Aeris woke up with a bitter, ashy taste clinging to his tongue and a cold, stubborn weight pressing inside his chest. It felt off even before his mind had caught up to his body.He was still lying on the damp cellar floor, the chill sinking deep into his bones. Alba had curled up next to him, their limbs overlapping just enough to share a scrap of warmth. The two of them had slept in turns, uneasy and restless, too wired from what happened upstairs to really let their guards down. Rhea and Rask had kept to the levels above, watching, or at least pretending they could.The oil lamp must have gone out sometime after midnight, and now only a weak gray light crept down the narrow stairs. Morning, then, but the light felt flat, tired, like even the sun was worn out.Aeris sat up slowly, letting the strangeness in his body reveal itself bit by bit. The wrongness sharpened as he moved, until it sat right on the edge of something he could almost name. His mind ran ahead of him, faster, colder

They’d barely pushed past that jagged outcrop when the world snapped shut around them, the ravine pinched into a natural choke point, the air so tight it almost hurt to breathe. Aeris barely heard the first restraint bolt hiss by before it slammed him in the forearm. The ambush had been waiting. Whoever the commander back at Vance’s estate had warned, they’d gotten the message fast, and these soldiers weren’t here for a warning shot.The pain was sharp and mean, nothing like Coral’s fire or the brute force of Vance’s mages. It was cold, metallic, iron biting down and squeezing until his hand went numb. Inside, where the demon usually hummed with its own uneasy vitality, there was nothing. The connection flickered and died, just a cold blankness. He felt utterly, heartbreakingly normal.For a second, everything he’d been carrying, the bruises, the strained muscles, the bruised ribs, crashed back into him all at once. It was brutal. That borrowed strength he’d gotten used to was stripped

They managed to find a place to sleep that night, a half-collapsed watchtower along the old road, close enough to Aldric Cross to feel the Empire’s pulse, but far enough for nobody to come looking. The upper floors were just stone and debris, fallen away long ago. All that remained was the shell of the ground floor: sturdy enough to fend off wind, miserable enough that nobody would bother scavenging it. Rhea set about building a tiny fire, tucking it behind a shroud of broken bricks to kill the shine. Even with her shoulder still throbbing, she went through the motions, sharp with pain but stubborn as always. When the flames took, she watched the sparks twist up the chimney hole. The others huddled close, silent and hungry for something besides food.It was there, with the fire’s glow fighting the dark and the smoke caught in their throats, that Rask ran out of ways to stall. She folded her arms and kept her gaze low, maybe at her boots, maybe just anywhere but the three faces waiting

Four wolves burst from the tree line together, and Aeris knew instantly there was no outrunning them. They moved strangely, jerky, twisted, not quite natural, but somehow they were faster than they had any right to be across this snarled forest floor.“Back to back!” Rhea yelled. She was already knocking an arrow, letting it fly into the nearest beast. The shaft punched through its shoulder, but it barely staggered. “They’re way faster than they look!”Aeris placed himself between Alba and the two wolves skirting wide, the surge of demonic strength unfurling under his skin. He met the first wolf’s leap with a hard, closed-fist blow to its head, enough to stagger it, not enough to finish it off. Right then, the second wolf took advantage of the opening, claws slashing his forearm and drawing a line of blood. He didn’t flinch. The wound knit itself almost as soon as it opened, the pain barely registering after everything he'd survived against Vance’s battle-mages.He twisted, seized the

They walked together for another hour, no one saying much. The air hung heavy between them. Finally, Aeris couldn’t hold it in any longer.“You said Vessel candidates had strange effects on magical creatures,” he said, eyes fixed on Rask. “Back by the clearing, you called it an insignificant side effect. Tell me what you really remember. Not what they drilled into you.”Rask took her time, just like she always did when something actually mattered. Her voice was steady when she answered, but you could tell she was digging up memories she’d tried to leave buried. “There were reports,” she said. “Not many. Scattered, lots of contradictions. Mostly, the senior mages called them coincidences. A candidate calmed a horse that should've bolted. A hawk circled one for hours for no good reason. I thought those were just stories, embellishments. The kind of myths that pile up around anything the Empire turns into a ritual.”“Did anyone really look into it?” Aeris asked.Rask shook her head. “No.