Suddenly, I spot something out of the corner of my eye—a shadow, lingering at the mouth of the alley behind a pile of discarded pig iron. They’re too close to us, and too hidden, to be doing anything but listening. Gavik starts to talk again, but I hold up one hand in his face, and he pauses. The pause is too long, and it spooks the shadow. Before I can blink, the shadow pivots and is gone, and I rush to the throat of the road just in time to see a scrap of darkness disappear around a corner.

I dash around it, and come face-to-face with the wall of West Gate, so high and tall that nothing could jump it, flanked on either side by similar brick walls, smooth and free of hiding places. The shadow is gone. But where? There are no places to duck into, no holes to disappear down. It’s like it simply…vanished.

Anyone could’ve followed me. But only one person would want to. Only one person knew I’d be going to talk to Gavik today.

“Lucien?” I whisper at the looming white wall.

But I get no answer.

When I return to Gavik, he tries to convince me, once again, to refuse to help Varia find the Bone Tree. But his pleas fall on ears long closed to him. I walk back to the palace, stopping in front of Y’shennria’s manor. The black rosebushes tug at my unheart as they wave beneath the immaculately blue summer sky, the fluffy white clouds so innocent and sweet.

Even under a sky that looks this peaceful, war is happening.

Varia has been throwing me at the valkerax. I’ve died over and over again, and no one has mourned. The witches throw their Heartless at the human army even now, but they won’t mourn them. War only means something because death does. Death only means something because life does.

Life—that tenuous, bright thing that humans take for granted. Each moment, a possibility. Each day, a new beginning.

All of that, stopped only by death.

The Old Vetrisians back then were right to be afraid of the Glass Tree. The real monster is not death. It is immortality. It is nothing changing, ever. It is that choking gray haze. It’s remaining the same for three years, trapped in a forest. It’s death being reduced to a joke. It is death meaning nothing, because then life, too, means nothing.

I want to be human.

I want to mean something again.

“Lady Zera?”