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© Taniel Lo, 2026
ISBN 978-5-0069-8932-0
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Prologue
Only one wall of the house remained — a black, charred skeleton jutting from the ground like a gravestone. The boy curled into a ball beneath the floorboards, feeling the cold earth against his back, and pressed his hands over his ears to block out the screaming.
The screaming still seeped through his fingers.
It grew quieter, more muffled, then changed into another sound — wet, gurgling, one that twisted his stomach into a tight, painful knot. The boy squeezed his eyes shut even harder.
Then silence came.
In that silence — that sticky, heavy silence — a crackling began. Timid at first, as if someone was stirring in the ashes. Then bolder, more insolent, and soon it filled everything.
The fire.
The boy opened his eyes. Orange flickers danced in the darkness beneath the floor — light forcing its way through the gaps in the boards above. He watched the planks over his head begin to smolder, golden threads racing across them, the air turning hot and acrid.
If I scream, they’ll find me, he thought. It wasn’t just a thought. It was instinct, drilled into his core by fear.
He bit his lip until it bled and made no sound as the fire devoured his home, his family, his childhood.
And when the patrol cleared the rubble two days later, it wasn’t a boy that crawled out from under the earth. It was a wad of hatred, baked into a crust of ash and grief.
Chapter 1
“Hey, Kane. Still alive?”
The beer mug cracked in his hand. Kane forced his fingers to relax — the clay walls spiderwebbed with fine fractures but held together. He looked up.
Lissa stood before him — a scrawny barmaid with perpetually red, chapped hands. She slammed a bowl of murky stew onto the table.
“Not dead yet,” Kane grunted.
Lissa snorted and flitted off, shuffling her worn-out shoes across the sticky clay floor. Kane watched her go, his gaze sliding over the moldy walls, the two oil lamps casting writhing shadows on the ceiling. The “Rotten Tooth” exhaled its usual hopelessness.
He sat motionless, rooted to the bench like part of the rotten interior. A man with ash-gray skin and a scar across his eyebrow. Any regular at the tavern would say the scariest thing about Kane wasn’t the scar or his fists — fists that could crush a clay mug. The scariest thing was his eyes. Tired, cynical, with such coldness at the bottom that even Kane felt uneasy when he caught his reflection in a murky beer glass.
But now he was looking inward. And there he saw a different face.
A child’s face, with curls and a laughing mouth. His little sister. The one whose scream he still heard in his nightmares.
The tavern had its usual evening atmosphere. An old man by the counter sharpened his knife with pleasure, listening to the screech of metal on stone — the only music he acknowledged. In the corner, two drunkards had already forgotten what they were about to fight over and now just stared at each other in silent, drunken hatred.
An ordinary evening. Ordinary melancholy. An ordinary life that stretched on like old chewing gum.
Then the light in the corner went out.
Not everywhere. The lamp on the table kept burning. But its rays seemed to hit an invisible wall, flowing around the figure of a man who had silently lowered himself onto the bench across from him. A hooded cloak covered him from head to toe, and his face remained in shadow, even though the light fell directly on it.
Kane caught a smell: dampness, mold, and something sweetish and cloying. Mastic for bookbinding, rotting folios, book dust. The smell of archives. The smell of people who spend too much time among dead pages.
“I need a man who isn’t afraid of fire,” the stranger’s voice was quiet, flat, and utterly lifeless, like the creak of an old door. “Or of what’s left of it.”
Kane finished his beer and only then looked up. In the shadow of the hood, only the tip of a pale, almost alabaster chin was visible.
“A demon?” he asked, setting the mug back on the table. His voice sounded lazy, but his hand was already on the knife hilt beneath the table. “Price depends on the rank. For a Rattler — a silver piece. For a Bonebreaker — a gold one. If it’s a Prince of the Abyss — I don’t do that kind of auction.”
The stranger didn’t appreciate the joke. He just tilted his head — and the movement was strange, unnaturally smooth, as if his joints worked differently than a human’s.
“Not a demon,” he said. “Worse. A girl who thinks she’s a firework.”
Kane froze.
“A girl? You look like someone who catches rats in a library, not a procurer.”
“I need a hunter,” the stranger interrupted. Steel crept into his voice, though he hadn’t even raised it. “Someone who can find and bring her. Alive.”
“That’ll cost you.”
“I know.”
A purse landed on the table, right in a greasy stain from the stew. Heavy. Kane gauged the weight with practiced ease: silver, and a lot of it. For that kind of money, he could stay in the “Rotten Tooth” for six months without Lissa giving him dirty looks about his tab.
“District,” he said curtly.
“The Old Quarters. By the eastern wall. Where the houses remember the Burned Skies.” The stranger rose, and his cloak didn’t even stir, as if made of lead. “She’s dangerous, hunter. But not to you. You… won’t burn.”
