The Shadows Remember BloodThe battle was over.But the echoes of it still clung to the air thick, heavy, metallic. Smoke drifted along the floor like a living thing trying to escape. Shattered lights flickered overhead, dying slowly.Kain stood in the center of the ruined chamber, chest rising and falling in ragged breaths. His shadow no longer just a second silhouette but something bigger, deeper, more monstrous stirred behind him, restless and uneasy.Talia gripped his arm.“You’re bleeding.”He didn’t answer. He barely heard her.His mind was still replaying the fight.Cipher’s psychic storm.The Elder collapsing.The screams of the Underground fighters.The feel of power surging through him raw, overwhelming, terrifying.The shadows had obeyed him.For the first time, they obeyed him.But something else had awakened too.He felt it whispering inside him.A hunger.“Kain.”Talia’s voice softened. “Look at me.”He blinked, pulling himself back into the present. Her face was smudged

He loses control. The shadow evolves hungry, unpredictable, almost deadly.The cavern lights flickered.The underground settlement already bruised from battle felt tense, restless, like the stone itself held its breath whenever Kain walked past.People whispered.Some stared.Some avoided him entirely.It wasn’t just fear of the Dominion’s trackers. Or Cipher’s psychic games. Or the losses they’d suffered during the Subterranean Battle.No.It was him.Kain could feel the difference in the air like the shadows themselves carried his scent now, dark and sharp and dangerous. The Shadow Split ability he’d once barely controlled had grown stronger after the fight. Unpredictable. Sometimes it moved before he could think. Sometimes it reacted to emotions he didn’t even understand.Sometimes…it reacted to blood.And tonight, for the first time, the Underground gathered to address it.The Elder called for a circle meeting inside the Hall of Stone Echoes a massive cavern carved generations ag

Orin does not sleep the night the Underground battle report comes in.Sleep has never been difficult for him before. Even during the bloodiest campaigns, even when cities burned and Awakened screamed beneath Dominion suppression fields, Orin had always been able to close his eyes and rest. Sleep was discipline. Control. A reminder that nothing no war, no rebel, no failure ruled him.Tonight is different.He sits alone in the Dominion’s white room, a chamber so sterile it feels less like a place meant for living beings and more like a shrine to precision. The walls hum softly with hidden machinery. The air smells faintly of cold metal and recycled oxygen, sharp and clean enough to sting the lungs. White light pours down from the ceiling in perfect symmetry, leaving no corner untouched by illumination.Before him, holographic screens float in a slow orbit.On every screen, the same thing plays.Kain.The Underground battle unfolds again and again in fractured angles and slowed frames. T

The tunnels were too quiet.After the Synthetic Echo vanished, the silence it left behind felt thick like dust settling over a battlefield where the enemy hadn’t been defeated, only paused.Kain’s breath still shook in his chest. His ribs ached, each inhale sharp, but he forced himself forward. Talia kept a hand on his arm to steady him, though her eyes never stopped sweeping the shadows.“We need to regroup,” she said softly.Kain nodded, but his mind was replaying the fight, the Synthetic Echo’s black eyes, the way it had mimicked him with terrifying accuracy.And then, beneath it all…another feeling.A tug.A pull.Something wrong deeper in the Underground.“Where’s everyone else?” he asked, suddenly aware of the emptiness around them.The Elder stiffened. “They should have met us by now. Joren was on watch. If something went wrong”“Let’s move,” Kain said, voice sharper than he intended.They hurried through the tunnels, steps echoing. The air grew colder the deeper they went, th

The tunnels smelled of cold metal and damp stone like the ribs of some sleeping beast. Kain could still feel the aftershock of the Echo he’d forced earlier, the one that showed Talia’s capture happening tonight. His pulse hadn’t slowed since.They walked side-by-side through the half-collapsed corridor, their breath visible in the chill. Talia kept glancing over her shoulder, every muscle in her body tightened like a wire.“Kain,” she said quietly. “You’re hearing something.”He didn’t answer. What he heard wasn’t a sound it was a pressure, like the weight of a storm pressing behind his eyes. Echoes were starting to bleed into the edges of his vision without permission. Shadows flickered in corners that weren’t there.“We need to move,” he said, voice sharper than he meant.Talia nodded without argument. That alone told him she sensed it too.They were close to the surface exit the old maintenance hatch the Underground mapped months ago. Beyond it was a disguised warehouse, then one o