The presence of the two had little effect on the world around them. They were shadows—seen and ignored. There, but not felt. Vulnerably immortal. Much like the spirit of the only friend either of them had left.

  “He’s dead, Anni.”

  The words weren’t true. Not yet. They lingered in the air, offering her one last chance to right what had gone wrong.

  “Hao.” She whispered her brother’s name. “We can still do this. We can make it there and back in time.”

  “Why though?” His voice cracked with something raw and dangerous. “It won’t change anything.”

  “It will for him.”

  That stopped him. She saw the tear he fought to keep hidden as he looked at her again, amber eyes burning with an anger no one his age should have carried.

  “But they killed him.”

  It was the language of youth, empty blame grasping for a target. It hadn’t been malice that sickened Dontae, but ignorance. The city had simply grown too crowded for an animal like him to survive. In truth, there was little space left for them either.

  “Come,” she urged softly. “Let’s take him home.”

  Hao bent and lifted the creature into his arms. Dontae’s body sagged like wet cloth, and Anni felt her bravery shrink to a trembling thread beneath her ribs. It tightened there, fragile and fraying, and she wondered how long it might hold. If it felt this suffocating for her, she couldn’t bear to imagine what it was doing to Hao.

  Her brother clutched the aging offle to his chest and followed her from the alley into the capital’s streets. His icy blue mane caught the wind, announcing his presence more loudly than any banner ever could.

  The crowds parted as they approached. Not out of respect, but in practiced denial. Making space only to pretend he was not there at all. It hurt Anni to witness, though it did make their passage easier.

  A compromise in the race against time.

  She tucked her arm in behind his waist and together, they kept their heads low, snouts tucked toward their chests, weaving through motion and noise toward the canals. Toward Dontae’s place. His real home. The shallow pool tucked between stone outcroppings, where the drains of the tri boulevards ran cleanest.

If only he had stayed there when the strangers flooded the city. He might have survived. He might have thrived.

  They were two blocks from the waterways, crossing the Boulevard of Hariem, when the illusion of their obscurity lost its power.

  A juc, tall, broad, and moving with the confidence of someone untouched by consequence, shouldered straight into Hao.

  In form, he was little different from them: bipedal, furred, snouted, ears pricking like spears against the dusty glow of the city. But Mars did not make all juc equal, and there, all comparisons ran dry.

  His coat bore none of the blue of their lineage. No Purpabene hue marked him. He was better than them. Jet-black fur was streaked with tendrils of blood-red striping, and he was not alone. A small cluster flanked him, each wearing the unmistakable colours of privilege.

  “It touched you,” one of them sniffed, disgust coiling through his voice.

  “That it did.” The leader’s reply was colder than the stone beneath their feet. “A pity.”

  He moved too fast for Anni to react. His foot striking Hao across the back of the legs, sending her brother sprawling, but not before Hao’s momentum carried him into the knee of the black-and-red juc.

  Anni’s breath fractured. Hao swore. Dontae slipped from his grasp and hit the pairch-stone street with a sickening thud.

  The same juc struck the offle. Hard.

  Anni dropped beside her brother, terror clawing at her throat, convinced the blow had killed Dontae outright. She wrapped Hao against her, pulling him tight to her chest, and cried into his ear, “Don’t! Please!”

  It was a wild, useless fear; to know what would happen and know she could not stop it. He was younger than her by more than a year, but stronger by five. Her weight meant nothing against him.

  He shoved her aside, his growl feral and unrestrained. A lone orphan pressed against the solidarity of the rich and no more than a joke to them.

  Hao rose and faced them.

  “Is this how you want to die?” the aggressor asked, the glint in the juc’s eye almost hopeful.

  Hao shook his mane. “If I was going to die to shit like you, I’d have been gone long before now.”

  Anni watched the group tighten their circle, tails coiling, bodies poised.

  “Hao.” She knew her pleading wouldn’t reach him.

  She turned instead to their numbers. “Stay away from him!” Her voice cracked across the boulevard like a whip. She stepped between Hao and the encroaching bodies. “He’s not yours to hurt!”

  A hand caught her. Not from the nobles, but from her own brother.

  “Do not help me, Anni!”

  The shock of his strike sent her to the ground just as fists collided above her.

  The fight blurred instantly. The crack of blows, snarls of triumph, the dull gasp of pain.

