Chapter 154: THE HOLLOW BREATH
The city curled in upon itself. One beat, the streets were tangled alleys heavy with smoke; the next, they flung wide like visions of wide boulevards lined with empty statues.
Every blink was a reformation. Every step betrayed them, leading them deeper into the maze that lived within the dragon’s broken breath.
Kaito leaned against a wall that felt both cold like stone and warm like skin. It trembled once under his hand before solidifying again into icy glass. He jerked back fast, teeth hissing.
Nyra went first, her sword exposed now, its blade casting black fire that refused to settle. She turned on him when she caught his hesitation. Her eyes looked older here—brittle, tight.
"Is it forcing harder," she answered, her own voice a soft murmur. "Sounds like the air is trying to burrow in."
Farid’s stride fell behind. He had not said a word since the plain had yielded to streets. His shoulders hung as if weighed down by unseen loads, and his hand twitched with spastic convolutions, clenching the crystal he clutched. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, a wound ripped open.
"It wants us to lose ourselves here. To get confused with its shadow for the truth. The harder we struggle, the further in we fall."
Kaito studied him. "And what do you think? That we just sit back and let it re-write us?"
Farid shook his head, slow, measured. "Not let. Suffer through. Difference matters."
The city shuddered in response. Statues cracked down the middle, revealing hollow interiors where shadows coiled like snakes.
The ground shook. Out of the tears issued a stench—not of flame or rot, but something worse: the smell of stale air, held too long.
Kaito clenched his fists. He could feel the dragon’s vibration in his heart. Every breath was borrowed, owned by something greater. Every breath paid.
"You choke what makes you live," the voice came back, shaking not from above but from below his lungs. "You’d suffocate without me. You struggle, but you’re mine with every breath."
He doubled over, gagging. The ash taste coated his throat, thick and vile. Nyra knelt beside him, tightening his arm.
"Kaito—"
He met her eyes, but the words jammed in his throat were not his. They rode up anyway, flowing like venom:
"You don’t exist without me."
Nyra’s face went rigid. Her hand clenched, but she didn’t waver. "That’s not your voice."
"Isn’t it?" The words grated between his teeth, his voice trembling into the dragon’s echo. "Or is it mine, unmasked?"
Farid pressed his crystal against Kaito’s chest, not to hurt but to startle. Light exploded outward, sending him crashing back. He hit the ground hard, struggling for air. His own voice came back, raw and jagged.
Farid’s voice was bitter. "Don’t let it speak through you. That’s how it binds."
Kaito swallowed, the ash and iron on his tongue. "What if it already has?"
"Then," Farid said, "we rip it out before it takes hold."
They advanced deeper into the labyrinth. Every street terminated before a wall of smoke that was its mirror, and they were repelled, obligated to retrace the steps that no longer had their own shape.
Sometimes they walked for minutes, sometimes for what felt like hours, but the sky never changed above. It continued cracked, pale, and gasping, a reminder at every turn that time here did not conform.
Nyra perceived it first. "The city pursues us.".
Kaito’s brow creased. "What do you mean?"
She gestured toward the statues. "They weren’t looking at us before."
He spun—and saw. The faceless statues, dozens of them, had turned silently, all their blank heads set toward them. Their arms hung loose, but their fingers trembled, as if hungry for guidance.
Farid’s lips compressed. "Not statues. Masks. The shadow’s way of learning us."
One twitched harder, then shuffled forward. Its motion was fluid, human. Its featureless face dropped, and in the void of its empty surface, lines coalesced.
A nose. A mouth.
Kaito’s mouth.
The others propagated. One by one, empty masks rippled, reshaping, until the streets were lined not with statues but with Kaito’s own faces—dozens, dozens of them, staring, waiting.
His gut writhed. He took a step back, bile scalding his throat. "No—"
The voices responded as one, a score of him all speaking at once. "We are you. You are us. To breathe is to belong."
Nyra stood between him and them, sword held high. "Back off."
The faces changed again, shifting, reshaping—this time into hers. Dozens of Nyra’s, lip curling in gentle smirks that weren’t hers.
