The mountains north of the city were dark and silent, the kind of silence that belonged to places humans had stopped visiting a long time ago. Trees stood close together like mourners at a funeral, their branches blocking what little moonlight managed to push through the clouds.Seth walked the narrow trail without hurry. His appearance was unremarkable. Average height. Plain coat. A face that would pass through any crowd without drawing a second glance. The only thing unusual about him was the faint pulse of energy beneath his skin, something that didn't register on any human instrument but would have made every awakener within a mile radius feel deeply, instinctively wrong.He found Shim Chun-hoo sitting with his back against a fallen tree, half hidden in shadow. The man looked nothing like the vice-guildmaster who had once commanded rooms with cold authority. His skin was gray now, pulled tight against his skull. The black veins that had started in his hands had spread up past his

Bear Mountain was an hour north of the city, and by the time Jason parked the car at the trailhead, the sun had already dropped below the treeline. Vivie hopped out before the engine died, her nose turned slightly upward like an animal testing the wind."He was here," she said immediately. "The traces are faint but they're layered. He stayed for at least a few hours."Jason followed her up the trail without speaking. The forest was dense and quiet, the kind of place that swallowed sound and kept it. Vivie moved through the undergrowth with a confidence that didn't belong to her small frame, her feet finding solid ground by instinct, her eyes tracking something invisible to Jason.She stopped at a clearing about half a kilometer from the trailhead. The ground was scuffed and uneven, the dirt disturbed in patterns that suggested someone had been sitting, standing, and pacing in the same small area repeatedly."Here," Vivie said. She crouched and pressed her palm flat against the dirt. H

Vivie didn't wait for Shim Chun-hoo to recover.The moment her kick sent him crashing through the parked car, she pressed forward, closing the distance before the dust settled. Her right hand came up and dark energy coiled around her fingers like living smoke, forming into chains that shot outward and wrapped themselves around Shim Chun-hoo's arms and torso as he staggered to his feet.The chains pulled tight. Shadowy links bit into his blackened skin and pinned his arms against his sides. For one second, two seconds, he was held in place, his body locked rigid against the crumpled car door.The onlookers who hadn't fled were pressed against storefronts and crouched behind vehicles, watching in stunned silence. A girl who looked no older than twelve had just kicked a monster across a city street and was now holding him in place with magic that pulsed with a color nobody in the crowd had ever seen before.Vivie planted her feet and threw a punch directly into Shim Chun-hoo's chest.The

Vivie stood at the edge of the wreckage, her arms crossed, her eyes fixed on the two figures in the middle of the ruined street. Jason hadn't moved. Shim Chun-hoo hadn't moved. The sword lay on the ground between them like a line neither one intended to cross.She had heard every word.I'm dying. And I can feel every second of it.The statement itself wasn't what unsettled her. She had watched people die before. In her previous life as Vivian Cross, death had been a professional constant, something that happened around her with the regularity of weather. Hunters died. Civilians died. Monsters died. The math of their world was built on subtraction.But there was something in the way Shim Chun-hoo had said it that reached deeper than the words themselves. The specific horror of feeling your own body consume itself from the inside. The awareness that every breath was borrowed from a countdown you couldn't see. The knowledge that whatever you had been was being replaced, cell by cell, by