Sera kept her word about the rules — no wandering, no touching, and absolutely no stepping off the marked paths she scratched into the ash with her steel-tipped cane.
They made camp in the shell of a ruined watchtower. Kaelen tried to sleep, but the island whispered. The wind carried voices that weren't voices — distant chanting, the grind of colossal chains far below the surface.
Sera sat near the dying campfire, rolling a sealed parchment tube between her hands.
"You're not here for answers," she said finally. "You're here for this."
She tossed the tube to Kaelen. He unrolled it, and the air seemed to warp around the parchment.
It was a map — but not of the archipelago as he knew it. The floating isles were drawn as fractured pieces of a single continent, each labeled in an ancient script. At the center was a vast pit, marked only with a single rune: TITAN'S HEART.
Kaelen's rune flared again, sending a shock up his arm.
"That's where your mark wants to take you," Sera said. "But every cartographer who's ever gone looking for that place has vanished."
She didn't say it, but Kaelen heard the unspoken words: and I expect you will too.