One didn’t just escape from Iskawan. Rakesh knew that. He’d always known that. Because it wasn’t just that the permeating darkness of The Nothingness extinguished all light in Iskawan – and all the places around it – except for a few glowing fairy-fire globes.

Life in the prison-city forgotten by the gods was one of an empty, cyclical existence. It drove the strongest of men mad in months. Which was precisely why Rakesh sat on the parapet of the outer wall, staring out at the dark lands of The Nothingness from which there was no escape. Unknown dangers and eternal darkness lingered north, east, and west of Iskawan. To go south was too risky by half. Still . . . something about the strange, inky blot of The Nothingness on the horizon drew his thoughts. He longed to be there – and hated himself for desiring it, at the same time. One day, he promised himself. I will go. Whether I must climb down the east or west sides, or fight the darkness of the north, I will go.

But at least in thinking about it, he could remember his enemy. His life before Iskawan.

His reason for escaping Iskawan.

Rakesh let one leg dangle down the other side of the wall, kicking above the seemingly endless void as he studied the dark land. Just like the rest of Iskawan, The Nothingness rested under solemn, heady darkness. Darkness that hid everything. Faults. Secrets. Desires.

Life.

Rakesh looked down at the back of his hands, visible only because of the presence of a fairy-fire globe over his shoulder. White skin so pale it appeared transparent covered his thin bones. Bluish veins of blood ran through his skin, winding away like a lost river. He let out a long breath and peered over the side of the high stone wall.

Nothing. He could see nothing below. Nothing but an unknown length of darkness, and a certain death if he were to fall. Somewhere, under his feet, waited the sprawling southern doors.

And what if he could see the bottom? Would his plan change?

Even when he did get to the bottom, that only meant he was one step closer to freedom, not that he was free.

He wouldn’t yet be done: He still had to get to the Empire, an unlikely feat that required traveling through the black-rock bridge known as the Conduit that connected Iskawan with the inner lands. Past that waited those charged with protecting the bridge from the defilement of the dark lands and the prisoners in Iskawan: the Mudra Clan. Even if he could successful navigate their territory, he’d have to reach somewhere where the residents wouldn’t immediately identify him as an escaped Iskawan prisoner.

His sunless skin, knobby bones, and sensitivity to the light would give him away to the Mudra.

Rakesh pushed the thought aside.

Next to him rested a rope of old, cast-off garments knotted together. He’d tied the makeshift rope to a jagged piece of metal sticking out of the old wall. Lichen grew on the stones here, giving off a strange, greenish hue that glowed under the fairy-fires. As with all fabric in Iskawan, the fabric rope was damp.

With no sun, the cold lands were always damp. Rakesh couldn’t remember what it felt like to be dry or warm. The mist crept into everything. Sometimes, even his mind.

Rakesh glanced over his shoulder to Iskawan and the sharp, dark spires decorated with erratic wind vanes. No one was watching him. Of course they weren’t. Vakums – those poor souls who toyed with magic and ended up losing their minds, locked into their own heads like prisoners –wandered blankly through the walled city. The rest of the undesirable people sent here by the Empire worked out the least miserable existence they could manage until the unnerving sameness of life in the walled darkness drove them half-mad. They either jumped off the wall to kill themselves or found a sharp stone to do the job.

Rakesh fingered a locket dangling over his chest, then clenched it in his fist. He wouldn’t go mad. He had something that no one else did – hope.

With a grunt, Rakesh rolled onto his belly, gripped the rope, and disappeared over the side of the wall. Knots tied every now and then in the rope then helped him control his descent down, but his hands still ached with the effort of holding onto the slippery fabric.

He continued down, controlling his breathing while filling his lungs with the vile air. Sweat broke out on his arms, his back. He felt ahead with his feet, keeping the fabric between his toes. Slowly he moved, lowering one hand at a time.

Until his makeshift rope ran out.

Rakesh wrapped his right arm around the rope, then tentatively reached out to the wall with his left. Unlike other areas where old ladders and crumbled stone gave him footholds, this section of the wall offered only smooth, flat stones. Water trickled down its front. The top of the wall above him had disappeared into the fog, and Rakesh hung in a vacuum of darkness.

Nothing above, nothing below.

He swung and stretched with his feet, grunting, but felt nothing beneath him. With a curse under his breath, he gripped the rope with both hands and slowly started to ascend.

The rope still wasn’t long enough.

