Lauren stood at the grove’s edge. “This is it,” she murmured, breath fogging in the cold. The trees inside spiraled unnaturally, their roots coiling like snakes.“The wind doesn’t even move here,” she muttered, stepping forward. The ground felt off. Alive. Watching.She tightened her cloak’s silver clasp and crossed the threshold. The Hollow Stone Grove which was sacred once, now feared was exactly as her grandmother’s book had warned.“No one remembers you,” Lauren said, glancing at the silent trees. “But I do.”Her fingers brushed the glyph stitched into her sleeve. That glyph had led her here—hidden deep in her grandmother’s spells.Each step pulled heavier than the last. The magic wasn’t passive; it pressed down, thick in the air.Finally, she reached it.“There you are,” she whispered.The Hollow Stone. A massive black slab, buried halfway in the earth, runes glowing with a pulse like a slowed heartbeat.She knelt and pressed her hands to its surface.“I call the blood, Witch bor

The stone door groaned shut behind Dylan, sealing off the forge and the enclave like a memory he could no longer touch. The chamber he stepped into was circular and hollow, with shadows curling in its corners. Only a single torch burned near the center, its flame a strange green hue that flickered like it breathed.A voice echoed from somewhere within the darkness, low and ancient. “Do you know who you are?”Dylan moved cautiously forward, scanning the space. “I know enough,” he said, his voice calm but alert.The voice replied, almost sad. “No. You know the edges. But not the wound.”As if summoned by those words, symbols began to glow along the walls—pulsing runes that spiraled outward to form a ring. Within them, memories emerged like reflections in rippling water.He saw himself as a child, standing outside a crumbling house while a man shouted at a woman whose eyes burned with unnatural light. His father. His mother. The moment blurred into another: Dylan, bleeding and chained be