Chapter 7: Rumors in the Smoke
She didn’t know his name then.
Only that he moved through whispers.
Mira had just crossed into the Eastern river routes beneath a forged name and a new cloak, the collar she once wore now just a memory buried beneath a crumbling shrine. She had slipped away from Kael Morain’s hold, but she hadn’t vanished without echo. There were whispers—low and hot like smoke—that someone was searching for her.
But it wasn’t Kael.
No, his pursuit would be loud and brutal, the kind that shattered doors and split throats. This one… this one asked questions in the dark. Paid old innkeepers and dock boys in silver. Traced rumors of a woman with salt still in her hair and fire in her eyes.
Some said he was a bounty hunter. Others swore he was a commander or assassin. A few, the more poetic, spoke of him like a ghost—“The man with smoke in his veins and a sword that sings when drawn.”
She heard the name name retracted. for the first time in a tavern lit only by the glow of an opium lantern. A sailor’s breath reeked of drink as he said it, not realizing the weight of it on her chest.
He was a man who had once trained soldiers in the highlands.
A man with one eye always on the sea.
And some believed—though few dared say it out loud—he had once refused a king’s coin to hunt someone down… because he’d already known who she was.
Mira kept her head down, the name blooming in her memory like a scar reopened.
They had crossed paths once, she was certain.
A brief flash in a moonlit port.
His voice had struck her like a drumbeat against her ribs.
He had offered her a blade to hold—not to wound, but to understand.
And now he was following her shadow, whether he knew it or not.
He hadn’t come for her, not exactly.
But she was part of a story he hadn’t finished yet.
And in the silence of her room that night, Mira whispered into the darkness:
“name retracted“… if it’s truly you… then find me before they do.”