43. Nobody's had a reason to touch it since

Chapter 43: Nobody's had a reason to touch it since.

The streets narrowed the closer they got to the old center, buildings leaning in over cobblestones gone uneven with age, until the three of them were walking single file through a part of Torak that felt like it belonged to a different city entirely, one that time had simply stopped bothering with.

The church rose up out of the dark at the end of a dead lane, and even in ruin it was clear it had once been something, tall walls of blackened stone reaching toward a roof that no longer existed, timber beams jutting up like broken ribs against the night sky. What windows remained held only jagged teeth of colored glass, the rest scattered somewhere in the rubble below, and the whole structure sat wrapped in a silence that felt less like absence and more like something waiting.

"Careful where you step," Freya said, voice dropped low without either of them asking her to. "Whole thing could come down if we're not paying attention."

Mikaela's eyes traced the burnt stone, the collapsed roofline, and something in the shape of it tugged at a memory she couldn't quite place. "What was this place."

"Order of the Eternal Flame." Freya picked her way over a fallen beam, boots careful on the loose stone. "Before your time and mine both, this was their main temple. They worshipped a god of light, of fire, believed the flame was where all life came from. Believed when you died your own flame just, went back to it. Returned to the source."

"Fitting name for a place that burned down, then."

"That's the strange part. Nobody knows how it started. No record of it, no one who survived to explain it, just one night the whole thing went up and by morning half the order was dead and the rest scattered to the winds. The ones who lived never came back to rebuild. Never even came back to bury what was left." Freya's mouth had gone tight. "City just let it sit here. A hundred years now. Nobody's had a reason to touch it since."

Eto said nothing through any of it, though Mikaela could feel him listening even without the translation, his eyes already moving across the ruin ahead of them, cataloguing shadows the way he always did before he trusted a place enough to walk into it without looking back over his shoulder every few steps.

They went in through what had once been the main doors, nothing left of them now but scorched hinges hanging useless from a stone frame, and the cold hit all three of them at once, a chill that had nothing to do with the night air outside.

Inside, the ruin opened up into what remained of the nave, roof gone entirely in places so that moonlight fell in pale shafts across rubble and ash, pews reduced to blackened skeletons of wood still arranged in their rows like the congregation had simply vanished mid service and left the furniture to keep waiting for them. Broken glass crunched soft under their boots with every step, colored shards catching what little light there was, scattering it red and blue and gold across the stone floor.

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Nobody spoke for a while. The silence pressed in thick enough that speaking felt like it would cost something.

Then Mikaela's foot caught something that wasn't stone.

She looked down. A scrap of black fabric, torn, half buried under ash and broken timber, and beside it, unmistakable in the moonlight, the pale curve of bone.

"Freya." Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.

Freya crouched beside her, and her face went hard the second she saw what was there. More bones, scattered wider once they looked properly, small ones, the wrong size for anything but a child, tucked into a hollow near the base of a collapsed pillar like something had made a habit of dragging its leavings into one particular corner and leaving them to gather dust.

A nest, Mikaela realized, stomach turning. Not a hiding place. A nest, built out of scraps of cloth and bone and whatever else the creature had decided was worth keeping.

"It's been here," Freya said, quiet, grim. "A while, by the look of this. Longer than a week, I'd wager. Must have been using this as a second home after the Orphanage."

Eto crouched near the hollow, close enough that his shadow fell across the bones, and something in his jaw had gone tight enough to show the muscle standing out under skin.

"Not here now," he said.

"How do you know that."

He didn't answer with words. He closed his eyes instead, breathing slow through his nose, the same stillness settling over him that Mikaela had watched take hold of him back at the children's home the night he'd first felt something watching from a rooftop. He listened. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the way his head tilted a fraction, chasing a sound too faint for either of them to catch.

He opened his eyes.

"Trail," he said. "Fresh."

"Where." Freya was already on her feet, hand going to the hilt of her sword.

He didn't answer in words this time either. He simply turned, moving toward the far end of the ruined nave, past the last of the broken pews, to where a section of floor had partially collapsed inward, stone steps visible beneath the rubble, descending down into a dark that swallowed the moonlight whole the moment it crossed the threshold.

Crypts. Of course a church a century old had crypts, somewhere below all this ash and broken glass where the order had once laid their dead to wait for whatever eternal flame they'd believed was coming for them.

"Down there," Eto said, already moving toward the steps.

Mikaela's hand found her knife without her telling it to. "You're sure."

"Smell. Sound." He didn't stop walking. "Fresh. Recent. Down."

Freya drew her sword fully now, blade catching the thin light, and fell into step just behind him without further question, and Mikaela followed a half pace after, throat tight, every instinct in her screaming that whatever waited at the bottom of those steps hadn't been carved out of stone a hundred years ago by monks who worshipped fire.

It had been carved out far more recently than that, and by something that didn't worship anything at all except its own hunger.

The steps descended narrow and crumbling, stone worn smooth in a groove down the center where a century of feet must once have walked before the fire and the silence took the place over entirely, and the cold only deepened the further down they went, air gone thick and stale, carrying with it that same faint sweetish wrongness Mikaela remembered from the cellar beneath the children's home.

Eto led without hesitation, without a single backward glance for reassurance, moving the way he always moved when the hunt had finally given him something solid to follow.

The hunt continued, down into the dark, into whatever waited beneath the ruins of a god that had burned a hundred years ago and never come back.