Wind tore through the shattered archways of the East Wing as Kael and Selene ran.Stone dust hung thick in the air, choking each breath, turning the once quiet corridors into a storm of collapsing echoes.Selene stumbled once, her shoulder brushing the wall, Kael caught her by instinct, his fingers brushing the rough fabric of her sleeve. The touch grounded him human, fleeting, real.“Down this way!” she coughed, pointing toward a half collapsed passage. Her voice cracked, raw from smoke.They ducked beneath a fallen beam, the glow of suppressive runes flickering above like dying stars. Behind them, alarms began to wail, shrill, mechanical, unnatural against the ancient stones of the academy.Kael glanced back once. Shadows flickered through the debris armored silhouettes, eyes glowing faint blue. Enforcers.He swore under his breath. “They’re faster than I thought.”Selene gave a sharp nod. “They’ll cut off the north exits first. We go underground.”“Underground?” Kael’s brows furrow

The moon had a coldness to it that made the world look unreal, a theater set lit by a pale, impartial hand. Kael dropped to his knees before he realized he had, the ground hard and gravelly under his palms. Each breath felt like sand through a reed, each inhale scraped.Selene was already there, half crouched, fingers frantic at the torn bandage where his shoulder bled through. Her hands moved with the quick precise motions of someone who’d tended wounds before not kindly, not gently, but with the certainty of someone who’d learned to keep people alive because she’d watched too many die. She hadn’t slept. Her hair hung in damp strands and the charcoal under her eyes mapped the nights she’d spent awake.“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said, not looking up. The sentence wasn’t accusation so much as fact. Her voice was thin, it caught on the words sometimes, on the memory of the Dominion Hunter.Kael tasted iron on his tongue. The fight played in his eyelids in short, broken flashes.

The forest around them was dying. Each step Kael took crushed brittle leaves into powder, the air thick with the scent of ash and wilted bark. The clash at the Dominion camp had scorched more than the ground, it had burned through whatever sense of safety they’d once had. The forest whispered nothing but their exhaustion now. Selene trudged a few steps behind him, her cloak snagging against low branches. Her breathing was ragged, uneven. Every few seconds she winced, pressing a palm against her side. Kael had noticed the stain spreading beneath the fabric hours ago, but she hadn’t said a word about it. “You should rest,” he muttered without turning around. Selene exhaled through her teeth. “And let them catch up? You’re not the only one who’s bleeding.” He stopped then, abruptly enough that she nearly collided into him. His eyes were sharp, the way they always became when irritation masked concern. “You can’t fight if you collapse before we get out of this forest.” Her lips twit

The cave kept its breath.Damp walls drank the rain’s last whispers and let out only the faint sound of dripping water, plinks too polite to be anything but patient. Outside, the sky had bruised into late gray, the ridge showed itself in slices between ragged pines. Kael woke slow, the kind of slow that felt like waking from someone else’s life.Selene was already awake, sitting with her back to the stone, one knee drawn up. Her face was set in that tired, determined way he’d come to know well small lines at the corners of her mouth, jaw working as if to chew away a thought. Her hand moved in a small, steady rhythm, rubbing the edge of the bandage at his side as if checking its hold.“Morning,” she said without looking up. Her voice was dry, as if the words had been passed around a while before they reached him.He pushed himself up, ribs protesting where the makeshift bandage tied. The cave smelled of wet rock and old smoke. He rubbed his palms together, feeling the faint vibration u

The Sanctum groaned.It was not a sound of stone breaking, but of memory shifting like the world exhaling after a thousand years of holding its breath. The ground trembled beneath Kael and Selene’s boots. Dust drifted from the ceiling in soft, choking curtains as the blue light from the fissure spread, tracing veins across the ancient walls.Kael steadied himself against a pillar. His aura, still raw from breaking the seal, flickered uncontrollably beneath his skin. “It’s starting,” he said, his voice low but steady.Selene looked at the widening crack in the wall. “What is?”He didn’t answer immediately. The air had turned thick, charged, as if the sanctum itself recognized his presence and was answering. A faint hum rose, threading through the bones of the ruin. Then, from the fissure, a ripple of light burst outward, coiling like a serpent of energy before settling into a hovering sphere, translucent, fluid, alive.A voice followed. It wasn’t spoken in words, but in resonance, a pu