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She pulled the nearest one free, feeling the familiar pulse beneath her fingers: responsive, but thin. Without Caelith, the connection felt like gripping water.

The ticking stopped.

She went still.

A sharp coldness started trickling down her back.

On instinct, she threw herself sideways, as a glass-boned hand closed in on nothing but air where her shoulder had just been.

It can’t see me any better than I can see it, she realised in the darkness, scrambling back, her chest heaving. It’s following the shard.

She looked down at the fragment glowing faintly in her palm - a beacon, she understood now, as much a target as a comfort - and made herself let it dim, curling her fingers around it, smothering the light against her own skin.

The ticking resumed, slower now, searching.

Maia held her breath and forced herself to move silently, the way she’d learned creeping down the stairs to the ruins just weeks ago. Heel first, weight shifting slowly, every footfall tested before it landed. She kept low, kept to the wall, feeling her way past the cold patches in the air where the thing had stood.

Then she saw it.

It was closer to where she’d just been, but not where she was now. A small flicker of hope crossed her as she realised it wasn’t hunting her position, only her last position. It arrived where she had been loud.

She tested the theory with her own fear driving her hands: she scooped a scattering of loose shard-splinters from the floor and threw them, hard against the far wall. The crash rang out, glass on stone.

The creature arrived there almost before the sound finished, folding into existence at the point of impact, ticking loud and fast now, its sockets fixed on the empty wall, its glass-jointed hands reaching for a sound with nothing behind it.

She had maybe three breaths before it understood she’d tricked it.

She used them. She crossed the chamber at a dead crouch-run, careful and silent, gathering every shard she passed within reach, until she stood at the chamber’s centre where the largest cluster of fragments lay embedded on the floor - the ones, she realised belatedly, that the whole room had been built around.

The ticking sharpened. It had noticed the missing echo, the too-long silence where a girl should have been. It began to circle, slowly and deliberately, testing the dark in widening arcs.

Maia knelt at the centre cluster and did the only thing she could think to do: she pressed both palms flat against every shard she could reach at once, and let them all flare together. Raw, screaming light was thrown in every direction, filling the chamber edge to edge.

The creature shrieked - a sound so pure and high it seemed to come from inside her own skull rather than the room. And for one instant, it caught fully in the light with nowhere to vanish into.

Its whole glass frame was visible: gaunt, ancient, its ribs strung in threads of something that might have been sinew, the hollows of its eyes finding her for the first time.

It lunged.

She threw herself backward, but she was too slow. A glass-boned hand caught her shoulder as she fell, talons tearing through fabric and skin. She screamed, the pain white-hot. She hit the ground hard, palm skidding across broken glass, splinters driving deep into her hand.

The creature reared back to strike again. And vanished before it landed, the light having given it somewhere else to be seen from, some angle it preferred.

It doesn’t like being seen fully, she understood, blood dripping through her fingers now. It needs the dark to move.

She had one working hand and perhaps four shards left within reach. It wasn’t enough to light the whole room again, but it didn’t need to be the whole room. Just enough of it.

She dragged herself towards the nearest wall sconce and jammed the shard into its base with shaking fingers, and forced everything she had left into it. It wasn’t as bright: only a small, steady glow.

The ticking stalled. Circled. But it came no closer.

It was a single point of light in a dark room, and apparently, that was enough to make even a monster built from glass and death think twice.

Behind the glass high in the walls, the Umbralyn watched in silence. Nobody moved. Nobody intervened.

Maia knelt in the dark at the edge of that one small, held light, blood dripping steadily from her shoulder and her torn palm, and waited for either the creature or her own strength to give out first.

Invisible energy surged outward before either could. Light flooded the chamber.