Chapter Two — I Don't Deserve Light… Least of All Yours

She climbed like a woman who had never been told that falling was possible.

Elias watched her hands find holds in the black rock, her boots testing every ledge, her patched coat snagging on thorns. Twice she slipped. Twice she caught herself, muttered something that sounded like a prayer, and kept climbing. The light around her never dimmed. If anything, it grew steadier, the way a hearth-fire steadies when the wind dies.

"Either she's suicidal or she's early," Soot remarked from the safety of the cliff's edge. "I'm rooting for suicidal. It's more interesting."

"Shut up."

"Ooh, three words. That's a record."

Elias's fingers closed around the hilt of a sword he hadn't drawn in a century. Not that it would help. Nothing helped. Nothing had ever helped. He was the lock, and locks didn't fight — they held. But his body was moving before his mind caught up, stepping back from the edge as her head crested the cliff, because the alternative was standing there like a monument while she climbed into his arms.

She hauled herself over the edge, breathing hard, and stood. Dusted off her coat. Tucked a strand of honey hair behind her ear. And looked at him.

Elias had been looked at by every kind of creature the world could produce. Priests who feared him. Kings who begged him. Mothers who threw their children behind their backs and screamed. He had been looked at with terror, with hatred, with hunger, with pity — pity being the worst, because it meant they saw what he had become.

This woman looked at him the way you look at a stranger holding an umbrella in the rain: with mild curiosity, and the clear intention of borrowing it.

"You're taller than the stories," she said.

Elias opened his mouth. Closed it. For the first time in three hundred and forty-seven years, he had nothing to say to that.

"Who are you?" His voice scraped out of him like gravel off a tombstone. "What are you doing here?"

"My name is Lila Voss." She stepped closer, unafraid, and the light around her threw his shadow long and jagged across the rock. "And I came to see the monster."

"You've seen him. Leave."

"Not a monster, then." She studied him — the wounds, the scars, the gray pallor of a man who had been dead to feeling for centuries. "You're a lock, aren't you? The one they sealed the chaos into. They put the nightmare in a man and called it mercy."

Elias felt his blood go cold. "Who told you that? No one knows that. The monuments — the world was told —"

"The monuments tell the pretty story." Lila's voice was flat. "They say a monster burned the villages and the Keepers chained him in the dark forever. That's the story they carved in stone. But my grandmother knew the other version. The one they didn't carve."

She reached into her satchel and pulled out a scrap of paper — old, yellowed, covered in handwriting that Elias recognized with a jolt of pain. His own. A letter he had written and burned, three centuries ago, to a woman who had already been dead for a decade.

"How did you get that?" The question came out a snarl.

"Stories survive, lock." She folded the paper away. "People survive. We're stubborn that way. And I've been looking for you for a very long time, because my family —" Her voice broke, just slightly, on the word. "My family was one of the villages you saved. The ones the monuments forgot."

Elias stared at her. The wind howled. The gray pressed in. And somewhere deep in the dead valley below, something shifted in the dark — a wrongness, a hunger, the sensation of a hound scenting blood.

"Go home," he said, and the words were stones. "Go home, Lila Voss. I don't deserve light. Least of all yours. Whatever you think I did, whatever your grandmother told you — I am not a hero. I am a curse wearing a man's skin, and everyone who gets close to me turns to ash. And I have been cold for three hundred years, seed — so cold that if you stay, if you give me one more hour of this, I will burn every world down to keep it warm. So go home. Go home before I decide you're worth the fire."

He turned his back on her, a dismissal he had used on kings, and began to walk away into the gray.

Behind him, her light flared. "Too late," she said, very quietly. "I already touched you."

Elias stopped. He looked down at his wrist, where her fingers had brushed him during the climb — and where, for one impossible second, the wound beneath his sleeve had stopped burning.

Lila had been walking for nine days.

Her boots were blistered. Her pack was lighter than it should have been — she had given the bread to a widow in the last village, and the apples to a child with a cough, and the blanket to a man who had wept when she pressed it into his hands. The light in her chest, the one her grandmother had taught her to guard, burned low and steady. It had to. It was all she had.

"I am the last," she whispered to the fire she had built in the millhouse ruin. "The last of the Voss line. The last light. And I came here — to the place where the stories say the light was buried — because Grandmother always said the Domain keeps what it is given."

Her grandmother had said a lot of things, before the burning. She had said the Voss women were seeds, planted to grow wherever they were put. She had said the world was not finished with the light, no matter how hard it tried to be. She had said — on the last night, with the smoke curling around them — that if Lila ever felt the cold closing in, she should go where the cold was oldest, and find the thing that had been holding it back.

"Find the lock," her grandmother had whispered. "The one they carved on the monument, the one they taught us to fear. The monument lies, girl. The fear lies. What he holds — what he has always held — is the only thing keeping the dark from eating the world."

Lila had not understood, then. She had been six, and the village had been burning, and she had understood only fire and running and the hard, cold ground.

She understood now. Nine days into the Domain, with the gray pressing at her light and the ruins of a dead world around her, she understood.

She fed the fire, and she did not sleep, and above her, on the black cliff, something moved.