"So tell me boy, what have you decided?"

  The lamps had burned lower, cheap liquor bottles nearly empty, when Sister Orivane finally called him aside. Away from the whispers, away from Marguerite's comforting smile, she had him stand by a worn down crate she was initially sitting on. It was nearing midday, and he had to answer her as he promised the people. In Solthar, it was the hour when duties weighed heaviest for it was not merely a simple ascent of the sun; midday demanded the most out of the people. And now it demanded a decision out of Sol.

  "You're not like the others," Orivane said in a tone stripped of warmth. "You carry yourself like someone who doesn't beg. But you're still here, which means you want something—not from me, that is."

  To that, Sol said nothing.

  He shivered, chilly morning air damp on his skin, thick with the boozy reek and sweat of countless struggles. He looked as if he had been vomited out of the underground Solthar, just as the rest of those refugees with hollow eyes did. He blended easily in—just another child lost amongst the rest of them.

  Orivane leaned closer. And closer, her mask was a map of scars and carved eyes glinting in the crawling shadows as if it were alive.

  "I can smuggle mothers and their children across the border. I can bribe guards, dress a farmer as a merchant, even slip past the eyes of priests. But someone like you?" Her face was still (beneath the veil of the mask). "Those who carry trouble like a banner? You cost more than a cloak and a forged pass. They won't let you so easily through the barrier," her words cut, but she didn't stop just yet. "So if I am doing this, I need your answer." Orivane concluded.

  The spoken demand and the decision pulled on harder than chains of fate, too heavy for a child to bear. Sol's mind spun recalling the faces around the walls belonging to the refugees. Marguerite's story still echoed in his ears like a broken record. And behind it all, loomed the Cathedral, like a shadow that never moved. When he lifted his gaze back to Orivane and answered, his voice was so unsure but so steady as if spoken by an adult with utmost certainty.

  "You... You'll take them as you would've," he said, nodding to the sleeping children. "But not me. I will stay here."

  Orivane's eyes narrowed under the mask, not surprised, nor disappointed. Silence hung between them, long enough for the fire's crackle to feel like thunder in the cramped space.

  "You were given a chance at survival," Orivane began. Her voice carried on to become louder, so that the warehouse could hear. "Passage, safety, and a place among us. Do you spit on that gift?"

  Sol drew a breath that felt like stone in his lungs. "N—No. I won't spit on it, but… it isn't mine to take!" He retorted, clenched his fists to stop his hands from shaking.

  Their voices were louder now, overheard by the residents of the warehouse. A murmur swept the crowd. Some faces turned with pity for him, and some with disappointment.

  "Then you will die here with the rest. And when the fire comes, remember you had the road beneath your feet and chose the pyre instead," Orivane said. Then, the lady turned around, raising her hand to command the people. "Move out."

  And so the wagons and carriages began to creak forward.

  "The Bishop would cut out my tongue and parade the silence as doctrine before my lineage marked untrustworthy. I would not die cleanly… Ofcouse, death is never clean in the presence of those damned disciples," her tone remained flat as she continued, "I have accepted peril before, but not stupidity. This—" She gestured at him one last time, "—is absolute foolishness. They will hunt you down and you will be unstitched by the fate that rules them."

  Sol remained silent as he had always done so, keeping his eyes cast down at the earth. Her words were not cruel, nor were they any kind, but they were certainly not lies. She stepped away, allowing space to form like a boundary carved rather than spoken into existence. Soon, the sound of hooves and wheels faded down the lone road until only humming of the grass remained behind. Without their noise, the landscape reverted to its older posture—stillness.

  Sol stood by the gateway of the warehouse, with the words he had said still beating into his chest alongside the wound.

  "You know what you've just done." Marguerite's voice came to him like a soft afternoon breeze—one that was felt when no stillness loomed.

  "Yes," Sol murmured, "I cannot run from this fate of mine."

  Perhaps, he spoke as if the decision belonged to him, yet the both knew that to be a lie, a deception of the truth. Fate was not an inheritance one accepted, but a plague that found its own host—more like a plague of the spirit: unseen in its arrival, yet unmistakable in its occupation. It lodged beneath the ribs. It traveled along the pulse. It pressed the symptoms through thought and dreams and slipped into the waking world, until one could no longer tell where the self ended and where the affliction began.