Pull after pull, Rakesh hauled himself higher and higher. His arms began to tremble. The bones and muscles in his shoulders protested. Slowly, the fog receded. Hints of light came into sight. Sweat poured down his neck and back until, finally, he reached the top again. He pulled himself onto the jagged wall, and gave off a final exhale.

Three fairy-fires clustered over him. He shooed them away.

Now was not the time to be seen.

Rakesh hauled the rope back up, tucked it into a hidden crevice, and covered it with spare rocks.

He required more time before he could find his freedom.

He’d have to trade for more fabric. Patrol the streets for any loose cloth that could be sewed into another rope. Attempt to make or find something he could trade for something better, which, in a city like Iskawan, was only as easy as your own cleverness. It was a desperate hunt, to try something like this. All this fabric could make him a rich man if he went into bartering like some of the others. But he wouldn’t. This was a frantic search to win his freedom.

It was better than waiting for death.

The idea to make a rope had come to him while patching a pair of old pants back together ages ago - perhaps years. Time held no real meaning here. While such efforts to create a sturdy and long enough fabric rope required time, it wasn’t as risky as when he tried to sneak under the bottom of a convoy wagon and had nearly been crushed on the rocky, uneven road. Once they caught him, they escorted him back.

It had taken an untold amount of time to recover from the beating and conceive his next plan.

Without the fairy-fires nearby, Rakesh had managed to hide his secret under the cover of darkness and move away from the spot along the top of the wall.

Time had worked her ugly, ravaging power over this wall. Uneven stones jutted up, sticking high in the air. The wall rambled up and down, occasionally giving way to sharp points.

Rakesh knew its unevenness by heart now. He roamed the parapet every day, climbing abysmal ladders, scaling chinks in the wall. Or, at least, once in the cycle of what he imagined was a day.

In Iskawan, the passage of time became an unknown. Unimportant. Why did it matter what hour it was when no hour changed anything?

The darkness prevailed. The inhabitants ate according to hunger and slept according to fatigue.

Rakesh hopped over and around stones, moving silently. He pushed himself. Although weary, he pushed harder, faster. Strength would be his only option when he fled. Unlike the rest of the captives of Iskawan, he hadn’t succumbed to the darkness yet.

Iskawan had not infiltrated his heart. The locket bouncing underneath his ratty, sweat-soaked shirt ensured that.

Nor would a lack of hope ever conquer him.

Twenty minutes later found him near a cluster of artificial light orbs made in Aviskara, the city of knowledge from the northern continent of Shamal. He crouched down and peered over the wall’s edge. In the distance, lights from the Mudra Clan flickered. Right below him, the thick, wooden doors below him were shut.

Shut. The Southern Doors were always shut.

Below him in the prison-city the Vakums wandered slowly, shuffling, their blank eyes staring out of expressionless faces. Some of them just sat, staring into the void in the distance with no signs of life on their strangely slack faces. More Aviskaran orbs congregated down the main facade of Iskawan’s biggest street. Their light allowed Rakesh to just discern the strangely decadent, once lavish buildings there that by now had fallen into disrepair.

People called out, haggling for trades. Old carts and wagons creaked as they were moved around in the darkness, in and out of the dark alleys. Imperial soldiers crowded the Southern Doors. They stared straight ahead as if they couldn’t bear to look back and acknowledge all the Vakums and the forgotten people behind them.

Rakesh looked back to the lights of the Mudra Clan in the distance, then down to the doors. His heart sank.

No matter how long he’d tried, the inevitable seemed so obvious: He could not escape Iskawan through the Southern Doors. The strange, flickering yellowing light of candles in the city came from some of the wealthiest of Iskawan’s members. They were the ones who lived above the main road in those buildings that hadn’t fallen prey to mold and decay in the pervasive darkness.

“The Yojin,” he heard a woman say. “They have not been here for many sleep cycles. Do you think they’ll return soon?”

Rakesh’s heart pounded painfully in his chest. The Yojin. The three, strange imperial agents who patrolled Iskawan, watching the inhabitants and checking the security.

“Why do you count the cycles?” came an answering bark. “There is no point. The Yojin will come when the Yojin come. Life is nothing.”

Rakesh lowered himself behind a boulder that had cracked in two. A cold wind whistled down his spine, bringing goosebumps to his skin.

The female’s voice snarled in response, “Life is something! You should become a scrounger. People drop things all the time. Then you trade them. It’s how it’s done!”

