The brick gave way five feet from the ground, leaving Halla hanging by a few wedged fingers and the cold morning air. She let go. The drop was less elegant than she would have preferred. Her boots crunched on dried mortar dust, and she was already turning, already looking for the others.

Tyrion and Cirillian spoke almost in unison. "I don't think we have time."

A fair assessment. The smoke trails Halla had marked at dawn were already thinning, going from black braids to grey threads against the pale sky. Whoever sat beneath them was either packing up or already gone.

The party moved.

Lyka kept close to Cirillian's heel, ears flat, eyes amber and constantly moving. The streets of Iron River were a careful kind of nightmare. Forty years of weather and absence had laid the city open: roofs sunk into themselves, brickwork bowing into the road, glass in the gutter where shopfronts had given up. The going was slow and stubborn. You watched your feet, or you broke an ankle.

A cacophony of overlapping roars rolled in from somewhere south.

"Patrolling its territory, maybe." Tyrion's head turned toward the sound. "Sounds closer than yesterday."

Halla nodded. Nobody named the thing. Nobody had to.

Tyrion grew quiet after that. They were walking through the bones of his childhood now, and he had a particular way of going inward when the ghosts started to crowd. Cirillian let him.

Nearly two hours later, they came to the edge of a plaza.

Halla peered around the corner first. The foundations of old market stalls and storefronts framed a broken square, three or four campfires petering out in the middle of it, and a knot of gnolls moving among the ashes. Cleaning up. Folding bedding. Shoving things into sacks. Two of them gestured east, again and again, the message clear enough: hurry, we're leaving.

The party withdrew into cover and conferred in whispers.

Forward was direct, and likely watched. South sloped toward the city's heart, where the thing with the many roars lived. North ran into the red light district, which Tyrion mentioned he had never set foot in, and said with the slight stiffness of a man who'd noticed his own line and did not intend to repeat it.

"We could kill them here," Halla offered, flatly. "Or follow them. Or beat them there."

"Beat them there is best," Cirillian said. "If we knew which there."

A breath of wind shifted around them, curling back from the plaza and brushing across the gnolls. Halla's head came up.

"We gotta go. Now."

Cirillian scanned the plaza, scanned the broken city behind it, and then was already moving, low and silent, across the open ground toward the alley mouth where the red light district waited.

Tyrion swore under his breath as he followed. "I keep telling you, I have memories. I don't have specifics."