The horn's echo lingered, long and mournful, as if the world itself had groaned in warning. It rattled the marrow of every soul in the camp. The guards shifted uneasily, armor clinking, shields trembling as much from weary arms as from fear. Even the air seemed to shiver with the sound.
The fog moved in time with it, thickening, curling like smoke from a pyre that refused to die. It pulsed, breathed, as though the ruin itself exhaled.
Leo felt it before he saw it.
The shard in his chest thrummed like a drum, each beat pulling something closer. Wrongness pressed at the edges of his mind, oily and heavy, like a hand sliding across glass. He wanted to push it away, he tried, but the shard clung to it, eager, craving. The fragment wanted what approached.
The first shape tore itself free of the gray.