  Then something cut through it.

  A scraping sound. The rattle of claws. A hiss sharp enough to split the din.

  The next howl didn’t come from Hao.

  Neither did the shouts that followed. Sharper now, panicked, retreating up the boulevard as fear overtook bravado.

  Anni twisted, breathless.

  Hao was on one knee, panting. Before him stood Dontae.

  The offle trembled, barely upright, yet defiant. Tail arched, scales flared in one last instinctive warning.

  Around them, the street pretended nothing had happened. Eyes slid away. Bodies passed. Hao became a shadow again. Invisible once more beneath the weight of prejudice.

  “I’m sorry, Anni.” Hao’s voice shook. She couldn’t tell if it was regret for striking her, or shame for surviving. “I guess our friend still had a little fight left in him after all.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Dontae’s green luminescence had faded to a weak flicker. His head sagged. His breaths came shallow and ragged. Death was coming to their friend shortly.

  “Come,” Anni whispered, swallowing the ache in her throat. “Let’s get him home.”

  Dontae’s funeral was small, quiet, and painfully fleeting. Just two siblings murmuring parting words to the dimming glow in their friend’s eyes. A single cry of farewell swallowed by the gentle lapping of canal water against the stone buttress of their hidden corner of the docks.

  And yet, it had meant something.

  More than could be said for the next funeral they were forced to attend.

  From offle to emperor, death itself did not discriminate. Only juc did that. And the whimsical song drifting beneath the arched bridgeways announced it was time to proceed to his.

  Instrumental tamuskas wailed their declaration of mourning, deep baritones crying into the winds of Indil to carry solemnity across the Ghittanan Empire. Even the sunset was seeming to bow. Its fiery light burning over milky green waves in sharp relief. Mars itself appearing to worship the fallen.

  Perhaps that was why the juc of the streets did not.

  The march of the rolling pyre had summoned all that the imperial capital could offer in devotion to a ruler never loved in life. Two million strong, the numbers were said to be. Two million faces alight with wonder. Their joy pulsed against the oppressive symphony of mourning, and it was that joy alone that allowed two Purpabene to slip through unnoticed.

  For ninety‑two days the procession had advanced; for another ninety‑two it could continue still, should all contenders fail to arrive. The pairch-stone streets cracked beneath the weight of the millions drawn to the tamuskan cry at every rising of the sun.

  The air stank of sweat and sour ale, of torvae manure shovelled carelessly into gutters. More than two thousand beasts had been hauled from distant ranches to bear the hundred Imperial Champions, their hides caked in dust and filth, their passing leaving the streets fouler still.

  Brother and sister took their obligated places in the parade, wedged tight between old Lyma Hudgederk and his enormous wife, Jyllie Hudgederk, the gravedigger. Jyllie, whose belly behaved like a rampaging creature of its own, and seemed to relish expanding into their narrow space across every one of those long ninety‑two days.

  “I swear the lump of lard’s doing it on purpose!” Hao hissed, shoulders aching from yet another shove of her mass. “She knows we’re here!”

  He cupped his hands around his mouth in exaggerated outrage, though it made no difference. Jyllie pressed on regardless, guzzling from her clay jug without the slightest hint of remorse.

  Rather than fight it, Anni smoothed her ruffled mane and lifted her snout. Juc ignorance was nothing new. Something she had long since learned to endure. Hao, however, had never understood the value of submission.

  He looked hollowed out. Eyes sunken. Tail wound tight. His heart was still back at the canals with Dontae.

  “I hate them,” he spat, ignoring the sharp warning flick of Anni’s eyes. “I hate being here. We should’ve stayed with Dontae.”

  It was the same argument again. Often, Anni would have reminded Hao that it was they, not the mighty and tall, they who descended from the line of the Aik kings of the Frosty Isles. That their icy blue fur set them apart from the mainland barbarians, and their shorter, leaner bodies were the very reason their ancestors survived to claim the isles while the Ghittanan navies conquered the wider Northern Oceans.

  But there was enough history being made in this city that he did not need her lessons.

  “We are Purpabene,” she said simply. “We stand where all others fall.”

  Perhaps she would have said more, had she known what thoughts twisted behind Hao’s eyes. But all she saw was the blank stare of a boy hiding too much behind too little, and there was no warning he would heed. No wisdom he would take.

  Then the Champions came into view.

