After Skye finished reading the System’s description of the Tainted Godhead, she let out a long breath.
“So a Godhead costs two hundred Contribution to redeem,” she said, tapping the air as if the exchange screen were still there. “And every single point of Contribution you spend adds one point of fusion.”
Rhine leaned against the table, quiet for a beat.
The System’s interface looked clean. Too clean. No hidden clauses. No fine print. Just a price tag.
“That’s what scares me,” he said at last. “It’s straightforward. Like it wants you to stop thinking.”
Skye’s tail flicked. “If you fuse it, you’ll be walking the same road Panglos did. A false god wearing a human face.”
Rhine’s gaze drifted to the dark bottle Delanna had promised to fetch. “We wait for the purification draught. I’m not letting that thing dig roots into me.”
Skye didn’t argue.
Outside, the ruined Outer Ward lay under a thin sheet of night fog. Windrest City was rebuilding, but the silence still felt like a bruise that hadn’t healed.
Delanna and Eira were already down the stairs, moving fast. Rhine watched their shadows stretch across broken stone, then turned to the man standing by the doorway.
“Lannis.”
The knight commander—gold armor muted beneath a plain cloak—bowed with crisp obedience. “Sir.”
“Follow them,” Rhine said. “Stay out of sight. If anything touches them, you end it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lannis stepped into the alley… and the night swallowed him.
Skye narrowed her eyes. “You’re really using him?”
“For now,” Rhine said. “I wasn’t going to kill him tonight. I was going to keep him close and use him as a broom—clean up messes that can’t be left lying around.”
He didn’t say the rest out loud: the more he learned, the more he realized the “knight commander” knew too much. And if Lannis ever slipped his leash, Rhine would be the one hunted.
He closed his eyes and reached for the Raven Totem’s faint pulse of awareness.
A cool thread of perception stretched outward, following Lannis’s movement across the shattered blocks.
Fast.
Too fast.
Rhine’s brows drew together.
Human legs didn’t move like that—not without leaving traces, not without breath, not without sound.
He tried to call up the Peeping Eye, but the distance was still too wide. The world beyond the Totem’s sense was smeared in uncertainty.
So he did what he always did when certainty mattered.
He stepped into the Shadow Realm.
Color bled away. The streets became a warped black-and-white sketch. Fog turned into pale ink, curling around collapsed roofs.
Rhine followed.
Several blocks later, a gaslamp burned like a sickly star over a crossroads. Lannis stood beneath it, perfectly still.
And his shadow was wrong.
It wasn’t the clean outline of a broad-shouldered man.
It was huge—taller, thicker, hunched like a boulder that had learned how to breathe.
Rhine’s hand tightened on Flintlock’s grip.
Lannis spoke without turning.
“You can come out,” he said calmly. “I did what you told me to do. Unless you’ve decided you want me dead tonight.”
Rhine didn’t move. “You can see into the Shadow Realm?”
“No.” A pause. Then, almost amused: “But I know what you’re like.”
Rhine’s eyes narrowed. “Turn around.”
Lannis exhaled, slow and patient—like someone indulging a child. “Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
For a heartbeat, the crossroads held its breath.
Lannis turned.
Skin rippled. Bone shifted. The cloak strained, then fell loose as the body beneath it surged upward. The gaslamp’s light crawled over rough gray flesh, over cords of muscle built for tearing ships apart.
A troll stood where the knight commander had been.
Its eyes were gold in the dead monochrome of the Shadow Realm.
Skye had been right.
Rhine didn’t know whether to laugh or swear.
“So,” the troll said, voice like gravel rolling in a barrel, “now you’ve seen it.”
Rhine’s pistol rose a fraction. “Haizan.”
The troll bared something that could have been a smile. “The real Haizan.”
Rhine held his aim steady. “Explain.”
“I’m bound to you,” Haizan said. “Contract. Orders. If you don’t die, I can’t disobey. But I don’t have to pretend to be human when you already know.”
Rhine’s eyes flicked over him—over the size, the power, the way his presence made the air feel heavier. “Why the disguise in the first place?”
Haizan’s gaze shifted, almost reluctant. “Because the little dragon told me not to expose myself.”
Skye.
Rhine’s expression didn’t change, but something cold slid through his chest. “She knew.”
“She noticed early,” Haizan admitted. “Smelled it, maybe. Dragons have instincts like that. She said if you found out too soon, you’d get paranoid and start cutting throats.”
Rhine let out a breath through his nose. “Smart cat.”
Haizan’s shoulders rolled, as if settling into his own skin again. “I’m Haizan of Furious Sand Isle,” he said, like the name itself carried weight. “Whatever mask I wear, that doesn’t change.”
Rhine lowered Flintlock—only a little.
The night fog kept crawling over the ruined street, and somewhere ahead, Delanna and Eira’s footsteps faded into distance.
Rhine stared at the troll wearing his enemy’s life like clothing and wondered, not for the first time, how many lies this city could hold before it split apart.