The last words sounded strange. Almost like a blessing. Or a curse.
Kane wanted to ask more, but the stranger was already gone — silent as a shadow, dissolving into the doorway. Only the smell of dampness still hung in the air, mixing with the stench of cheap tobacco and sour beer.
Kane tucked the purse into his shirt. The leather felt its pleasant weight. The stew had cooled, covered in an unappetizing gray film. He stared at it, feeling a dull irritation rising inside him.
He hated jobs like this. When they paid you like royalty but didn’t tell you who to look for. That always meant one thing: shit that would surface later. Big, stinking shit.
Kane stood up, threw a worn cloak of thick wool over his shoulders — it smelled of old leather and metal. Checked his sword belt — the blade slid easily in its scabbard, the knives were in place.
Lissa caught his eye.
“Already?” she asked, surprised. “What about staying the night?”
“Business.”
He stepped out into the night.
The rain met him with the kiss of cold drizzle. Not a downpour, but that nasty, persistent dampness that instantly crawled inside his collar and made the cobblestones slick as fish scales.
Kane headed toward the Old City. The sound of his steps drowned in the whisper of water, the squelch of mud, and the occasional sob — dripping from rotten drainpipes.
The streets were empty. At this hour, normal people stayed home, shutters nailed shut and protective charms hung on their doors. Garlic, iron horseshoes, rowan berries — they helped against the lesser creatures like mosquito repellent. Didn’t kill them, but kept them away.
Kane didn’t hang charms. He preferred to kill.
His hand rested on the knife hilt as he turned into an alley between two crooked houses. No lanterns burned here — the glass had long been smashed, the oil drunk by rats. The darkness was thick enough to chew.
He sensed the tail before any sound confirmed it. Just a chill between his shoulder blades. An animal instinct that hunters paid for with sleepless nights.
Kane slowed his step, pretended to adjust a buckle on his belt. He turned slightly sideways, offering his back — bait.
Under the stairs leading to a cellar, there was simply blackness. But not the kind of blackness born from lack of light. That blackness was breathing.
He caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. From the corner where a wall should have been, two coals appeared — dull, reddish. Then a sound tore through the air — a wet, gurgling cough, as if someone was trying to clear lungs full of water.
A Rattler.
The creature jumped before it finished coughing. Kane didn’t see its body — just a clot of darkness flying at him, a gaping maw full of needle-like teeth. The air stirred, reeking of swamp rot and carrion.
Kane took a half-step sideways — dry, calculated, without panic. The attack whizzed past his ear, blasting him with icy draft. And in the same motion, pivoting on his heel, he struck upward.
Cold iron sank into flesh that shouldn’t exist. The demon didn’t even squeal — it just exhaled, collapsing into black ash, and a stinking sludge splashed onto the cobblestones, hissing in the rain.
Kane wiped the blade on his pant leg. He wasn’t even winded. His heart beat steadily.
He walked on, leaving behind the hissing puddle that the rain was quickly washing into the gutter.
By the eastern wall, in the Old Quarters, a firework girl was waiting for him.
The room he rented was no better than the “Rotten Tooth” — the same mold in the corners, the same dank chill that had soaked even into the stones. It smelled of old rags, mice, and Kane himself — the ingrained scent of leather, gun oil, and that particular bitter dryness that seeps into the belongings of a man who has lived alone for a long time.
But it was quiet here. And best of all, he didn’t have to talk to anyone.
Kane lit a candle stub — the flame licked the wick, illuminating the shabby surroundings: a sagging bed, a table, a stool. He tossed the purse onto the table. It clinked heavily, contentedly.
He sat on the bed — the springs groaned pitifully — unbuckled his sword belt, laid the blade within reach. He always slept with a weapon.
His gaze fell on the wall. There, above the headboard, hung an old, faded drawing. A child’s hand had carefully traced clumsy figures: a house with a chimney, a tree, three little people — a big one, a medium one, and a tiny one. The colors were almost gone, the paper yellowed and cracked along the folds.
Kane stared at it for a long time, without blinking. Somewhere beyond the wall, water dripped steadily. Somewhere in the distance, a demon howled — mournfully, drawn out.
Then he blew out the candle. Darkness covered him like an old, familiar friend.
Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll find that girl. The firework.
And for the first time in a long while, he felt that tomorrow might bring something he couldn’t calculate in advance. Something that would knock him out of his usual rut.
He was wrong. It didn’t just knock him out. It burned his life to the ground.
Chapter 2
The quarter that remembered the Burned Skies looked the part. The houses here leaned into each other like drunks after a tavern closed, propping up their neighbors with rotten beams. Black mold covered the walls, and in its bizarre patterns you could make out contorted faces if you stared long enough. Kane didn’t stare.
