Dawn broke pale and uneasy over the palace. The garden should have smelled of jasmine and dew, but the air was heavy, faintly metallic, as if the night had not truly ended though morning had taken over.
Aveline couldn't shake off the image of the man who vanished from her bedroom from her mind. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the mask, the strange crest, his regal. They all felt strange.
"Leora," she said quietly, staring out her window. "You're sure no one came in?"
Her maid shook her head. "No one, my lady. The door was locked. I swear it was."
Aveline pressed a trembling hand to her lips. "Then how did he leave?"
Outside, a petal fell from the royal roses and crumbled to black dust the moment it touched the ground. Neither of them noticed.
The palace hummed with normal life. The guards changing post, servants bustling but to Aveline it all sounded distant and false. Something had shifted in the air. The silence between sounds was too deep.
That night in the garden replayed in her mind again and again, and with every memory, her heart ached not from fear, but from something unknown.She didn't know that in the shadows beneath her balcony, something else was remembering her too.
It had no face. Only movement.The same thing that had slipped through the crack Maeric tore open now slid silently through the palace walls. It wasn't after her yet. It was searching,sniffing out the remnant of its master's magic. And when it found it, the night around her room grew a shade darker.
Aveline shivered and turned. "Leora… close the curtains."
The maid obeyed quickly, but when her fingers brushed the fabric, her breath hitched. The window glass was too cold. Frost spread in a perfect spiral pattern, as if something had pressed its hand against it from the other side.
"Did you see that?" Aveline whispered.
Before Leora could answer, the frost melted instantly.
The air was quiet again.Far beyond the veil, Maeric woke to the same chill.
The Umbral Bind was still burning under his ribs, but it wasn't just the curse this time. He could also feel the echo of his crossing something had followed him through.
"The breach isn't stable," his physician murmured. "You tore it too wide. The shadow will find the one who touched you."
Maeric's pulse sharpened. "The human?"
"She's not safe," the man said. "Neither are you."
Maeric stood despite the pain, his hands curling into fists. "Then it's already begun."
The torches flickered. Outside, wolves began howling in patterns that sounded like a call, not a warning.
Back in the human realm, Aveline woke at midnight to the faint echo of those howls, distant, foreign, and yet close enough to her window to make her heart stop.
She didn't know it yet, but the boundary that kept her world safe was already cracking again.
And the next time it broke, it wouldn't bring a man.
It would bring what followed him.