Rakesh glanced down the wall. More fairy-fires remained closer to the main part of the city, but some had wandered close.

Off in the distance, the shadows cast by the Aviskaran orbs were shifting.

Iskawan had many secrets, many shadows. Only the fairy-fires could illuminate them.

Rakesh straightened, slipping along the Iskawan perimeter again, moving quickly. When he spied another cluster of fairy-fires off a little ways off, he frowned. They rarely went to that area of the city.

It only required a few minutes for him to pick his way along the wall and get close to the cluster. Rakesh stopped right above the fairy-fires, peering down through a gap in the wall. He immediately recognized the bald head of The Hangman.

Rakesh shuddered, not daring to leave or move.

A small man crouched next to The Hangman. Behind him, an empty wagon. Their conversation meandered its way up the rocks.

“Here,” The Hangman said. “As promised.”

A small leather pouch passed between them. The small man took it in his knobby hands and hefted it up and down. “Do I need to test it for potency?” His voice sounded like nails on the dry stones.

“Don’t insult me,” The Hangman growled.

The little man reached into his baggy coat and handed The Hangman a small wooden box. “Safe travels.”

The Hangman laughed when the man growled at him and turned away to grab at the dilapidated wagon at his side, the pouch disappearing into his ample tunic.

Rakesh straightened to his knees as The Hangman walked off, turning down an ill-lit street.

The Hangman’s many bracelets jangled on his wrists as he called out a bawdy song. Most inhabitants didn’t want to confront him, and they scattered as soon as they heard his off-tune songs.

As soon as The Hangman disappeared from view, Rakesh worked his way down the inside of the crumbling wall, taking him back into Iskawan. A rock slid out from beneath his feet, tumbling ahead of him. He stopped, held his breath, and when The Hangman’s singing disappeared, kept going.

The small man that had given The Hangman the box had turned a corner, taking all but two of the fairy-fires with him. Just enough light fell through the air to let Rakesh maneuver down the crags in the wall.

When he was hovering just a few feet above the earth, his hand slipped. He plummeted down, landed on his feet and straightened, still weary from his earlier climb.

Rakesh stole down the street on which The Hangman walked, quickly catching up with the massive man’s easy – bored – gait. No one hurried in Iskawan; there was no reason to.

A few fairy-fires followed The Hangman, zipping around in strange movements and sending eerie highlights along The Hangman’s body.

The Hangman turned right on a busy street, nonchalantly finding and knocking the heads of two Vakums together. They gave no resistance, simply falling into the other and collapsing. Rakesh leaped over them just in time to see The Hangman turn a corner and disappear inside a tall, looming structure. The outside facade had a sloping roof that angled high, decorated with the twisted faces of dead spirits. Moisture dripped down its front.

Rakesh stopped on the other side of the street, hiding behind a barrel. There were no glowing orbs to light the way here, just a few fairy-fires. The Hangman pulled the box out of his pants pocket before he stepped inside and slammed the door shut behind him. Rakesh frowned.

What was in that box?

Everyone in Iskawan had secrets – and definitely the boss of the underworld. Yet The Hangman kept enough order in this gods-forsaken place that no one questioned his authority. Ever.

Rakesh shrank back when something caught his gaze. Three fairy-fires buzzed back and forth, creating strange, pulsing shadows. Some of Iskawan’s residents began to scuttle away from and off the streets.

A woman passed in front of Rakesh, shrieking under her breath as she passed.

Iskawan harbored nervous people all the time, but something felt . . . wrong.

A blur of movement toward the perimeter wall caught his eye. Rakesh looked up to see three bodies above the wall backlit by fairy-fires as they zipped away from Iskawan.

His throat tightened.

The Yojin had arrived.

The Yojin wore black tunics with sashes around the waist and dark pants underneath. One was standing, hands on his hips. When the man turned sideways, Rakesh spied a strange wooden mask covering his face. Rakesh didn’t need to be standing close to him to know that it had a grotesque expression, with twisted features as if curled in pain.

The second one disappeared, no doubt climbing down the wall just as Rakesh had done. The last dashed off, jogging along the wall as if it were an easy, smooth surface.

Within moments, the Yojin climbing down the wall dropped onto the ground below. He disappeared off in the darkness as the hair on the back of Rakesh’s neck stood up.

Could it be possible that the timing was a coincidence?

Rakesh stayed still, hardly daring to breathe from behind the barrel. All the fairy-fires and their strange halos of light had fled, leaving him concealed in the murky darkness.