The fog lay thick as old cotton wool. It muffled sounds into indistinct rustling, blurred outlines, turned houses into ghosts, crept into the lungs and settled there as damp cold. The locals called it the “Breath of Gloom” and tried not to stick their noses out of their homes unless necessary. Kane called it “convenient” — the fog hid him just as well as it hid the creatures.
The first witness was found where he belonged — in a pile of rags shifting by the wall of an abandoned bakery. The pile reeked of cheap booze, urine, and long-standing rot.
A beggar. Old, filthy, with the clouded eyes of a man who had long ago traded reality for cheap swill. Kane squatted down. His knee cracked. He shoved a copper coin under the beggar’s nose — a dull disk that glinted faintly in the gray light.
“Hey, old man. Seen a girl around here? Alone, skinny, not from around here.”
The beggar jerked as if electrocuted. He scraped at the cobblestones with his crooked, bird-claw fingers, trying to crawl away. His eyes widened, animal terror flooding them.
“Saw her!” he gasped, blasting Kane with the smell of alcohol. “Saw her, I say… She walked, and the stones melted under her feet! Holy fire, I thought, a she-demon in human skin! So I ran!”
Kane calmly took the copper coin back. It clinked as it fell into his purse.
“You were drunk, old man. Stones melting…” He gestured at the huge puddle under the beggar’s feet, where cigarette butts and a dead rat floated. “The moss doesn’t grow here because of the rats, not because of fire.”
The beggar whimpered and burrowed deeper into his stinking rags. Useless.
Kane straightened up, his knee cracking, and walked on, weaving between puddles and piles of trash that nobody cleaned up here. Why bother? The next rain would wash it all into the gutters anyway.
The market in this part of the city worked while it was light. Now, in the gray twilight, the merchants were hastily closing up shop, shoving goods into sacks and chests, glancing back at the fog every few moments. One of the women — stocky, with red, sleep-deprived eyes and flour-stained hands — was boarding up her stall with such fury it looked like she was taking personal revenge on it.
Kane stopped nearby. A board flew off to the side, the nail scraping unpleasantly and bending.
“Need help?” he asked without much hope.
The woman glared at him like a wolf, but seeing the sword belt and his cold eyes, she cooled down a bit. Hunters weren’t liked around here, but they were feared more than the unclean things.
“Help,” she exhaled, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “Third day and I still can’t pull myself together. Look, the corner’s scorched.”
Kane looked. The corner of the stall was indeed scorched — but strangely. The edges were even, as if the fire hadn’t spread gradually but had struck from a single point and instantly gone out. Neatly. Sterilely. Not even smoldering embers remained.
“What happened?” he asked, taking the hammer. The metal struck the nail head with a dull thud.
“There was no girl!” The merchant suddenly shrieked. “A flash, I tell you! A flash! I was saving my goods! A lightning bolt, I thought, thrown by the gods to punish sinners. And after that blaze…” She lowered her voice to a whisper and crossed herself fervently. “It smelled sweet, like in church during a service!”
Kane hammered in the last nail — thud, thud, thud — and returned the hammer to the woman.
“How far from here?”
“Well, in that dead end,” she waved her hand somewhere into the fog. “Where the rats die. Just don’t go there, hunter. It’s still… warm.”
He went.
The dead end between two houses looked like a wound. Soot covered the brick walls, but not the kind left by an ordinary fire — old, ingrained. This was fresh, smelling of smoke and something else, unfamiliar, unsettling.
Kane stepped inside and immediately knew something was wrong.
The air was dry. In this damp, perpetually wet city, this little pocket of space breathed heat, like an oven just extinguished. Kane ran his tongue over his parched lips.
On the ground, on the dirty cobblestones, a black circle stood out.
Perfectly even. Burned down to the stone.
Kane knelt. The stone was warm. He ran his finger along the edge of the circle — the soot crumbled into gray dust, but underneath, the stone was clean, even melted at the edges, transformed into something like smooth glass. Inside the circle lay ash. Not ordinary gray ash, but almost white, with a pearlescent sheen, shimmering in the light like fish scales.
He poked at it with his knife and brought it to his face. It smelled of ozone and incense.
Remains of demons. Low-tier. Three, maybe four. Burned so thoroughly that not even bones remained — only this light, almost beautiful ash that the wind had already begun to scatter through the dead end.
“Holy shit…” Kane breathed.
He stood up and touched the wall. The brick was warm. So many hours after the flash — warm, as if the sun were shining directly on it.
She didn’t set the house on fire, he realized. She destroyed them. A weak but pure force.
The client hadn’t lied. This wasn’t a demon. It was something else. Something that knew how to burn creatures so that only a memory remained.
Kane circled the area, peering at the ash, the melted stones, the soot-stained wall. Then he froze.
The soot on the wall… it wasn’t just a random stain. Near the floor, a clear imprint was visible.
