Outside the tunnels, the city was slipping into a nightmare. Strange blackouts rolled through blocks at a time — streetlights flickering out, neon signs dying in mid-glow, entire districts swallowed in darkness. Whispers of shadows moving where they shouldn't be spread like wildfire.
Inside an abandoned factory on the city's edge, the last fragments of Sanavak — seeds of hunger and ruin — had begun to gather. Drawn like iron to a magnet, they slid through pipes and drains, seeped through cracks in basement walls, and pooled in the shadows of the broken factory floor.
There, in the dark, they found each other — binding together with a hiss like a dying storm. The air turned cold, damp with a wrongness that crept under skin. Slowly, a shape began to form — not man, not beast, but something half-born from nightmare. Limbs like mist and smoke stretched across steel beams. A thousand whispering mouths breathed as one: "We are hunger."
---
Back at the Forest's Edge
Zindra, Liyaya, and the captive enforcers emerged from the underground tunnels before dawn, the forest waiting for them like a living wall. Zindra's runes were dim, drained by the fight. Liyaya's fingertips still glowed faintly when she touched the trees — and the trees seemed to lean closer in answer.
They tied the enforcers to a fallen log. Zindra gave them water and stripped their armor of its tracking runes, knowing Cyne would send more soon.
He turned to Liyaya. "The cult's broken. But it's not enough. Sanavak's seeds will look for each other. If they merge…"
She finished his thought, voice steady but low. "They'll become something worse than fragments."
Kethra's betrayal still echoed between them, but Liyaya didn't flinch. She pressed her palm to Zindra's chest — feeling the Meakery Senlord's faint hum beneath her touch. "Where is it gathering?"
Zindra closed his eyes, letting the runes flicker. Images rippled in the air — the city's power grid, the snaking tunnels beneath, the old steel bones of abandoned places no one bothered to watch.
Then he saw it — the factory on the edge of town, devoured by shadows that pulsed and breathed.
"There." He opened his eyes, their light reflected in hers. "If we're going to stop it, it has to be now — before it finishes taking form."
Liyaya nodded. "Then we go together."
Zindra hesitated — fear flashing behind his warrior's mask. "If it's stronger than us—"
"—Then we find a way," she cut in. "This world chose me for a reason. Maybe I'm the missing piece."
He pulled her close, forehead resting on hers. For a moment, the world was quiet — the forest breathing around them. Then they turned as one and slipped through the trees toward the sleeping city.
---
In the Factory
The shadows gathered themselves into muscle and bone. Broken metal twisted like ribs around a writhing heart of black flame. Eyes flickered open along its shifting hide — not one pair but dozens, watching the city skyline with a hunger that dripped like venom.
It breathed in the city's fear — the darkness spreading with every flicker of the failing grid.
And somewhere deep inside the shifting shape, a single thought echoed, echoing through every fragment reunited: "The sentinel comes. Let him."
---
In the distance, two lights moved through the dark — one the cold blue glow of Cyne's last sentinel. The other the soft green pulse of a woman bound to Earth's oldest power. Together, they stepped into the night — to face the monster that waited to devour them all.