  Fate was cruel.

  Sol pulled the hood of his cloak across his head again, its threads stinking faintly of smoke and mildew past dawn's breeze that it had absorbed over time. Besides him, Marguerite pressed her shawl tighter, hers appeared much cleaner, and together they slipped into streets already restless with preparations for the coming festival.

  Though, it was midday, the clouds obscured the sunrise in the city, leaving the lamps to illuminate the streets. A child in a paper sun-mask stopped to stare at Sol as he passed, eyes fixed beneath the mask's design, until his parent yanked him away with a scold, but Sol simply looked around the bustling Solthar. A group of jugglers, fire-eaters, masked revelers rehearsed for Midsummer festival. In the half-light it was grotesque, each painted grin and rattling tambourine blended into something uncanny or maybe it was his lack of sleep catching up to him.

  What caught his attention right after was a beggar in a corner, hunched over in ragged clothing, and his wooden marionettes dance under a painted sun. One puppet pulled a black cloth over it, and the beggar cries out in a rasping voice, "Dark comes at midsummer, and every soul is swallowed!"

  The crowd that had gathered with faint smiles suddenly shrank back in horror. Mothers clutched their children, and men cursed under breath.

  "Blasphemy," some muttered, as the men in white cloaks did not spare a second to grab him from the corner and drag him. The beggar did not resist, his eyes were were too unfocused, and mind elsewhere, but they still found Sol's.

  The boy noticed with a gasp that the beggar's veins were running dark over the skin of his neck, crawling up to his face, till he found eyes focused on him. The man noticed Sol, he whispered across the crowd, "Don't wait for the eclipse, boy. When the sun goes dark, so does every soul in Solthar."

  He didn't think anyone else heard the beggar besides himself.

  The puppets lay abandoned, arms and legs twisted, the painted sun half-smeared in the dirt. Sol stood rooted, his own blank cloak heavy on his shoulders. The crowd began to disperse at the scene, muttering curses unpleasant to the ears, and Marguerite took her chance to help them blend within it, away from the Sun's Disciples' prying eyes.

  "They'll purge him before dawn," she muttered. "We could still leave. If we wait for the festival, we'll be stuck here forever." Marguerite touched his sleeve, gently guiding him away.

  They turned into a narrower street, pressing themselves into the crevice beneath the unused, concrete staircase. With his back to the stone as the young boy leaned back, the roughness coaxed itself into his skin. The faint noise of festival preparations rolled through the streets, lanterns at the mouth of the alley swaying like watchful eyes he had to stay vary of. But for a few seconds, Sol breathed a sigh of relief. He had made a decision he believed he would surely come to regret, it had been done and dusted.

  But something inside him had constantly hesitated to leave Solthar. As if, something was binding him here, and it was not certainly not just his buried brother, or the ones that played the roles of various stage actor's in the tale of Old Solthar.

  Marguerite knelt not far from him under the same shelter, tracing a circle with ash from the guttered out fire. She whispered under her breath, and the alley's lone gas-lamp flickered before it went out, leaving them to sit in the dark, almost like it was not midday, but midnight. That was how Solthar had always been, he paid no heed to that.

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  "What are you doing?" Sol asked as shadows wrapped around them like a warm blanket.

  "Smudging our names," she replied keeping her focus on the magic. "If the Cathedral sends their seers sniffing through the city, they'll pass over us. Just this once, I want to rest without them tailing us… It has been a long day…"

  And for a moment, Sol swore the world itself turned its gaze away from them at her request. Magic was fascinating.

  She leaned back, exhausted, and gave him a tired smile. "There. Not perfect, but enough..." Sol looked at her with only this fragile glass magic stubbornly laid like a shield across their shoulders, and yet, even in the quiet she'd carved for them, the ragged man's words remained.

  Don't wait for the eclipse...

  And as he closed his eyes, sleep came to him like a merciless thief, stealing him away from the world. It came with not rest but only that uneasy drift where the body slackened yet the mind remained taut, strung taut against the darkness of the corner they resided in.

  He dreamed of Old Solthar once more.

