The silence of the Sky-Reach Ruins was heavier than the noise of the battle had been. It was a thick, suffocating thing that tasted like iron and ozone. Elara sat on the obsidian floor, her fingers tracing the place where the Beta had vanished. There was no blood. No bone. Just a faint, shimmering residue that looked like crushed diamonds.
"Don't stare at the hollows," Shen said. His voice was rougher now, stripped of its combative edge. He was kneeling by a stone basin, washing the grime from his face with melted snow. "The more you look into the space where you sent him, the more that space starts looking back at you."
Elara looked up, her eyes still shimmering with a faint, residual blue light. "Where did he go, Shen? Truly?"
Shen paused, his hand dripping water. He looked at her with a somber gravity. "He went back to the Source. To the spirit-well. You didn't just kill his body, Elara. You unmade his tether to this world. To the Great Wolf in the sky, it's as if he never existed."
A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold raced down Elara's spine. For nineteen years, she had been a "Null"—a nothing. Now, she had the power to turn others into nothing. The irony was a bitter pill to swallow.
"We can't stay here," Shen continued, standing up. He grabbed a leather pack from the shadows and tossed a pair of thick, fur-lined boots toward her. "The High Alpha Council will have felt that blast. A Shent Howl is like a flare in a dark room. Every power-hungry Alpha from here to the Iron Sea is currently turning their nose toward the wind."
"You said we're going to the Mountain of Glass," Elara said, pulling the boots on. Her hands were still shaking. "Is that where your pack is?"
Shen's face darkened, a muscle jumping in his jaw. "I don't have a pack, Elara. I have a graveyard. The Mountain of Glass is where the first Shent was born, and where the last one was executed. It's the only place where the veil is thick enough to hide your heartbeat from the Council's Seers."
The Shadow-Walk
They left the ruins as the sun began to bleed over the horizon, but they didn't take the forest paths. Instead, Shen led her toward a shimmering distortion in the air between two ancient, twisted oaks.
"Step exactly where I step," Shen commanded. He reached back, his large, scarred hand enveloping hers. His grip was firm, grounding her. "We're entering the Ghost-Roads. It's the space between the physical world and the spirit realm. It's faster, but if you lose your focus, you'll wander into the Grey Mist and never come out."
As they stepped through the distortion, the world changed. The vibrant greens and browns of the forest were replaced by shades of silver, charcoal, and deep indigo. The trees were tall and spindly, their leaves made of frozen light. There was no wind, yet the air hummed with a thousand overlapping whispers.
Elara gasped, her breath coming out as a puff of blue mist. "It's beautiful."
"It's a trap," Shen warned, pulling her closer to his side. "The Ghost-Roads show you what you want to see. Don't look at the shadows in the periphery. They'll look like people you've lost. They'll sound like the mother you never knew."
Elara kept her eyes fixed on the back of Shen's head. His dark hair seemed to flow like liquid smoke in this place. She felt a strange pull toward him—not just the fated mate bond, but something deeper. Her "Null" soul, which had been empty for so long, was finally being filled, and it was his scent, his presence, that acted as the anchor.
"Shen," she whispered, her voice echoing strangely in the silver woods. "Why did you call yourself a 'God-Eater'?"
Shen slowed his pace but didn't stop. "The first Alphas were gods, Elara. They were titans of fur and claw who didn't just hunt deer—they hunted stars. But as the centuries passed, the blood thinned. The Alphas became petty kings. My bloodline... we didn't lose the old ways. We learned how to consume the essence of the spirit-bound. I was born to hunt things like you."
He stopped then, turning to face her. In the indigo light of the Ghost-Roads, his golden eyes looked like twin lanterns.
"That is the cruelty of the fates," he said, his voice dropping to a low rumble. "They paired the Spirit-Born with the Spirit-Devourer. I was made to be your ending, Elara. But the moment I heard your howl, my hunger turned into something else. Something I don't have a name for."
Elara reached out, her fingers grazing the jagged scar on his chest. "Protection. It's called protection."
Shen let out a dry, mirthless laugh. "Or obsession. Be careful, little wolf. A God-Eater's love is just as hungry as his teeth."
