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Her mind slid back to the ruins, wondering if Caelith was there now. She suspected he would be. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever was shifting in those ruins was still moving… in the Fracture, and perhaps in him.
Julen rubbed the back of his neck. He was nervous. “I’m going to check the southern wardlines. They glitch after lightning sometimes.”
Maia nodded, but she knew that lightning had nothing to do with it. “All right. Yes. I’ll stay with the fragments and see what I can work out. Be safe, Julen.”
“And you, Maia.”
When he left, his footsteps echoed down the corridor until the sound faded entirely. Silence rushed in behind it; thicker, heavier, almost deliberate. The chamber seemed too large now, every shadow stretched thin, every flicker of light holding its breath.
Maia drew in a slow breath. The storm had dimmed the day so far that candles burned along the hallways. A pulse rippled through the fragments, sharper this time.
Something wasn’t right.
The room grew colder, and her chest loosened with something close to relief. Caelith. She knew the particular chill that came off him now. She almost said his name aloud, glad of it even now, even here.
But the cold deepened, wrong in a way his never was. His was cold and quiet. This had teeth in it.
Her relief curdled into something else.
“Julen?” she called, her voice shaking.
No answer. The stacks held their dark.
The air had gone thin and mineral, with the smell of a well right before something surfaces in it.
A low, metallic clatter echoed from deep within them, followed by a breath-like hiss curling along the walls.
Maia froze.
Then it came again, but closer. And after it, softer, something scraping against the stone.
Whatever had been waiting was here.
Inside.
18
The Hollow Wraith
Maia’s pulse thumped in time with the shards’ faint hum, each beat sharper than the last.
They were warning her.
She moved between the tables, hands hovering over the fragments, tracing their glow.
An even colder draught swept through the room, coiling around her neck, carrying a scent like old, rotting wood.
She froze.
Somewhere behind her, one of the candles guttered and did not come back, as though the dark had simply reached out and taken it. She turned slowly, fearing what might await her.
At first it was only a distortion. A ripple in the candlelight on the far wall. But as it moved closer, the warped shimmer unfolded from the darkness.
At first glance, Maia thought it was a person bent in the wrong direction. Then it straightened.
Too tall. Too thin for anything that should have been human. Its limbs stretched past the length they should have had, joints folding the wrong way before snapping back into place with a quiet, wet click.
Its face was a pale, hollow mockery of humanity. Eyes like pits of ink, mouth stretched too wide, too still. Long, thin wisps of black hair stuck to its sallow, damp skin.
