grip on reality frighteningly shaky, but she focuses on the details—the cracks in the cobblestones, the crunch of dried-up leaves, her footsteps echoing in the humid night air—and forces herself not to stop.
The city of Elarion looms behind her, jagged, ruined buildings standing like teeth in the dark.