Movement, Flynn's wolfish rumble was projected directly into my mind, bypassing the silence of the air. He halted, hismassive, shaggy body lowering into a hunter’s crouch. I could feel the tension in his muscles through the bond, the way his hackles rose like wire brushes along his spine. He sniffed the dead air, his upper lip curling back to reveal teeth that were more shadow than bone.
Ten o’clock,he projected, the thought sharp and urgent.Shapes. Wrong scent. Fear and ozone.
I squinted through the gloom.
Ahead, nestled in the trough of two ash dunes, a cluster of figures huddled together. They were translucent, their edges blurring and bleeding into the background radiation of the Underworld. Shades. But they weren't drifting aimlessly as one would expect of the dead, lost in the loop of their own fading memories. They were aware. They were backing away from something I couldn't see, their mouths hanging open in silent, terrified O's.
We shouldn't interfere,Kaelen warned mentally. The presence of the Dragon Prince was a heavy, coiled weight in the back of my skull. Beside me, his ethereal form shifted uneasily, his tail thumping the ash and kicking up clouds of grey particulate.The dead are not our mission, Aria. We walk past. Every moment we linger is a moment the Devourer takes more and the Underworld fractures further.
"No," I said, the word scraping against the dryness of my throat. I stopped, my boots sinking inches into the soft, treacherous dust. "Look at them. Kaelen, look at them. I know them."
I stepped closer, drawn by a sickening, magnetic pull of recognition that bypassed logic and went straight to the gut.
There were two distinct figures in the center of the huddle, separated from the nameless wash of other souls. One was a woman in tattered robes, the fabric looking scorched and rent, as if she had burned to death in a high-intensity fire. Her facewas a mask of haughty cruelty, even here at the end of all things. But the arrogance was marred by a spiritual gash that ran from her temple to her jaw, leaking a vapor that looked like darker smoke.
High Keeper Natalia. The woman who had ordered my torture. The woman who had upheld the Great Deception.
And clutching her arm, looking small and pale, with a phantom wound in her chest that bled grey smoke into the ash, was a girl with hair the color of straw.
Ellie.
I stopped dead. The air left my lungs in a ragged rush. A phantom pain flared in my side, right where a dagger had once pierced me, a localized echo of betrayal.
"They didn't make it," I whispered, the realization cold and heavy in my stomach. "The Citadel... it collapsed. The magical backlash. They died in the merger."
Ellie looked up. Her eyes, usually so full of nervous energy and the desperate need to please, met mine. For a second, across the distance of life and death, there was recognition. A flicker of shame? A plea for forgiveness? I couldn't tell. The clarity of the afterlife hadn't granted her peace, only a sharper definition of her fear.
She reached out a hand, her fingers trembling and fading at the tips.
"Aria," her mouth formed the name, the syllables perfectly readable, though no sound carried through the dead air of the wastes.
Then the mist rolled in.
It wasn't a weather front. It was a ripple in the fabric of the dimension, a translucent grey wave that didn't obscure the view so much as delete it. It moved with a terrifying, silent intelligence, washing over the group of shades like a wet eraser moving across a chalkboard.
There was no scream, no struggle.
One moment, Natalia was sneering at the encroaching dark, trying to command it to halt with the authority of a station she no longer held. The next, her form simply unspooled. She turned into grey dust, dissolving from the feet up, her robes drifting into nothingness.
Ellie looked at her hand, watching her own fingers turn to smoke. She looked at me one last time, her expression crumbling into absolute terror, the realization that there would be no judgment, no afterlife, only the void.
And then she was gone.
They were all gone. The mist swirled once, heavy and satisfied, a predator licking its chops. Then it dissipated, leaving only a fine rain of pale ash drifting down to the ground, settling into the grooves of the silence.
I stood there, frozen, my boots anchored in the dust. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, wet bird trapped in a cage of metal and bone. Instinctively, I reached out with my left hand and snatched at the falling ash before it could hit the ground.
When I opened my fist, a pinch of it sat on my metal palm, cold and gritty, distinct against the smooth silver plating. I stared at it, frowning. The pounding of my heart began to slow, replaced by a dull, throbbing stillness. A deep, unsettling confusion began to bleed into my thoughts, thick as heavy syrup, clogging the synapses.
I knew I was hurt. I touched the raised ridge of the scar on my side through the fabric of my tunic. Instead, I found only smooth, unblemished skin. The physical proof of the wound was simply... gone. But the universe abhors a paradox, and my star-metal lattice refused to yield to the Underworld's entropy.
A sudden, searing heat flared at my side. I gasped as the silver metal beneath my skin surged outward, aggressivelyrushing to fill the temporal error the Devourer had just created. It stitched itself across the smooth flesh, leaving a jagged, metallic seam where the scar used to be.
I remembered the pain of the betrayal, the sharpness of the knife sliding between ribs, the shock of seeing a friend turn enemy. The data was there:Injury. Puncture. Betrayal.
But... who was it?
I furrowed my brow, staring at the grey dust in my palm. Someone had stabbed me. Someone I trusted. A girl with... brown hair? No, that wasn't right. Blonde? Wait. Did I have a friend in the Citadel?
