The sickening, heavy crunch of the wall sentry’s body colliding with the grain cart vibrated straight through the damp timber planks beneath Azaliyah’s boots. It was an unmistakable, absolute sound of death—the wet, structural collapse of bone and muscle under a violent, unnatural force. For a single, agonizing heartbeat, the entire lower courtyard seemed to freeze, paralyzed by the sheer proximity of the brutality. The splintered fragments of the thick oak cart rained down over the frozen mud like a handful of gravel thrown into a quiet pond, and then, as if a dam had violently burst, the rising tide of human panic rushed back into the thoroughfare in deafening layers.
Azaliyah didn’t waste a single fraction of a breath. She vaulted cleanly over the shattered, smoking wreckage of the gra
