Dawn broke like a bruise over the Woods, painting the treetops in streaks of violet and ash-gray. The rain had ceased, leaving the air heavy with the scent of wet earth and smoldering petals—storm-flowers crushed beneath hooves, their perfume a bittersweet echo of the night before.
Shade swung into the saddle behind Sirra on her massive black mare, Thunder's Mercy, the creature's muscles coiling like living lightning beneath him. Elias rode pillion on a spare mount—a sturdy gray gelding named Ashfall—his bandaged leg awkwardly slung over the pommel.
The camp vanished in minutes: tents folded, embers drowned, the carved stone rune tucked into Shade's saddlebag beside his half-sword—now whole. The blade's constellations had deepened, as though Lira's fire had burned its story into the steel itself.
Sirra led them at a ground-eating trot, her midnight armor dulled by dew. The silver hound emblazoned on her tabard caught the rising sun, glinting like an unblinking eye.
The Woods thinned as they rode. Copper leaves gave way to low scrub and thorn-bushes that whispered as they passed—half-formed warnings in a tongue of wind and bramble. To the right stretched the Vast Shores, a distant shimmer of glass-waves crashing against cliffs of lightning. Inland, the land rose into scarred hills, old hunt-trails etched deep: claw marks gouged into stone, bones half-buried like forgotten signposts.
Shade rode in silence. The rhythm of hooves thudded like a dull heartbeat against his grief. Lira's absence was a blade lodged between his ribs, twisting with every jolt.
He saw her everywhere—
in the blue flash of Sirra's cloak, echoing the Glasswood's chime;
in the reflection of Elias's scarred cheek, recalling the Choir's haunting depths;
in the pearl chain wrapped around his wrist, its half-melted links glowing faintly blue when he clenched his fist.
Live, she'd said, burning for him.
But what was life without her laugh in the sunlit cottage? Without her hand naming him whole?
The clan's old ghosts—his father's stone pride, his mother's trembling kiss—felt weightless beside this new void: a hollowness that mirrored the tower's abyss, devouring him from within.
He pressed a hand to his chest, as if to hold himself together. But the gesture only stirred her scent—lilac and sea-salt—clinging to his skin like a ghost's final touch. Tears pricked hot at the corners of his eyes. He swallowed them, jaw locked tight.
For us, he'd promised.
But us was ash now, and the promise tasted like smoke.
Elias rode slumped, stealing glances at him through the mist. His voice broke the rhythm of hooves.
"She... she hummed at the end," he murmured, almost to himself. "Like the pools. A lullaby."
Shade's throat closed.
"Don't."
The word cracked like a whip. Elias flinched, and silence fell again. Sirra glanced back, eyes gray and knowing, but she said nothing—yet.
They crested a ridge. The land unfurled before them: rolling moors blanketed in dark heather, dotted with standing stones leaning like weary sentinels.
The Emberhold, Sirra had said, lay a day's ride north—a squat fortress of basalt and ironwood, perched on a crag above the bleed-lines where nightmares seeped into waking.
"Walls that sing when the hunt nears," she'd told them that morning, fastening her greaves. "And a forge that mends more than steel."
By midday, they reached a crossroads marked by a weathered obelisk. Runes were carved deep into the stone, glowing faintly like the eyes of hounds. Sirra dismounted, leading Thunder's Mercy to drink from a trickling spring.
Shade leaned against the obelisk, tracing one of the runes with his thumb—a spiral stair entwined with a lantern. Lira's mark.
Sirra filled her waterskin, then turned to him. Her voice cut the air like a whetstone's scrape.
"You ride like a man chained to the dead. It'll kill you before the wolves circle back."
Shade's laugh came hollow, jagged.
"What's left to kill?"
He slid down the stone and sank to a crouch.
Then the wave hit.
Grief—raw, wordless—crashed through him. He saw Lira again in the fire's glare, her blue light devouring the wolves, her final smile framed by ruin. For the nights.