The remaining Yojin strolled up, glanced at The Hangman’s shelter. Another Yojin joined him. They spoke in mere whispers before walking around the building.

Rakesh’s pounding heart banged against his chest, thudding back and forth between his ribs and spine. He waited, searching with his ears in the way that only an Iskawan resident can do, until he heard no more.

With a dash, he set off down the street, running. There were no Vakums on the stone roads, as if even they could sense the dark power of the Yojin.

Rakesh slowed in front of his shelter, panting. He bent over, sucking in long breaths. The dilapidated shelter that he shared with his two friends, Jiro and Gekko, welcomed him with flashing fairy-fires under the door. He sighed, grateful they were home, and pressed through the thin, moldering door.

The inside of the shelter was stark and plain, with three makeshift chairs, two bedrolls on the ground, and one more hung up – his – away from the strange dust that collected everywhere. Gekko and Jiro called out when he stepped inside, hands held high.

“Rakesh! You have returned.”

“We gave you up for lost.”

“Thought you’d fallen in love with a Vakum and were waiting for her to kiss you.”

They chortled, elbowing each other in the ribs. Rakesh half-smiled before he dropped onto the chair in front of them.

Like him, the skin on their faces was white, almost translucent. They had the strained, haunted appearance of everyone in Iskawan, a result of lack of light and the hopeless cycles of wake, eat, sleep. Their eyes were sunken into their faces with bluish bags underneath.

“What’s this?” Rakesh asked, motioning at what lay on the table.

Gekko leaned back, stacking his hands behind his head. “Bartering. We scrounged up a few things.”

There was a rock shaped like a heart. A piece of wood barely straight enough to be a shelf. Three pieces of thin metal that could be used as nails.

“I won a new tunic,” Jiro said as he reached back, pulling a wadded, wrinkled garment from behind him.

Rakesh schooled his reaction. That single garment alone would let him stretch at least three more feet to the bottom of the wall! He hid his eagerness, forcing a smile instead.

“Just like you,” he drawled. “It’s a woman’s.”

Jiro laughed, a deep, rolling cackle that sounded more like a cough. Sometimes it seemed like Jiro, painfully thin and pale, with wide eyes in a too-small face, would crack at any moment and become like the Vakums who wandered endlessly. But he never did.

Gekko nudged Rakesh, his eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong with you? You look shaken.”

“We all look shaken,” Jiro said.

“No, this is different.”

Rakesh sighed, “There is something.”

“You tried to break out again,” Jiro said, leaning back in his chair. “They obviously didn’t catch you this time or you’d be under The Hangman’s paw.”

Rakesh cut a hand through the air. “It’s not about that. It’s about The Hangman.”

Their eyes widened. Both leaned forward, hands planted on the table.

“Did he punish someone else?”

“Did another Vakum disappear?”

Rakesh held up his hands, laughing. “Calm down. I’ll tell you, and it’s neither of those things. Thankfully.”

Jiro and Gekko fell silent as Rakesh recounted the strange exchange and the following arrival of the Yojin.

After, Gekko pressed his lips together in a thin, ghostly line. Jiro blinked and asked, “Really?”

“I think they’re connected,” Rakesh said, slamming a fist onto the table. It trembled beneath the blow. “Maybe it’s something we could use to escape.”

Gekko threw a dismissive hand in the air. “There you are. Escape. Escape. Escape. There’s no escape from Iskawan, and you’ve almost died trying. Can’t you just accept that yet?”

Rakesh shrugged. “No.”

Jiro put a hand on Gekko’s shoulder. “Just hear him out. He may have a point.”

Gekko scowled. “Not you too.”

“Just listen,” Rakesh said, interrupting both of them. “The three of us could break into that building. We could find that box! Maybe it’s our way back.”

“Maybe it’s insane!” Gekko snorted derisively. “The Hangman will kill you. Or worse, he’ll cripple you. You’ll die on the streets of Iskawan as a cripple. That’s almost worse than being a Vakum. They don’t seem to feel anything. You’d know pain every single moment that you were dying if The Hangman tortured you.”

“I have a reason to live.”

Jiro and Gekko stared at him, dumbstruck. Rakesh held his breath, but didn’t offer them anymore.

“Please,” he finally said, leaning close. A fairy-fire swooped in, illuminating their faces with strange, dancing light. “We must try.”

Jiro grinned.

Gekko hung his head.