Three Marks

The lock turned.

Two hours had passed since the Hero of Solvar left him alone in the cell. Nino remained seated against the cold stone wall, one knee raised before him and his chained wrists resting over it. He had spent most of that time listening to footsteps beyond the iron door and trying not to think about how four days had disappeared from his life.

The door opened and three soldiers entered. Dark steel covered them from neck to shin, built in overlapping plates that gave their armor an almost scaled appearance. Short ash-grey mantles hung from one shoulder, each fastened by a golden clasp bearing Solvar's mountain crest. Their helmets left only the lower half of their faces exposed, while thin channels carved into their spears carried a faint golden Pulse along the metal.

"On your feet."

The youngest soldier tightened his grip around his spear. Nino looked at them without moving. His attention dropped briefly to the weapon before returning to the man's face. The soldier swallowed.

Nino pushed himself from the wall. Pain answered immediately. His ribs burned beneath the bandages wrapped around his torso, and the moment he stood, something cold spread through his veins. The poison was still there.

The chains around his wrists rattled as he straightened. Noctrium. Dark metal reinforced by thin lines of golden Pulse that traveled from one shackle to the other. Another chain connected them to the restraints around his ankles.

Nino looked around the cell one last time.

"Move."

He did. The soldiers surrounded him as they stepped into the corridor. Nino had expected them to lead him directly toward whatever room the ministers had prepared for his questioning. Instead, at the end of the passage, daylight struck his face. Nino narrowed his eyes.

He could finally see what the fall of the Colossus had done. Part of Solvar’s entrance was simply gone.

The mountain passage he remembered from the Colossus looked nothing like it had from above. One of the enormous defensive walls had collapsed almost completely, leaving only sections of stone jutting upward like broken teeth. Wooden scaffolding already covered what remained of another, while hundreds of workers moved through piles of debris below.

Soldiers carried shattered beams while workers pushed carts filled with stone through the rubble. Nearby, a group of men pulled together on ropes wrapped around a piece of the fallen wall larger than a house, and farther ahead, an entire road had disappeared beneath the debris.

Beyond all of it, rising over the destruction, was the Colossus.

Even dead, it dominated the valley. Its enormous body lay between the mountains, partially obscured by distance and clouds. One arm had crashed through the outer defenses of Solvar before finally stopping, ancient fingers buried among shattered fortifications.

Nino stared at it. Four days ago, he had been standing on that body. He remembered the fight against the Shadows, Alicia's voice and then falling. Everything after that was darkness.

"Quite the view, isn't it?"

Nino turned. The Hero of Solvar was waiting several steps away.

He wore the same heavy coat from the cell, his dark brown hair shifting beneath the mountain wind. No armor. No weapon that Nino could see. His amber eyes briefly moved toward the chains around Nino's wrists.

"Thought you might appreciate seeing your handiwork before meeting the ministers."

Nino looked back toward the destruction.

"Appreciate?"

"Poor choice of words." The Hero walked past him. "Come on."

They descended toward the lower streets. The farther they walked, the clearer the damage became.

Several buildings near the walls had lost their roofs or entire sections of their upper floors. Broken carts had been pushed against the sides of the road to clear a path, while workers moved constantly through the rubble, dismantling what could not be saved and reinforcing what remained.

Soldiers were everywhere, though many now carried the marks of the disaster. Some walked with bandaged heads or arms held in slings; others leaned on crutches as they directed workers through the damaged streets. One stood near a collapsed building with an empty sleeve pinned beneath his shoulder, the fresh bandages still visible beneath his uniform.

His expression hardened as Nino passed, but he said nothing. Others did, their whispers following the chained Hero down the street.

"That's him."

"The Hero of Mezi."

"I heard he brought the thing here."

"My brother was on the western wall."

"Why isn't he in a cage?"

Nino heard every word. He didn't turn toward any of them. He had heard worse. For years, people had cursed him as he walked through villages.

Murderer. Monster. King's dog.

Sometimes they screamed. Sometimes they spat. Sometimes they simply lowered their eyes because looking at him was more dangerous than hating him.

Nino had never cared. At least, he had believed he hadn't.

