We stepped out of the bunker into a dawn smeared with rust-red light. The fog had thinned, but the air was still thick with the metallic tang of ozone and decay. Somewhere in the distance, something howled—long and low. Not animal. Not alien. Something in-between.Reyes walked beside me, quiet for once. Her pistol was reloaded. Safety off.“Where to now?” she asked.I didn’t reply immediately. The pull in my chest wasn’t directional anymore. It was everywhere. Like the next one hadn’t yet decided where it would be. Or worse—it was watching.Then the wind shifted.And I felt it.Sharp.Personal.“North,” I muttered.Reyes frowned. “What’s there?”I didn’t say it aloud, but the answer clicked in my skull like a switchblade:A memory.We moved fast through half-collapsed roads and overgrown intersections, past memorial walls covered in photos and old candle wax. Every few blocks, soldiers in makeshift checkpoints stared as we passed. Reyes flashed her badge. No one stopped us.We passed

The chopper cut low over the ruins of old Cleveland, hugging the skeletons of buildings like a bird too afraid to fly high. Wind shredded through the broken glass towers, and somewhere below, a fire still burned. No one had put it out. No one left alive to care.Reyes sat across from me, armored up, jaw clenched. The Mourner stood at the open side door, one hand braced against the frame, staring into the void like it was calling him home.Sarge’s voice came through the comms, staticky but clear:> “Approaching coordinates. New York’s sealed tighter than a tomb. Airspace’s off-limits. You’re going in on foot once we’re close.”“Figures,” Reyes muttered.The Mourner didn’t blink. “That’s by design. Vesh-Tal doesn’t like to be disturbed.”I looked at him. “You said you died there. How?”His fingers flexed. “We were part of an extraction team. Eight of us. The first real test of hounds outside controlled environments. The city was already collapsing—earthquakes, disappearances, time slipp

The field vanished like smoke.Not in pieces—all at once.One blink and we were back in the ruined city, the towers bending like crooked teeth above us. Reyes stood rigid, her rifle trembling in her hands, caught between instincts: shoot or flee. I hadn’t moved since the Shepherd touched my chest. I couldn’t.Something in me had shifted.I didn’t just hear the chain now.I felt every link. Every echo of pain tied to it. Every soul reclaimed.And every one not.They weren’t burdens. They were… memories.“You marked him,” Reyes snapped, stepping toward the Shepherd. “I saw it. I felt it.”“I didn’t need to mark him,” the Shepherd replied calmly. “He was already mine the moment he doubted.”Reyes pulled the trigger.The bullet never reached him.It hung in the air for a split second, then turned to ash and fell at his feet.The Shepherd looked at me.“You know what comes next.”And I did.The Collector would come.Because I had seen something I wasn’t meant to. Because a leash does

I didn’t sleep that night.Reyes did, in a chair across the room, her sidearm resting on her lap. The survivor we pulled from the docks was unconscious in the infirmary, her vitals stable—but flat. Like a puppet without strings. Like she was just waiting for someone to pick her up again.The golden spiral hadn’t returned. But I could still feel the hum beneath my skin. Not a pull.A pulse.Like the world was breathing with someone else’s lungs.Like we were standing on the skin of something massive… and it was shifting in its sleep.I stepped outside just before dawn.The streets of the bunker zone were quiet. Still. Too still.We’d fortified the perimeter with relic wards—glyphs carved into steel, blessed ash painted over doorways, salt circles laced with blood and silver. Most of it came from superstition.But lately, superstition worked better than science.I stood on the rooftop, eyes on the east, waiting for a sunrise I knew wouldn’t come. The sky didn’t glow anymore—it leaked. A

Ash and I didn’t speak much after the crater. There were no words for what we saw. What we felt. The throne wasn’t just a symbol—it was real. It had memory. It had will. It had seen me, and I knew—just knew—it wouldn’t forget. The chain in my chest had always been a leash. Now, it felt like a fuse.I asked Ash once, as we walked: “Why didn’t you warn me?”He didn’t stop walking. “Would it have changed anything?”No. He was right. I would’ve gone anyway.We moved east through the ruins. Skipped the main roads. The cities were too loud, too watched. Reyes stayed back to lead the bunker—reluctantly. But she knew I couldn’t drag her further into this. She didn’t belong in the world of old kings and forgotten gods.She belonged to the world that was still trying to survive.We reached the edge of a ghost zone after three days. A stretch of land marked with static on every map. No recon data. No patrols. No satellites dared look too long.They called it the Shard.Ash called it something el