The slaves at the Wall were no longer men and women—they were husks. Hollowed by starvation, broken by the sun, shivering under frost, and scorched again in the same breath. Their eyes were pale and yellowed like old glass. Some had long since stopped speaking. Others whispered lullabies to rocks.
"They're already dead," Lioren murmured beside her, eyes scanning the ragged figures. "We're only giving them a different ending."
She nodded, jaw tight. There were no guards on this side. No need. No one survived long enough to escape.
It was Kael who spoke to the first group—men too thin to stand, with blood between their teeth. The overseers didn't even feed them anymore. Yshari watched as Kael knelt low, hands open. He did not offer hope. He offered blood.
"You want to die here?" he asked. "Or take a chance at setting the world on fire?"
"What's death to us?" one woman spat, her arms a nest of whip scars. "We're already ghosts"
They had nothing. But that made them dangerous.
The plan was chaos, stitched by desperation and burned edges. Davi mapped the inside from memory, Kael forged weapons from scrap and iron teeth, and Yshari... she strung her bow with the silent hunger of vengeance.
And when Yshari drew the string of her bow, steady despite the tremor in her limbs, they moved.
Like rats from the dark.
Like vengeance from the grave.
---
The rescue was chaos.
They struck on the third dusk. Wind howled through broken walls, and the sky bled like open skin. It was the old woman who started it—shoved a sharpened spoon into a soldier's thigh and screamed, "FORGIVE ME NOT!" like a hymn.
After that, it was fire and arrows.
Kael lit the storeroom with stolen oil. Lioren slit throats without blinking. Yshari's arrows found eyes, throats, spines. And when she ran out, she pulled a blade from a corpse and kept moving. Ash blinded a captain, diving for his face as she loosed the final arrow.
Then she saw him.
Hung in the execution yard, barely conscious, swaying with the breeze—her fiancé.
Long hair, grey eyes, the shade of wet ash. Even now, he looked like a story. A myth of a boy who once swore to never leave her.
She screamed his name and ran.
Kael covered her, slashing, bleeding. Lioren blew the signal horn they'd stolen.
She climbed the scaffold and cut him down with trembling hands. He landed on her, half-dead. But when she cupped his face, his eyes opened—just a little.
"I knew you'd come back. I told them... I told them you'd burn it all."
And then, in front of the fire, the corpses, the dying stars above, he kissed her.
Not like a prince. Not like a memory.
Like a man who had nothing left but her.
---
They escaped before dawn.
Ash flew ahead, crying into the dark.
They rode stolen horses, their group slashed to less than half. Wounded. Bloodied. But not broken. The wall burned behind them—stone and screams crumbling into ash.
Somewhere in the distance, mountains loomed.
Home.
And on that road, her fiancé looked back at the flames.
"If I'd known it would be years," he said softly, "I would've followed you that night...."
Yshari said nothing.
She didn't trust her voice not to break.
But Ash flew a little closer.
And behind them, the crows began to gather.