A woman pulled her daughter closer as he passed. The girl stared at him from behind her mother's dress. He looked forward again. The chains suddenly felt heavier.

They crossed beneath an arch damaged by the impact. Beyond it, the streets widened toward the central district. There were more people here: workers, soldiers, families displaced by the destruction. Then a different voice came from somewhere among them.

"That's him."

Nino continued walking.

"No, I'm telling you. That's him."

An elderly woman had stopped beside a cart. Unlike the others, she wasn't looking at Nino's chains. She was looking at his face. A man beside her followed her gaze. His eyes widened.

"He saved Arvendel!"

The woman nodded. More heads turned. Nino felt their eyes following him. A young boy pushed between two adults to see.

"Mom, is that—"

"Yes."

The answer came quietly.

"The Hero."

Nino's step slowed for the briefest moment, just enough for the Hero of Solvar to notice, before he continued walking.

Hero.

He had heard that word thousands of times. Soldiers had shouted it when he entered battlefields, nobles had announced it before tournaments and people in Mezi had bowed while using it.

Hero of Mezi.

A title. Nothing more. But the woman from Arvendel hadn't said Hero of Mezi. She had simply called him: The Hero.

Nino tightened his hands inside the shackles, still unable to shake the word from his mind.

"Interesting."

He turned slightly toward the Hero of Solvar, who continued walking as though he hadn't said anything.

"What?"

"Nothing."

The faint smile at the corner of the man's mouth suggested otherwise, but Nino let it go and continued beside him.

The damage grew less severe as they climbed toward the administrative quarter, but Nino paid little attention to the buildings around him. His thoughts had returned to the people he had last seen on the Colossus. Three had carried Alicia and the children away before he destroyed the Heart, and he could only hope she had taken them far enough before the mountain fell. Four days had passed since then, with no way of knowing where they had gone, whether the Shadows had followed them, or even whether they had made it out of the valley safely.

The uncertainty had become unbearable. Whatever awaited him before Solvar's ministers, he needed to get out of this city.

They passed through what had once been a narrow stone arch connecting two buildings. Half of it had collapsed, leaving a fractured column on one side and long cracks spreading through the wall opposite it. Reconstruction had already begun there; wooden supports had been driven against the damaged masonry, loose stones were stacked along the roadside, and fresh chisel marks covered sections where workers had begun removing unstable pieces.

Nothing about it seemed unusual.

Yet as Nino passed beneath the remains of the arch, one mark caught his attention. A thin vertical cut had been carved into the broken column at roughly shoulder height, too straight to resemble the cracks surrounding it but ordinary enough to disappear among the damage.

He continued walking.

A few paces farther, another line appeared on the wall across the street. This one was shorter and slightly higher, carved into the edge of a stone block between several fresh tool marks. There was no obvious connection between the two. They weren't even on the same surface.

Then came a third.

It had been cut into one of the wooden supports holding up the damaged wall, several feet beyond the others. Nino slowed without meaning to.

"Problem?" the Hero of Solvar asked.

"No."

He continued forward, but something about the placement of the marks refused to leave him. None of them meant anything on their own. One belonged to a broken column, another to a wall several feet behind it, and the last to a wooden beam farther down the street. From almost anywhere, they looked exactly like what they were meant to look like: insignificant scars left behind by four days of frantic reconstruction.

Almost anywhere.

As Nino reached the opposite side of the street, the ruined column briefly overlapped the wall behind it. The first mark slid across his field of view until it stood beside the second, while the line carved into the wooden support closed the remaining gap from farther back.

For the space of a single step, three marks carved into three different surfaces at three different distances aligned perfectly.

III.

Then Nino moved beyond the angle, and the symbol disappeared.

The wall became a wall again. The column was only rubble, the wooden beam only part of the reconstruction, and the three lines returned to being unrelated scratches that no passing soldier would have reason to remember.

Nino kept his pace unchanged. He didn't need to look back. There was only one person who would leave a message like that: Three.

"What's happening?"

He looked forward again.

"Nothing."

The Hero watched him for another moment before continuing, and Nino followed without looking back. Three was alive — or at least someone wanted him to believe she was. But the possibility of another person having arranged those marks didn't survive long in his mind. He knew her too well. Three would never leave behind an obvious message that a soldier might recognize or that could somehow be traced back to her. Three separate marks, hidden among the damage and positioned so precisely that they became meaningful only from a single point along the street, were different. That was exactly the kind of message she would trust.

