The street widened suddenly, spilling us into a square that opened like a wound in the city's skin.
Stalls leaned at crooked angles, their wood blackened with age but not rot, as if time itself had been swallowed here. Fabric scraps still clung to poles, brittle as paper, their colors long bled away into gray. Empty baskets sat overturned on the stone.
For a moment, it looked like a marketplace waiting for its people to return.
But the people were here.
Their shadows clung to the walls. Burned black into stone, bent and stretched in frozen poses — a man leaning over a stall, a child reaching upward, a woman caught mid-step with her arms raised as though to shield her face.
The boy buried his face against my arm. His small body trembled.
The woman stood rigid, her jaw set hard. "They burned," she said, though her voice wasn't certain. "Or… something worse."
I stepped closer despite myself. The silhouettes weren't flat. Up close, they seemed sunken into the walls, as though the stone had opened its mouth and drunk them in. The edges of each figure rippled faintly, almost alive, like ash disturbed by unseen wind.
The hiss moved through the square. Not from the alleys, not from behind — from the walls themselves. Every blackened shadow exhaled, a faint whisper of air slipping from the stone.
The boy's muffled voice cracked against my sleeve. "They're still here."
I froze.
The woman swore under her breath and shoved me backward. "Don't listen to him."
But I couldn't unhear it. Beneath the hiss was something else, too soft for words, but not for meaning. Pleading. Pulling. The same rhythm I had felt in the ruins, beating faintly under my ribs.
I tore my gaze away, clutching the boy tighter, forcing my feet to move. The square pressed around us, shadows crowding, whispers rising until I thought my head might split open.
Only when we stepped out of the market did the sound fall away, swallowed whole by the silence of the streets.
I didn't look back.
Because if I did, I was afraid I'd see the shadows move.
But even as we walked, I heard it — faint, fragile, just behind us.
A breath.
Not from the city.
From one of the shadows that had followed.