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Psychological horror didn’t arrive with a roar; it bled into the quiet.

Every single sound in the black forest was amplified a thousand times over. The subtle expansion of the petrified tree trunks as the frost hit them sounded like the slow crunch of heavy footsteps in the ash. The trickling of condensation down the basalt cliff face sounded like blood dripping onto stone. The wind howling through distant mountain passes sounded like the shrieks of dying candidates.

My heart hammered against my ribs, every beat ringing in my ears with deafening clarity.

Is that a branch snapping? Is that the rustle of leather wings? Is that a predator standing just inches outside our root barrier?

Paranoia clawed at my mind, stripping away my logic piece by piece. I strained my eyes against the dark, trying to parse the shadows, but my mind began to play tricks—creating moving shapes, slitted eyes, and looming jaws out of thin air. I held my breath for minutes at a time, terrified that the sound of my own lungs expanding would attract whatever was prowling the woods.

Hours bled into one another, agonizingly slow.

Around midnight, a faint crack in the iron-thorn root wall caught my attention. It was a narrow sightline that looked out across the vast expanse of the valley basin below our ridge.

I leaned forward slightly, wincing as my stiff, frozen joints protested, and pressed my eye near the gap.

Miles away, on a high, exposed rocky ledge on the opposite side of the valley, a spark ignited.

I froze, my pulse stuttering.

Someone had built a fire.

Through the narrow gap in the roots, I watched as a small, flickering amber flame caught light. It was tiny—a desperate, pitiful attempt by candidates who had clearly broken under the cold and could no longer endure the dark.

I could make out the shadowed silhouettes of two, maybe three candidates. They huddled tightly around the glowing embers, arms wrapped around themselves, trying to leech whatever heat the tiny blaze could offer.

Idiots, a cold spike of dread dropping into my stomach. Fools.

Beside me, I felt Mal shift slightly in the dark. He had seen it too. I could feel the sudden tension radiating from his frame as he pressed his own gaze toward a gap in the roots.

We watched in absolute stillness, holding our breath, waiting for the inevitable.

We expected a roar. We expected the sky to split open with fire. We expected the thunderous beat of massive wings to tear through the valley.

What actually happened was infinitely worse.

There was no sound. No roar. No warning.

A shadow, darker than the midnight sky, simply glided across the distant ridge. It moved with a smooth, terrifying, acoustic silence that defied nature.

Blink.

In a single second, the amber fire was snuffed out. It didn’t flicker; it was simply erased, as if a bucket of midnight had been dumped directly over the embers.

And then the shadow passed, disappearing into the dark clouds above the peaks.

When the ridge came back into view beneath the pale light of the moons, it was completely empty.

The fire was gone. The candidates were gone.

There were no screams. No sounds of tearing flesh. No bodies left lying on the stone. No blood.

They hadn’t been burned. They hadn’t been dropped from the sky. They had simply been erased from existence in a fraction of a second. Swallowed whole by a predator that ate light, sound, and life without leaving a single trace behind.

The absolute horror of it slammed into my chest like an iron fist.

The dragons of Isath Nalore didn’t just hunt with fire. Some of them were the void itself.

My breath caught in my throat, a terrified sob trapped behind my clenched teeth. I pulled back from the crack in the roots, sliding back down into the deepest corner of the hollow, pressing my back so hard against the stone I thought my spine might crack.