❛ do you want me to leave? ❜
The air was dense with the stench of decay, a putrid blend of damp earth and something far worse—something sickly sweet and rotting beneath the ruins. Lyanna pulled her threadbare cloak tighter around her shoulders, though no fabric could shield her from the biting wind that carried the echoes of a world crushed beneath the Rumbling. A carcass of a city, its bones jutting from the earth in the form of broken walls, splintered beams, and twisted iron. Ash still clung to the remains like a shroud, rising in ghostly wisps as her boots disturbed the filth beneath her feet.
She stepped carefully, picking her way through what had once been a familiar street, though now it was unrecognizable—craters swallowing the cobblestones, remnants of homes reduced to heaps of stone and wood, doors leading to nowhere. Silence has been a heavy, smothering thing that pressed against her ears. The only sound was the occasional creak of debris settling, a mournful sigh from a city long past saving.
Lyanna’s breath trembled as she stepped over a skeletal hand, half-buried in the rubble, its fingers curled inward as if grasping for something—someone. She didn’t stop to look. She couldn’t. There were too many. Too many reminders of those who had been here. Those who hadn’t made it. Her stomach clenched, though she had nothing left inside her to bring up, hunger having hollowed her out days ago.
The wind howled through the ruins, rattling against the remnants of a tram car that had been overturned like a forgotten toy. A loose sign swung from a broken post, its rusted hinges groaning in protest. Liberio District—West Entrance. The words were barely legible beneath the soot and claw marks of destruction. Lyanna reached out, trailing her fingers over the letters. Her throat burned. This had been home.
A distant sound—something between a sob and a cough—snapped her out of her trance.
Lyanna stiffened. The voice was low, rough, but unmistakable.
She turned slowly, her breath shallow, her fingers still pressed against the rusted sign as if holding onto the last fragile thread of the past. Reiner stood a few paces away, his broad frame hunched slightly, as if the weight of the world had finally bent him. His face was gaunt, streaked with dirt and exhaustion, his golden hair dull beneath the smothered sky. His eyes—those weary, guilt-ridden eyes—met hers, hesitant, guarded.
"Do you want me to leave?"
His voice barely carried over the wind, but it struck her like a hammer.
For a moment, Lyanna said nothing. The silence stretched between them, heavy with everything left unspoken. She knew why he was here. Knew why he looked at her like that, like a man standing before the grave of someone he had buried with his own hands.
Because, in a way, he had. They both did.
The Rumbling had taken everything— homes, families—but it hadn’t started with that. It had started long before with the cracks they'd carved into their world, the brain washing, the betrayals, the zealotry, long before the titans ever came crashing through. And yet, here he was, standing in the ruins, breathing the same as she was. Both slive, while so many others weren’t.
Her fingers curled into a fist, nails digging into her palm.
Did she want him to leave?
She wanted to scream at him, to tell him that nothing he did now could undo the past. That she had spent nights waking up to nightmares of her mother’s face frozen in fear as the ground split beneath her. She wanted to tell him that every time she closed her eyes, she saw footprints bigger than houses, crushing everything in their path. That the silence of Liberio was louder than any war drum.
But when she opened her mouth, no words came.
Lyanna looked at him, really looked at him. He wasn’t the armored warrior who had once trampled cities under his heel. He wasn’t even the broken soldier who had long since lost his way. He was just a man now. A tired, grieving man who, for some reason, was still standing here. Still asking if she wanted him gone.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, her voice barely more than a whisper.
