None of it’s left. The buildings sag on both sides of us, run-down, their windows gray and their doors standing open. A cart lies toppled in the gutter with its load spilled out around it—fruit gone to black mush, cloth rotted soft. The runes are still cut into the street, but they’re cold now, not a flicker left in a single one. And down at the center, where the Heart Tree should be burning gold over the rooftops, there’s only a black husk of branches with every leaf gone, clawed up into a sky that has no sun to light it.
The air’s gone sweet and wrong, the smell of fruit left to rot in a bowl no one’s emptied. Underneath it, something colder, old in a way I can’t put a name to.
Mara wrinkles her nose hard and looks up at me.
“I don’t know what happened here,” I tell her.
“Dark magic was their whole life.” Kade’s eyes move over the dead storefronts. “Without it, what reason do they have left to thrive?”
I look over at her. “There’s more to life than dark magic.”
“Try telling them that.” Kade shrugs and faces front, pulling a slow breath through her nose.
She steps off the curb into the middle of the street, and the air changes when she does. It thickens, warm and wrong. Mara catches it before I do. Her tail stiffens. She circles slow at my side, nose up, reading something I can’t.
“Something isn’t right.” Kade says it low, under her breath.
“Nothing is.” I look down the empty street. “There’s no one left here at all.”
“The last time I was here, they’d started pulling back, retreating deeper into the realm.” Kade slows, her glance cutting to the dark between the buildings. “Never anything close to this.”
“Huh?”
She just groans and waves us on. “Let’s go.”
Josiah starts walking, hands deep in his pockets. His head swivels like a tourist’s. “How about we explore?—“
“No the fuck we are not exploring shit.” Kade rounds on him. “These witches and warlocks could be manifesting themselves into—“ She shudders, hard, and doesn’t finish it.
I go after him, and Mara comes with me. She’s got both hands wrapped around my arm, holding it to her chest. “Manifesting?”
“Have you ever read the old texts?” Kade asks, matching my pace.
The trees lining the street are dead, and not the way they go bare in winter. Black clean through, every limb brittle and stripped. Mara’s lip pushes out and her ears fall flat.
Kade keeps her gaze on the empty street ahead. “The witches and warlocks who manifest turn into the things humans put intheir folklore—the monsters parents use to keep their kids under the covers at night. Past a certain point the dark magic owns them instead of the other way around, and it remakes them into whatever’s been waiting underneath.”
“Why would anyone choose that?” I ask.
“You don’t understand the hold dark magic gets on you when you ride it too long.” She steps over a crack in the pavement without looking down. “It stops being something you use and turns into something you need. By the end you’re not driving it anymore—it’s driving you. And when it runs out of things to feed on, it turns on you.”
“‘The thing you swallow to feel whole is the same thing that hollows you out.’” Josiah says it pleasant and clear, still taking in the rooftops. “Chapter forty-one.”
Kade scoffs and ignores him, but her mouth tightens. “Think of the worst hunger you’ve ever had. Then imagine starving it down to nothing and finding out there’s something living inside you that’s hungrier.”
The street is empty. Whatever should be here—voices, footsteps, the hum of a living place—is just gone, and the only sound left is us breathing. The silence presses against my ears, heavy enough to feel, and every part of me wants to stay quiet inside it.
We keep moving, Kade talking low beside me. I hold onto every word, because each one shows me a side of my mother I never knew was there.
“Your mom tried.” Kade’s pace eases, and she keeps her eyes off me while she says it. “Harder than anybody. For a while it even worked. They listened to Angie. Whole families walked out of this realm and made lives on Wintermoon. They started covens, put their kids in the Academy. Some took plots on the community lands, others found work out on the tourist island. They were our neighbors.”
My mouth’s gone dry. “So why’d they stop?”
“Because they started demanding she stay.” Kade glances at me. “Rule them, be their queen. She’d been coming in to help where she could, a little at a time. But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted all of her, shut behind these walls for good. She wouldn’t give them that. So they shut the door.”
I stop in the middle of the street, and Mara stays close behind me, still holding my arm.
“Wait.” The word scrapes out of me. “My mother’s been coming here? All this time? She never said a word about it to me. Not one.”