  They arrived with the thunderous clop of torvae hooves. Towering beasts, each three times the siblings’ height, antlers branching like carved bone crowns against the hazed sky. Only the long, slender horn jutting from each torvet’s lower jaw dipped low enough to meet Anni at eye level. Domesticated or not, the creatures radiated something ancient and untamed.

  Their riders did more still.

  The Champions of Starfalls.

  Anni whispered silent thanks to the moon gods as her heart fluttered painfully in her chest. They were glorious. Beautiful, even the ugliest among them, for ugliness could not stain the legitimacy of legend. Dozens were said to be gathered now, here in her city.

  Already she had glimpsed Lagoes the Blind and the Benevolent Rai, among the first to arrive and the first to escort the fallen Emperor’s pyre. Then had come the Gaunt, his midnight-blue mane trailing as far as his feet, just as the texts promised. Timmio of Ratacast Mountain. Fiore. Foolwaegon. The Gyhst of Pei. Names she had read in reverent scripts, now borne flesh‑and‑fur astride torvae flowing through the sea of bodies.

  And still more Champions were said to arrive with every passing day.

  But there was one she waited for above all the others.

  “There he is,” she whispered when the most radiant Champion emerged through the haze.

  Hao guffawed, and a flick of his tail caught her clear across the back of her shoulders. “Him? That’s who you’ve been dying to lay your googly eyes on all this time? Craw?”

  To this, even the Hudgederks found the sudden ears to laugh. With her ears pricked, Anni’s tail flicked her brother back not quite so unfriendly as she beheld the juc at hand. Craw was most certainly not who took her breath away. The aging Champion more hunched over his torvet than rode it. Those small, cruel eyes doubtless to have ever embraced such a fair notion as love.

  No, the juc of all juc in Anni’s eye was that of the Champion at Craw’s side;

Kyra. The one they called the Sundancer. A magnificent beast was he, golden fur speckled in rays of violet. Mane tied back into five distinct braids that danced over his shoulders and back as he rode. He was tall, long, and lean, every bit the Champion born to serve the justice of the land.

  “He’s also the biggest shit of them all!” Hao Purpabene drove into Anni’s thoughts.

  If eyes could pop from one’s head, it was at this moment she was sure hers would.

  “Hao!” His denouncement enough to scatter her every mindset. “You can’t…”

  “Well, it’s true.” With his fingers slung through the knots of fur at his waist, her little brother posed as ignorant of his own mouth as the sand to a crashing wave. “They’re all pricks.”

  “Hao, stop it! If you are heard, they’ll make you face your choices!”

  “Exactly!” Her brother slammed his tail to the cracked pairch‑stones. “And don’t that just show you what kind of arseholes these guys are?”

  “Please, take it back,” Anni whispered urgently. She saw the gravedigger’s glare sharpen, hungry for an excuse to remove them permanently.

  Hao offered them that exact opportunity.

  “Fuck them!” he roared, and as Jyllie’s gut slapped into him one more time, her brother turned and faced her. “And fuck you too!” He slapped the clay jug from her pudgy fingers and laughed as it smashed against the stone.

  His commotion caught the eye of the Champions.  A ripple passed through the parade line—subtle at first, then unmistakable as one of the towering riders slowed his torvet to a halt. The massive creature snorted, its breath steaming in the cooling dusk, hooves scraping against broken pairch‑stone as it turned.

  The crowd parted with a hush of anticipation.

  The Champion was approaching.

Anni felt every hair along her spine rise. Hao, oblivious or uncaring, barked another laugh.

  Jyllie Hudgederk noticed before anyone else. Triumph flared in her bloated eyes. She had waited ninety‑two days for this chance.

  “There now,” she grinned, voice wet and gloating. “Time someone taught you Purpabene pups your place.”

  Her thick meaty hand shot out.

  Hao barely had time to react before Jyllie’s enormous arm wrapped around him. Her grip crushed him against the warm, reeking bulk of her gut. He kicked, clawed, twisted, but her hold was iron.

  “Let go of him!” Anni shouted, shoving herself between bodies, but Lyma blocked her path with a delighted hiss, his bony fingers gripping her shoulder hard enough to bruise.

  The Champion dismounted.

  Or perhaps “descended” was the better word. He stepped from the torvet with the kind of slow, inevitable grace that only those bred to authority possessed. His slick coat whispered with the movement. His eyes, pure molten, fixed on the commotion with predatory interest.