  He met Alistair once more, but this time he was a spectator in the bustling town with a looming festival. Old Solthar was a furnace of life with it's torches flaring high, bonfires lit in the squares, laughter spilling like wine down streets intervened with colorful ribbons. Sol felt the heat kiss his skin as if the sun itself had descended as dawn broke through the once dark sky—hues of deep orange and reds swept across the once navy firmament.

  Drums boomed until the very windows rattled and so did his heart in his rib cage. For a breath, the world roared with joy, and all felt real. Too real to be a dream.

  The children ran through the crowd, laughing to their heart's content, as the people welcomed the longest day of the year with open arms. The little ones weaved ribbons into circles in the center of the square. Reds, golds, greens, and various other shades intertwined until they formed a perfect floral circle, spinning slowly in their hands and against the wind. Sol could see their little faces flush with excitement and immense joy he could never again mirror.

  Across the towns square, Alistair stood at a distant, his gaze fixed not on the sunrise but on Sol, as if Sol were only another figure in some performance already written. His posture was relaxed, eyes reflecting the rising sun that the people of Old Solthar welcomed with hymns and praises, as he welcomed a new day alongside them.

  "You're back, Sol." His voice was a comforting warm contrast to the aggressive heat of the crowd and torches.

  "Alistair." Sol stepped closer to where the man stood, "This is..."

  "The Midsummer festival, yes." Alistair let the corners of his mouth curl with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "It's... fleeting. Perfect, but fleeting..."

  "It's a lovely festival," Sol murmured in awe.

  "It is, is it not?" He tilted his head with a chuckle at that, blond hair framing his face. "Though, I wish, we could have celebrated a hundred more."

  "What do you mean?" The music stuttered, the laughter faltered, and the light began to fade despite the sunrise, unnaturally so, as he uttered the words.

  "This—" He turned. "—is the last Midsummer of Old Solthar."

  The cheers died, and the sun, once brilliant, blackened at its core and let the shadows bled across rooftops, pouring into alleys like a liquid, starless night—like the abyss.

  Sol's chest seized at the sight. His breath caught as if the night—as if the abyss—were a hand closing around his lungs. The air tasted of copper and ash and no longer of freshly bakes goods from the lady's bakery. Whispers crept from the corners of the crowd, soft at first, then urgent and fearful, "It's coming... it's coming..."

  "W—What is going on!?"

  The darkness deepened as the eclipse manifested and something stirred beneath the earth. His skin prickled, hair standing on end. The warmth of the festival was gone, replaced by a subterranean chill that pressed against his spine.

  "This... this is the Midsummer Eclipse," Alistair said quietly, lifting his head to the blackened sun by the horizon. His hair gleamed like a sole pure gold in the corrupted light. "And it comes to consume. The abyss."

  The children's circle of ribbons began to unravel, strands flying loose into the wind, twisting and knotting around themselves until the joyful floral of their making became a tangle of living shadows. Sol tried to move, to run and demand an answer, or to rush from there, away from the nightmare he was forced to face. But the scarlet threads of fate tugged at him, invisible yet unrelenting, pulling at his skin, his bones as he tried to break free, resist with futile efforts.

  Sol watched the blonde man gaze up at the sky, once sunlit.

  "You feel it," Alistair spoke. "The city doesn't end because of it, Sol. It ends because of—"

  Sol gasped and woke up. His chest heaved, cloak damp at his throat. Stone branded cold into his back. He winced at the sudden, albeit dull light, realizing it was the afternoon and the city was bustling, but not the alley they had took refugee in, nor the darkened dream he had acted in.

  Marguerite crouched besides him with concern lacing her face and eyes fixed unblinking on his face.

  "You were thrashing," she murmured. "I thought—" Her voice faltered, and brows creased together as if trying to decipher some puzzle on Sol's face.

  Sol opened his mouth, yet no words came. Only the dream of a Midsummer festival he had never lived, yet remembered.

  A warning to him.

  His throat scraped dry. "I had a dream... The people were preparing for the festival—The Midsummer festival, but—" He heaved a breath, all heaving windpipes, trying to gather his thoughts.

  Marguerite's frown deepened, her lips pressed together in a subtle frown.

  "Is it because of the puppet show? Maybe, your thoughts were muddled by it."