Her grip on the sword faltered for a moment. Her voice trembled, but she made herself say it. "They’re not me."
Farid raised his crystal. "Don’t fight. If you fight them as you are, they’ll take it. You strike at them and they return fire at you."
The street wrapped over them. The city tightened, walls bending inward, forcing them toward the center.
Kaito settled his breathing. His borrowed air seared his lungs. His head throbbed with whispers. But amidst the pressure, he recalled his decision in the Abyss of Memories: not to give in, not to listen to false voices as his own.
"They want us to divide," he croaked. "To doubt what is ours and what is theirs. That’s the trap."
Nyra looked at him. "So what’s next?"
He gripped his gun harder, but he did not raise it. His chest strained. "We leave. Together. As long as we know that we’re never alone, the city can’t do anything to us."
It was a faint voice. But it was all they had.
The maze revolted against them. Streets led onto corridors of mirrors that displayed not their shapes, but their losses—Kaito watching Nyra vanish into thin air, Nyra watching Kaito surrender to the dragon, Farid watching his hands drenched in blood that did not belong to him. All the reflections implored, weeping to be heeded.
They pressed onward.
Every step became heavier. The air itself was clawing at them, pulling their feet. The reflections were screaming louder, but they were not answering.
At last, they burst into a courtyard in the center of the city. The pavement here was smoother, almost polished, as if it had been cleaned by millions of feet.
In the center lay a huge, hollow ribcage of stone, curving upward like the skeleton of some long-dead giant. Within the ribs encircled the broken dragon-shadow, reduced now but more defined in outline. Its head turned to them. Its many eyes opened, each of them a mirror.
"You live," it said to her, and this time the voice was almost gentle. "But living is not freedom. What will you pay to breathe free of my shadow?"
Nyra stepped closer. "Nothing. We’ll steal it without payment."
The dragon heads parted and reformed, leaning in laughter. "A lie. Breath is always borrowed. Even now, you are alive because I breathe you in."
Kaito’s chest tightened until he dropped to one knee. The truth of it weighed down. His breaths panted, gaunt. Each one was expensive.
He looked up at the echo, sweat trickling from his forehead. "If every breath is yours, then why make us choose? Why give anything?"
The broken beast fell silent. Its many mouths curled. "Because choice is the leash that does not exist."
The words cut more deeply than any growl. Kaito’s eyes went blurry. He thought of all the times he had made a choice—battle or fall, bear on or give in, save Nyra or let her slip away. Each choice had shaped him, shaped him, tethered him. And if each choice was the leash... then freedom would be what?
Farid’s voice sliced through the fog, jagged and urgent. "Don’t give it what it desires. It feeds on false dilemmas. Choice without reality is merely another shackle."
Kaito’s arm trembled upon the earth. He closed his eyes. For a moment, he did not hear the dragon’s bellow, but Nyra’s—the gentle rhythm at his side, genuine, unshattered.
He rose.
His voice was gruff, but resolute. "We won’t accept your choices."
The shattered dragon reeled backward, shattering into shards of light and dark. The city screamed, writhing, coming apart. Statues exploded. Streets were ash. The stone ribcage cracked open around them.
And for a moment, a moment that was too, too long, Kaito drew in air filling his chest—not borrowed, not stolen, his.
The windless sky overhead tore itself wide apart.
They stood speechless while the city collapsed, the ground beneath them dissolving into a white line. Nyra holstered her sword, observing Kaito.
"You were about to give up."
"I did know," he replied, his chest warm, but his breathing his own once more. "But I didn’t."
Farid stared out at the empty horizon where the dragon’s wound had been. His expression was unreadable. "Not yet. But this isn’t finished. That was only the empty breath. The lungs remain."
Nyra furrowed her brow. "The lungs?"
Farid stared upwards, at the tears in the sky. "Do you think the world is breathing for?"
The horizon shuddered. The sky thundered like a giant throat clearing. Something on the far side of it moved.
Kaito’s gut fell. Whatever was brewing over the laboring sky was not finished with them.
Not by a long way.