 “Hao,” Anni whispered, throat tightening. “Stop struggling. Please.”

  But he didn’t hear her.

  Couldn’t.

  Jyllie squeezed him tighter, lifting him partly off the ground, shaking him like a misbehaving pup. “Go on,” she snarled into his ear. “Say somethin’ now.”

  Hao choked. The laughter died. Panic clawed its way into his eyes.

  And then his tail brushed something sharp.

  A shard of her shattered clay jug. One jagged piece lying near his foot. In the scramble, his tail curled around it. 

  He snatched it up without thinking.

  “Let. Me. Go!”

  The shard plunged.

  A dull, awful sound followed. The wet thud of clay meeting flesh.

  Jyllie screamed.

  Her grip collapsed all at once, hands flying to her side where blood burst hot between her fingers. The crowd recoiled in a wave of gasps and curses. Lyma’s snarl broke into a strangled cry. The torvae stamped nervously, their antlers clacking against one another.

  Hao stared at the shard in his hand.

  It dripped red.

  His ears flattened. His tail quivered. Horror flooded his features, drowning out the bravado.

  “Oh… no.” His voice was small. Lost. “Anni… I...”

  The Champion stepped forward.

  Only a pace. But that was enough.

  Hao bolted.

  He stumbled backward, dropped the clay shard, and broke away in the only path available to him. Right into the midst of the Champion horde.

  “Hao!” Anni’s cry cracked into the air as he vanished into the heaving mass of fur and armour and torchlight. It echoed down the boulevard as Hao Purpabene disappeared, and Anni understood with a sickening certainty: she was about to be orphaned again, and this time, the Martian city of Indil would swallow her whole.

She saw the fear in his eyes all through the nights that followed.   It chased her into sleep when sleep managed to come and haunted her when it did not. On the nights she lay awake. As most nights became. She stared out the small, barred window of the Blackring djarrar. There was little to see, only the faceless hollows of the other crumbling hovels along her miserable street, lit by the occasional flicker of a gutter torch. There were the cries of newborn pups bawling out there for a teat to ravage and raucous songs of older, more intoxicated juc seeking the same.

Out there in those bog‑ridden and flea‑infested alleys, there was nothing that could come close to the sight of her Hao. Not anymore, and with each and every passing night that followed the blankness of yet another day, there appeared fewer and fewer reasons to suspect there ever would.

  He had vanished into that ocean of torvae and Champions as though swallowed whole by Indil itself. Not a footprint left. Not a whisper. Not even a rumour. And the joy that disappearance brought the Hudgederks was nothing short of vile.

  “What’s one less Purpabene?” Lyma Hudgederk had rasped in her ear as he gripped her tail tight on the third day following her return, yanking her so violently that she had screamed. “Perhaps I shall be seeing the scrawny mutt soon.” The gravedigger had then dug with a cruel, knowing grin, her own superficial gut injury mocking under its light bandage.

  Each day she appeared as she was ought to, though, at the throngs of parade, and each night she crawled back to the hopeless abandon of the Blackring Orphanage behind the infamous Black Wall of Indil, his fear still echoing on. At least in here the others left her alone. No one wanted to come near Anni’s room. She was as guilty as her brother, they said, and soon the hunters would come for her also.

  “Anni,” Ortoman, the lord keeper, had said on the tenth or twentieth night since that day, “your files are clear. You are nearly of age to be gone of here. You would do well to find some employment by then. If you’re lucky, there may be a juc out there who’ll pay a high price for something as exotic and queer as you.” They were the kindest words he had ever spoken.

  Her time behind the Black Wall was ending. Time everywhere was ending.

  How long had it been? Since the Emperor’s slaying it was hard to tell the passage of time. The only measure of days was the parade—dawn to dusk, the tamuskas blaring, the torvae stomping, the crowds heaving. All the rest of life seemed to be placed in a perpetual state of paralysis.

  Though that too appeared to be drawing to a close, at the morning’s reveille on the one‑hundred‑and‑eleventh day there came the announcement that the final Champion had made his way from Starfalls and was due to come into march by the final tamuskan call of the day.

  It would then only be a matter of time until the moon gods chose their new Emperor from among their Champions, and life would either continue on for Indil, regardless of one young absentee Purpabene, or they would be coming for her too.