Now the nights were endless.
Sobs tore out of him, unbidden, shaking his frame until his fists struck the mud. "She burned," he gasped. "For me. After everything—the tower, the sea, the Door—she chose me to live. And I… I couldn't even—"
The words broke apart. The pearl chain seared his wrist, as if accusing him.
Elias limped closer, reaching out a hesitant hand, but Shade shrugged him off, curling inward.
Sirra watched him for a long time, expression unreadable. Then she knelt, her shadow cutting across his. Her hand—scarred, steady—clamped down on his shoulder.
"Grief's a hunt of its own," she said quietly. "It'll chase you until you turn and face it."
Her eyes softened, storm-gray with memory. "I know the bite."
She drew her blade halfway. The metal sang, runes etched along its length, the fuller pulsing with faint blue light. "Lost my wardens to the bleed ten winters past. My sister-chief, Elara—she bound the first hound with me. We rode together under blood-moon oaths, sealing rifts where nightmares spilled into the wilds."
Her gaze turned distant, haunted by the past she was dragging back into shape.
"Elara and I were hatchlings in the order. Trained beneath the Emberhold—oaths carved into our skin, hounds bound to our souls. We closed Doors that never should've opened: Choir-singers, Wrathhounds, things that still dream in bone."
Her hand tightened on the hilt. "One night, a rift tore open on the Vast Shores. Not tower-born, but older—First Hunt old. Elara went in first, her hound Grimtail at her side. The light swallowed her whole."
She paused, voice rasping.
"I sealed it. Bound her hound's fire to my Mercy. That's why she glows blue. Elara became the ward itself—a ghost in the bleed, closing rifts from within. Every storm since, I feel her there… in the thunder."
Sirra's eyes met his again, hard but kind.
"Grief didn't break me. It honed me. Made me the last Warden."
Shade looked up, mud streaking his face. Her story hit like shared pain—Elara's echo mirrored in Lira's flame.
"How?" he whispered. "How do you keep riding?"
Sirra extended a hand, pulling him to his feet.
"You don't," she said simply. "The grief rides you. But you steer it toward the hunt. For Elara. For your Lira. Turn the ache into blade-song."
Elias offered the waterskin, eyes hollow but steady.
"Like the pools," he said. "Reflect the pain. Don't drown in it."
Shade nodded slowly. The sobs ebbed, replaced by a fragile calm. The pearl chain cooled, its blue pulse syncing with his heartbeat.
They mounted again, the rune-stone heavy in Shade's pack. The road north beckoned—its horizon crowned by the jagged silhouette of the Emberhold, walls dark against the rising sun.
Hooves drummed against the earth, their rhythm shifting from grief to resolve.
The moors whispered as they passed—not warnings now, but invitations. Thorns bent aside. Heather bloomed under the weight of their passage. Shade's sorrow lingered—a shadow riding beside him—but Sirra's words wove through it like houndfire, steady and bright.
By dusk, the Emberhold loomed before them: basalt towers, squat and thorn-crowned, ironwood gates scrawled with runes that hummed faintly in the gathering dark. Smoke coiled from the forges, carrying the tang of molten starlight.
Sirra raised a horn to her lips and blew.
The sound rang like a hound's bay—deep, resonant, mournful.
The gates opened.
Wardens emerged—few, gaunt, their eyes mirroring Sirra's. A grizzled forge-master grasped her forearm, burn-scars gleaming under emberlight.
"Sirra Houndheart," he said. "The bleed stirs. Riders on the Shores—blue-cloaked, blade like Maria's ghost."
Sirra's jaw tightened.
"The tower fell," she replied. "The First Hunt wakes."
Shade dismounted. The half-sword hummed at his side, alive with blue resonance.
Grief sharpened into purpose.
Lira's legacy burned bright again.
The Emberhold's forge-fire flickered in his eyes, blue and unyielding.
The storm was coming.
And he would meet it edged.