The First Hunger
They walked for what felt like hours, though time in the Ghost-Roads was a fluid concept. Eventually, the silver trees began to thin, and a new sensation hit Elara.
Hunger.
It wasn't a stomach-deep hunger for food; it was a soul-deep craving for energy. Her skin began to itch, the blue light beneath her veins flickering erratically.
"I... I feel strange," she stumbled, her knees turning to water.
Shen caught her before she hit the silver grass. "The transformation. Your body is human, but your spirit is Shent. You're burning through your life-force because you haven't learned how to draw power from the world around you."
He sat her down against a glowing stump and knelt before her. "You need to feed."
"On what?" Elara asked, her vision beginning to blur into a haze of indigo.
Shen didn't answer with words. He bared his neck, the pulse of his jugular visible and steady. "On me. I have enough ancient blood to stabilize you until we reach the Mountain."
"I can't bite you," Elara protested, horrified.
"You won't bite," Shen said, taking her hand and placing it directly over his heart. "Direct it. Focus on the heat in my chest. Take what you need, Elara. If you don't, the void inside you will start eating your own mind."
Elara closed her eyes. She felt the rhythmic thumping of his heart—a powerful, steady drum. She let her consciousness drift, reaching out with the "needle and thread" Shen had described earlier.
She touched his spirit.
It was like stepping into a sun. Shen's essence was a roaring bonfire of gold and crimson. It was violent, ancient, and breathtakingly warm. She took a tentative pull, drawing a sliver of that warmth into her own cold, blue veins.
Shen let out a low, guttural groan. His head fell back, his eyes rolling into his head as the connection deepened.
It was more intimate than a kiss. It was a total invasion of privacy. Elara saw flashes of his life: the cold mountain where he was raised, the blood on his hands after his first kill, the crushing loneliness of being a monster among men. And through it all, she felt his singular focus—her. The scream he had heard in his dreams for nineteen years.
As the energy flowed into her, Elara's strength returned. Her skin stopped itching, and the blue light stabilized into a soft, steady glow. She felt whole. She felt his.
She pulled her hand away, gasping.
Shen slumped forward, his forehead resting on her shoulder. He was breathing heavily, his skin pale but his eyes bright with a feverish light.
"Is that... how it always is?" she whispered.
"No," Shen rasped, pulling back to look at her. His pupils were blown wide. "That was... more than I expected. You don't just take, Elara. You commune."
The Shadow in the Woods
Before they could recover, the humming whispers of the Ghost-Roads suddenly went silent. The silver leaves stopped shimmering.
Shen was on his feet in a second, his claws sliding out with a lethal shink. "Something is wrong. The Roads are closing."
"Is it Silas?" Elara asked, her heart racing.
"No," Shen said, sniffing the air. His lip curled back in a snarl. "Silas is a dog. This... this smells like old parchment and Grave-Dust. The High Council didn't send hunters. They sent an Inquisitor."
Out of the indigo mist, a figure appeared. It didn't walk; it drifted. It wore long, flowing robes of bone-white silk, and its face was covered by a mask of polished silver with no eye-slits. In its hand, it carried a staff topped with a skull that breathed green fire.
"Shen of the God-Eater Clan," the figure spoke, its voice sounding like a thousand people whispering at once. "You have interfered with the natural order. You have awakened a Shent without the Council's blessing."
"The Council can take their blessing and bury it in the dirt," Shen growled, stepping in front of Elara. "She belongs to no one."
"She belongs to the Balance," the Inquisitor countered. The green fire on the staff flared bright. "A Shent is a weapon of the gods. In the hands of a rogue Alpha, she is a world-ender. We cannot allow her to reach the Mountain of Glass."
The Inquisitor raised the staff, and the ground beneath Elara's feet turned into a swirling vortex of black sand.
"Run, Elara!" Shen yelled, lunging toward the masked figure.
But Elara didn't run. She felt the heat of Shen's blood still singing in her veins. She felt the power of the Ghost-Roads vibrating around her.
She stood her ground, her eyes turning a solid, glowing blue.
"I am not a weapon," she said, her voice shaking the indigo trees. "And I am done being afraid.