Small. Narrow. Five fingers.
He knelt again, tilted his head, squinting from a sharp angle. And then he saw the tracks.
They led from the circle — a trail of small bare feet printed in the soot… The tracks crossed the burned zone and dove under the wide eaves of a crooked house. There, where the rain hadn’t reached, the same trail was clearly visible in the dust, leading deeper into the slums. Kane followed it with his eyes. The fog was thickening, and beyond five steps, nothing was visible.
Kane adjusted his sword belt… And stepped into the fog.
Chapter 3
The tracks led him to the ruins of an old chapel.
Once, a temple of the Order of Purity had stood here — the remnants of a stained glass window in the pointed arch, where pieces of blue and red glass could still be made out, and a pile of dressed stone that had once been a bell tower, testified to that. Now the building was half-collapsed, the roof had caved in, and a bush of elder grew in the doorway, covered in a strange, out-of-season frost that sparkled even in this damp climate.
Kane stopped at the entrance, listening. Inside was pitch dark, but he could smell it — that same sweet, church-like scent the merchant had mentioned.
Incense. And something else. Burnt wood. And… sweat? The salty, bitter smell of human fear and exhaustion.
He silently drew his sword — the blade left the scabbard with a soft whisper — and slipped inside, stepping soundlessly over the broken stone.
Inside, the chapel seemed larger than from outside. A dim, sickly light seeped through holes in the roof, picking out fragments of benches from the darkness, a crooked altar with a chipped top, a pile of rubbish in the corner — rotten boards, torn rags, gnawed bones.
And a figure.
Small, huddled against the wall, trying to blend into the stone. Arms wrapped around her knees, head bowed, long dark hair covering her face. She wore some kind of ragged tatters — a shapeless robe, clearly not her size, stolen off someone else’s back.
Kane stepped closer. A small pebble crunched under his sole. He kept his sword ready — old habits don’t die.
The figure by the wall didn’t move, but he noticed the shoulders tensing under the rags, the fingers gripping her knees tighter, the knuckles going white. She heard him. She was waiting.
“Hey,” he called softly. “Are you the one who burns demons?”
Silence. Then — a low, slightly hoarse voice. Tired, with no trace of fear, but with such steel inside it that Kane instinctively went on alert.
“I’m the one who wants to be left alone.”
Her head lifted.
Kane saw a face smeared with soot and grime, beneath which pale, almost translucent skin showed through. Huge eyes — amber, almost golden in this dim light — stared back at him, attentive, piercing. There was no ordinary human fear or hope in them. Only an ancient, frightening depth. They seemed to glow from within with their own inhuman light. Long dark hair, matted into tangles, singed at the ends. Sharp, aristocratic cheekbones, chapped, cracked lips, a thin neck where you could almost count every vein.
She was thin — too thin, almost transparent. Hungry. Exhausted. Beneath the torn clothes, sharp collarbones were visible and, surprisingly, a coiled tension, unnatural for such emaciation. The tension of a predator lying in ambush.
This wasn’t a girl. A young woman. About twenty. And there was nothing childish in her gaze. There was an abyss in it, one Kane didn’t particularly want to look into.
“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was steady, without a tremor.
“Someone who got paid to find you,” Kane answered honestly. “And someone who hasn’t decided what to do about that yet.”
She blinked. Her amber eyes narrowed slightly, sliding over his face, the scar on his eyebrow, his stubbled cheek, his sword belt, the blade in his lowered hand. She seemed to see not just a hunter, but his entire life, all his scars, all his weariness.
“You’re not like the others,” she said quietly. “You don’t smell of greed.”
Kane grunted. A strange choice of words, but he was used to everything connected with magic sounding strange.
“What do I smell of, then?”
She paused, as if listening to something inside herself. Or sniffing — Kane had heard that some with magic blood had an animal’s sense of smell.
“Ashes,” she answered finally. “And that you also want to be left alone.”
That hit the bullseye, the sorest spot. Kane didn’t even know what to say.
Then, outside, in the fog, something crunched. Loudly, clearly — a branch under someone’s heavy foot.
He spun around instantly, raising his sword. Gray murk swirled in the doorway, and shadows could be made out within it. Many shadows. They were moving, flowing into each other, surrounding the chapel.
“We’ve been found,” the girl said. Calmly, as if talking about the weather. Too calmly for someone who should be screaming and hiding behind someone else’s back.
A sound came from the fog. A wet, gurgling cough that made Kane’s stomach turn cold.
Rattlers. And there were… a lot of them. More than he could count by ear.
“How many?” Kane asked curtly, not turning around. His voice was even, but his fingers tightened on his sword hilt.
“Twelve,” she answered just as curtly. “A thirteenth, a big one, hanging back. A Bonebreaker.”