The Whispering Woods swallowed sound the moment we crossed the first line of trees.The air changed. It thickened, heavy with damp earth and something colder—ancient, patient, listening. The branches climbed high enough to blot out the moon, leaving only faint ribbons of silver light slipping between the leaves. Everything else was shadow.Riven hung between Lyra and me, his weight dragging at my shoulders, but every time I adjusted my grip, his breath hitched. Pain shot across my arm from the cut I’d sustained earlier. I ignored it.“We need somewhere to set him,” Lyra whispered.Her voice seemed too loud, even though it was barely more than breath. The forest pressed in close, absorbing her words like it didn’t want them.“There should be a clearing deeper in,” I murmured back. “The tunnels map said the woods were once part of the old—”“You two are still arguing directions,” Riven croaked weakly.I nearly dropped him. “Riven?”His eyes cracked open, glassy and unfocused. “You’re to

Kael 's PovThe world returned slowly.I remembered falling heat seizing my lungs, Lyra’s grip slipping from my shoulder, Riven’s voice cracking through the trees and then darkness swallowing everything.What I didn’t remember was opening my eyes.Because when I did, I wasn’t in the woods anymore.I stood in the center of a battlefield.Ash swirled in a wind that carried no temperature, no direction, only memory. The ground beneath me was scorched black, split by jagged veins of molten orange. Figures blurred, ghostlike rushed past me, shouting words I almost recognized but couldn’t hold onto long enough to understand. Their armor glinted like hammered bronze, etched with runes that pulsed faintly even in deathless memory.Shadowfire.I felt it before I saw it. A pressure behind my ribs, coiling like something waking up inside me.A blast shook the earth. I turned...A wall of black flame erupted at the far end of the battlefield, swallowing soldiers whole. The fire didn’t burn the wa

The forest around them felt heavier than before as if the Whispering Woods sensed what had just shifted, what line had been crossed. Darius stood rigid, still breathing hard from the decision that shattered the years of loyalty carved into him. Kael watched him cautiously, standing between Lyra and the former golden boy of the Academy, Shadowfire still flickering faintly along his arms.Riven lay slumped against a tree, his breaths shallow, skin pale, veins lined with a sickly silver glow.Riven was dying. And the forest knew it.Lyra knelt beside him, hands shaking slightly as she poured her auric light through his wounds. “It’s not holding,” she whispered. “He’s slipping too fast.”Darius swallowed hard. “Let me help. Please.”Kael didn’t immediately answer. Shadowfire twined up his wrist like a warning serpent.Lyra looked at him. Not a plea — a decision.“Kael, we need him.”Riven let out a weak laugh, choking on the end of it. “Strange… I spent my life expecting the Council to k

Kael's Pov Dawn came slowly to the Whispering Woods, as though even the sun feared approaching the scorched clearing we had left behind. What little light managed to slip through the muttering canopy carried an uneasy pallor—sickly, thin, as if touched by lingering Shadowfire.None of us had slept.Not really.Lyra sat slumped beside me, her head resting against my shoulder, though she pretended she wasn’t exhausted. Her eyes were puffy, red at the corners, her braid ragged. Every so often her fingers brushed mine, not quite holding, not quite letting go. As if checking that I hadn’t disappeared.Darius, meanwhile, kept watch from the edge of the glade, his back to us, his posture unnaturally rigid. He hadn’t said much since the hunters left. But he hadn’t stepped away from Riven’s body either—not once.Riven lay between us on a bed of moss and Darius’s cloak, still wrapped in the fading luminance Lyra had cast to preserve him overnight. The faint light clung to him like a memory ref

Kael surfaced into consciousness with the slow, cold heaviness of someone dragging themselves out of a lake of mud. He didn’t open his eyes at once—part of him feared what he would see, feared that if he looked, the pain of the last moments before he collapsed into the Veil would come rushing back and crush him.Riven’s face.The ambush.Lyra’s blood.The pull of the Veil like a hand around his ribcage.He felt it all waiting for him on the other side of breath.So he stayed still, sensing before seeing.He was lying on something soft—not grass, not soil, but something like woven mist. His body didn’t ache, but it felt… hollow. His heart thudded in his chest, but strangely muted, like he was hearing it from underwater.And underneath it, like a second heartbeat mirroring his own, was the quiet thrum of the Shadowfire.Alive. Awake. Watching.That was new.Kael inhaled sharply, his eyes snapping open.The world around him was wrong.A sky of rippling silver and deep purple stretched ab