Still, the symbol itself told him little beyond the fact that she had been there. If Three had gone through that much trouble to make sure he noticed it, there had to be something else.

What are you trying to tell me?

The answer didn't come immediately. They continued uphill and turned onto another street, where the buildings stood closer together and the noise of the reconstruction faded behind them. A narrow alley opened between two of them, its entrance partially hidden beneath hanging cloth and the shadow of an upper balcony. Beside it, an old man sat alone on a weathered wooden crate.

Grey hair fell almost to his shoulders. His clothes were patched in so many places that it was difficult to tell where the original fabric ended and the repairs began, and a crooked wooden cane rested between his knees. He seemed far more interested in watching the pigeons peck at the ground than in the armed procession approaching him.

As they drew closer, however, one of the patches on his coat stood out. Three narrow stitches ran vertically through the faded cloth, parallel and evenly spaced. To anyone else, they would have been nothing more than another crude repair among dozens, but Nino had seen those same three lines only moments before. This time, there was no question. The old man was part of Three's message.

One soldier gestured impatiently.

"Move."

The old man didn't. The soldier stepped toward him.

"Didn't you hear me?"

"Leave him."

The Hero of Solvar continued walking, and the soldier reluctantly returned to formation. As Nino approached the alley, the old man showed no interest in him whatsoever, keeping his attention on the pigeons scattered around his feet.

Only when Nino was close enough to hear him without the words carrying across the street did the old man lift one hand to scratch his beard.

"The cure waits in Veyra."

Nino passed directly in front of him without slowing. He gave no sign that he had heard the message, leaving the old man behind as naturally as he had passed every other stranger along the way.

The Hero of Solvar sighed somewhere beside him. "Every disaster brings out prophets, lunatics, and people claiming they knew it was coming."

One of the soldiers gave a quiet laugh, but their voices quickly faded beneath the thought already consuming Nino.

The cure waits in Veyra.

Now the purpose of the three lines was clear. They hadn't merely been Three's way of telling him she was alive; they had been there to make sure he recognized the old man as part of her message. She knew about the poison, and more importantly, she knew of somewhere it could be treated. Whether she had witnessed Five poisoning him or already knew what Five carried hardly mattered. Three understood what was happening to him well enough to send him toward a cure.

That realization brought another with it: Alicia.

Three had been carrying her when they escaped from the Colossus. If Three had survived the fall, remained free long enough to arrange this message, and knew where Nino needed to go, then there was every reason to believe Alicia might still be with her.

He couldn't be certain, and he refused to let hope turn possibility into fact, but for the first time since waking in that cell, the weight pressing against his chest eased slightly. Alicia might be alive. She might be safe.

And Three had given him somewhere to go.

Veyra.

Nino committed the name to memory as they continued uphill. Whatever happened in the next few hours, whatever Solvar's ministers intended to do with him, he now knew what waited beyond these walls.

Still, one possibility kept him from trusting the message completely. If the Shadows had found Three during those four days, they might have had Alicia as well, and using Three's number to lure him somewhere was exactly the kind of trap they were capable of setting. Nino couldn't dismiss that risk, but it changed nothing. Trap or not, he would have to go to Veyra.

"Here."

The Hero's voice pulled him from his thoughts as they reached the end of the street.

Before them stood a massive stone building embedded directly into the mountainside. Solvar's crest had been carved above two enormous doors, and rows of armored guards stood on either side of the entrance.

The Hero of Solvar climbed the first step, then looked back. The faint amusement that usually rested in his expression was gone.

"From this point forward, I'd recommend thinking before you speak."

Nino climbed after him.

"You think that's going to help?"

"No."

The Hero turned toward the doors.

"But I'd like to be able to tell myself I tried."

The guards pulled the doors open, and warm light spilled across the stone steps. A mixture of voices drifted from somewhere inside, enough to tell Nino that Solvar's ministers were already waiting for him.

He briefly glanced at the Noctrium chains around his wrists before crossing the threshold and following the Hero inside.