LOGINAurelia's POVA month out of Drakos and the world had decided to cooperate.The grass came back first, thick and green and aggressively alive, then the trees, small pale buds pushing out along the bare branches until the whole treeline looked like it was done hiding n The stream behind the mansion ran clear enough that I could see the bottom of it, which sounds ordinary but after everything? It wasn't, not after what it had looked like a month ago.I woke up to birds doing their normal, irritating, beautiful thing in the trees outside my window every morning.I had never been so glad to be annoyed by birds in my life.Training with Rylan had become a different thing than it used to be.The shift came fast now, no reaching for it, no fighting the seam of it. My wolf met me at the door every time, coat on. My claws extended on command. I could hold the wolf form for a full hour without slipping, which Kaelen had noted in his notebook along the days. The spirit wolf, however, had her o
Kade's POVTwo days of not being in a collapsing ruin did wonders for a person's outlook.My ribs still had opinions about the wraith throwing me into a wall, and my shoulder had developed a throbbing that arrived every morning like an unwanted visitor who'd decided to stay. But I was alive, which put me ahead of where the night in that chamber had seemed to be taking things.I walked to the edge of the settlement on the second morning with a cup of something the innkeeper called tea and looked at the ground.Grass. Thin, pale, but pushing up through the grey soil in small, scattered clusters, like something that had been holding its breath and had finally decided to try again. The residue on the settlement walls had flaked away overnight, leaving faint dark outlines of where it had been. The air smelled of damp earth and something underneath it, green and faint, the smell of nature trying to self revive itself. I stood there for a while and drank my tea and looked at the grass.We h
Aurelia's POVThe wraith was winning and it knew it, which made it worse.Aldric's magic sputtered out like a wet candle. Rylan hit the pillar hard enough that the sound of it went through my chest, and he didn't get up. Torin went down next, blood running dark from his temple, his blade skidding across the stone away from his hand. Kade was on one knee, his burning sword doing exactly nothing, his face the colour of old ash.The wraith turned toward me.It didn't have a face. But whatever it had instead was arranged in a way that communicated satisfaction, which I found deeply offensive given the circumstances.My wolf stopped pacing.[Let me lead.] Her voice arrived low and certain, stripped of everything except the fact of it. [Stop fighting me. Let me lead.]I had been fighting her for weeks. The shift, the loss of control, the fear of what happened when she moved faster than I could think. Even though I've gotten better at controlling myself during shifts, the fear still lingered
Kade's POVFor approximately thirty seconds, I thought we had it.The blades burned, Aldric's magic held, the wraith pressed back against the far wall like something that had run out of room, and I felt… for the first time since we'd walked into these ruins, something that could reasonably be called hope.I should have known better. Hope in Drakos was just stupidity with better posture.The residue mass convulsed.It split open down the center, a wet, tearing sound that had no business coming from something that wasn't alive, and the wraith came out of it like pressure finding a crack, larger, faster, its form more solid than it had been, edges defined in a way they hadn't been sixty seconds ago.My men went first. I watched two of them hit the walls hard enough that they didn't immediately get back up. The scarred woman took a glancing blow that sent her skidding across the stone floor on her side, and even she stayed down for a moment, which told me everything about the force of it
Aurelia's POVThe heart chamber was exactly as horrible as everything leading up to it had suggested it would be.Black vines covered every surface, walls, ceiling, the broken remains of whatever this room had once been, thick and pulsing with that slow, breathing rhythm that made your eyes want to look somewhere else. A mist crawled across the floor, ankle-deep, cold enough that I felt it through my boots. And in the center of it all, a mass of residue the size of a cart wheel, beating like something's heart. We spread out automatically, blades up, torches high, everyone doing their own rapid inventory of how bad this was."Right," I said, mostly to myself.Then the shadow rose.It came up from the center mass slowly, which was almost worse than if it had been fast, taking its time, assembling itself from the dark. It built into something shaped like a person, if a person were made of smoke and bad intentions, its edges bleeding into the air around it. The voice came without a mout
Aurelia's POVWe hit the wall of the narrow corridor and stayed there.My chest heaved. My arms had moved past the stage of complaining. Around me, everyone was doing their own version of the same thing, backs against cold stone, heads dropped, pulling air in like it was rationed.One of Kade's men, not the scarred woman, a younger one I hadn't caught a name for, was pressing his palm hard against his thigh, blood seeping through his fingers in a slow, steady pulse. He wasn't making a sound about it, which either meant he was tough or in shock, and I didn't have the energy to determine which.The sounds from the main chamber hadn't followed us. But the feeling of being watched had, and it sat between my shoulder blades like a thumb pressed into a bruise.Kaelen broke the silence first."I need to tell you something," he said, his back still against the wall, his eyes on the passage ahead. His voice was even, which was how I knew it was bad."That's never a good opening," I said, my vo
Aurelia's POV.I couldn't move.I knew it wasn't him. Some part of my brain was saying that clearly, calmly, the way Kaelen would say it, this is not real, the ruins show you what you fear, Jaren told you this, you know this. That part was working fine.The rest of me was completely useless.Becaus
Aurelia's POV.The cave was not comfortable but it was defensible, which was the only thing anyone cared about right now.The guard found it, or remembered it, pulling us off the main path toward a rockfall that looked impassable until he showed us the gap behind it, wide enough to get through in a
Aurelia's POV.I stared at him for a moment, just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. His eyes were open, glassy and confused, but open, and his hand was still around mine with that weak deliberate grip that meant he had chosen to reach for something and found it."Hold on." I said, and turned and
Aurelia's POV.The door closed and the silence it left behind was the worst kind.The three of us stood in it, none of us quite looking at each other, the weight of the old woman's last words still pressing down. No matter what you hear.I counted to about thirty before the first sound came through