  Sol shook his head stubbornly. "No... it wasn't just a dream. It felt too vivid. Like I was living a memory." His voice dropped lower. "And Alistair was there."

  "Alistair?"

  "The one I had fought in the arena. Wait, that sounds strange. It is strange, I know," he rambled. "I had lived it's—his memory before, met him in a dream before..."

  Marguerite stiffened and her hand faltered where it hovered near his arm. "Alistair?" She repeated carefully, trying to piece together what it was about. Then, she uttered the words he did not like. "The dead do not walk in dreams without reason…"

  Sol pressed a palm to his chest, still trembling faintly from the phantom pain that seemed to yank at his ribs, at the very wound. "He said... the festival was the last of Old Solthar. Then the eclipse occurred, and I could feel it as if it was all real. Like it was pulling me apart alongside the dream." The memory.

  Marguerite studied him with her brows drawn in thought, but her voice stayed measured as she spoke. "Dreams can be twisted things, Sol. The mind is clever at frightening itself, but worry not. Whatever it is, we shall figure it out together. You are lucky, you have a guide to lead you, not everyone can be as lucky as you are." The witch tried to cheer him up, with a small chuckle.

  For a moment, silence pressed heavy between them, broken only by the muffled clamor of afternoon crowds spilling through the streets beyond their hiding place.

  "I know, but… I don't know what it means, but I think... I think the festival isn't just a celebration. It's the stage for whatever is coming," Sol began. His hands curled into fists. He swallowed hard, the strangeness of the dream echoing through him. "Sister Orivane mentioned the bishop before, the disciples. Something is so… so dang restricting here, I can't leave without figuring out what is bothering me, or why I have been seeing memories of someone else."

  "Maybe, it was not a memory. Maybe, it was a prophecy," Marguerite added.

  "I am going crazy, regardless of whatever it is."

  Sol lowered himself beside the old, dead fire-pit, something reduced to nothing but the ash. He pressed his palm to the dirt, feeling the grains of it shift under his fingers. Absence of the souls had weight. It pulled at the air, it made the silence in his mind ring.

  He grabbed a stray wooden stick, dragged a line through the ash. Then another line crossed it. He drew again. Two circles, this time. One larger than the other, overlapping at the edges like eclipses caught mid-transition. He brushed the stick across the smaller one, smearing it, as if erasing a symbol that refused to be erased.

  Marguerite watched him from the side, wordlessly, her arms folded, and face unreadable, but curious to see what the boy had going on in his mind. Sol ignored her for the moment. He kept shaping those circles—sun-shapes, broken-shapes, remnants of the sigils he'd seen carved into the underground walls. Shapes he did not consciously remember, but his eyes traced with familiarity. He pressed into the center of the larger circle until it blurred into a dark pit.

  "The eclipse..." She whispered. "Those marks," then continued, "are from the underground. But, why do you draw this?"

  He dragged the stick again, carving a thin channel from the smaller circle into the larger one.

  "They were copied all across it, that I can recall. As if someone had tried over and over... to comprehend something they could not grasp first time. I think they were to study something," he rambled to himself more, "Or yeah, recreate it—the eclipse certainly."

  He pressed the stick down until it snapped.

  "You asked why," he mumbled, brushing the broken fragment aside. "Why I draw this."

  His fingertip took over where the stick failed, smearing ash in deliberate strokes.

  "The dream wasn't showing me the festival. It was warning me of something, you did call it... a prophecy."

  He leaned back on his heels.

  Marguerite's gaze fixed on the ruined circles, the kind that comes from fitting together fragments of a story she had suspected but hoped not to see confirmed. Then she exhaled once, the way someone does when the shape of dread finally clarifies over them.

  "The eclipse," she confirmed, repeating the words once more.

  Sol wiped his hands on his cloak, leaving black streaks across the fabric.

  "No," he rejected the idea. "Not just the eclipse. Whatever happened to Old Solthar was not simply an eclipse." He recalled Alistair's words: Old Solthar's end was something else, not simply the eclipse.

  Marguerite remained silent.

  "So tell me, guide, what do you know that I have missed so far?"

  "I know as much as you do, Sol. That the cathedral holds something—" She answered. "And that something is to trigger a midsummer eclipse." They continue unanimously. She only muttered, "Then, everything begins now."