The silence after the rhymes was worse than the chanting.
It didn't sound like victory. It sounded like something waiting.
Aria woke not with fire but with cold, the ash clinging to her skin, the damp seep of earth beneath her knees. The mark was quiet. Too quiet. But in the hollow it left, her heartbeat sounded like drums, heavy and off-beat, each thud echoing the last verse she had heard
Not his rhyme, not his song,
Forge your fire, make it strong.
Kael's words. His defiance. The only tether she still had.
She forced her eyes open. The clearing sprawled in ruin around her, the dawn a pale bruise spreading across the sky. Smoke curled from the earth in ribbons. The corpses of wolves and men lay like scattered offerings, their shadows long and blackened.
And the survivors had not left.
They had split.
