The ruins were silent.Too silent.
Dust still hung in the air, motes catching faint streaks of light that filtered through the shattered roof. Liora's breathing came in ragged bursts, her fingers still white-knuckled around the hilt of her dagger.
Kaelen stood at the center of the chamber, staring at the blackened fragments of the shard scattered across the stone floor. They pulsed once, just once before going still.
"It's over," Liora whispered, her voice almost trembling.
Kaelen wanted to believe her.He should have believed her.
But the silence pressed in on him like a weight, and something inside him… shifted.
He flexed his fingers and felt a faint tremor ripple through his arm. It was so subtle that he might have dismissed it as fatigue, but then came the warmth. No, not warmth, heat, blooming under his skin like embers buried too deep to cool.
Liora stepped closer. "You're hurt. Let me"
"I'm fine," he cut her off, too quickly. The words felt wrong in his mouth, almost as if they weren't his.
Outside, the wind had died. No rustle of leaves. No distant calls of night birds. Just the creak of scorched timbers as the ruins seemed to settle into their grave.
Liora crouched and picked up a shard fragment. It crumbled instantly, leaving nothing but black dust clinging to her gloves. She frowned. "Strange. It shouldn't just… disintegrate like that."
Kaelen didn't answer. He couldn't.
Because now the heat was spreading to his chest, curling up toward his throat, and beneath it, he could hear something. A low, guttural hum. Like a voice that wasn't a voice, whispering from inside his bones.
We are not gone.
His vision flickered, just for a heartbeat and in that flicker, he saw himself standing in a vast hall of crimson glass, a crown of jagged black thorns pressed into his skull. His reflection was smiling at him.
Then it was gone.
"Kaelen?" Liora's voice pulled him back. Her hand was on his arm now, her eyes sharp with worry.
He forced himself to meet her gaze, to push the rising dread back down where it came from. "Let's get out of here," he said. "Before the ruin decides to bury us."
They left the chamber, the echo of their footsteps the only sound.Neither of them noticed that in the dust where Kaelen had been standing, faint black veins were beginning to spread… like roots searching for something to cling to.