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With a running leap, she catapulted herself onto Skye’s back.

“Oof,” he grunted, mostly from surprise.

“I need to know everything,” she demanded, her arms locking around his neck.

He adjusted instinctively, hands coming up to support her thighs as he hoisted her higher. Skye turned to Kato with a resigned smile. “Taly would very much have liked to come with us today,” he explained.

“Ivain didn’t want me to leave the city,” Taly said with a roll of her eyes.

“Well, in his defense,” Kato said dryly, “we did go to an awful lot of trouble trying to get you back inside it.”

Taly stuck her tongue out at him, refusing to be distracted from what was really important here. “I want to know all about the riftway. Did it actually open? What was the resonance frequency?”

Skye turned, and she turned with him. He nodded towards Kato. “He has notes and glamographs.”

Taly sucked in a breath, barely choking back the shriek of excitement bubbling up. “Are you staying for dinner?”

Kato looked surprised by the invitation, his brows lifting. “I wasn’t planning—”

Taly arched a brow.

He hesitated, like he wanted to make an excuse. But then a smile won out—small, real, softening the edges of his face. “Uh, yeah. Sure,” he surrendered. “Why not?”

Taly bounced with glee on Skye’s back as he keyed in the code to the pedestrian gate, the familiar metallic click signaling its release. The gate swung open, and they stepped inside.

“Was there any fluctuation in the shadow crystal alignment? Did the energy signatures match the Gates? Was there any spatial distortion?”

For some reason, that made both shadow mages laugh.

“What?” she demanded, her eyes darting between them. “What’s so funny?”

Skye shook his head, something halfway between a grin and a grimace tugging at his lips. “Yeah, there was some… spatial distortion.”

“And by that, he means ‘giant gaping hole in the ground,’” Kato added as he followed them into the townhouse. “Totally Skye’s fault, by the way. I was nowhere nearby when things went boom.”

That night, Taly made another attempt at scrying.

Again, the threads slipped through her fingers like mist.

Again, the images scattered before she could grab hold of them.

Again, that flicker—black and twisting at the edges of her sight.

Again, she found nothing.

She tried the next night too. And the next. And the next.

A week passed, and she kept searching. The days blurred together, and all she had to show for it were fragments: adarkened library where the amulet rested among dusty tomes; a bustling marketplace where it exchanged hands beneath a stall’s canopy; a crumbling ruin, the carvings barely visible under centuries of moss and decay.

Sometimes, she recognized a place. Ryme was old—it had seen its fair share of comings and goings. When she could, she went there, walking the same streets, collecting remnants—a scrap of metal, an old map, keys long separated from their locks but still humming with temporal residue. Anything to pull the past into focus.

Not that it helped.

Every thread unraveled. Every answer twisted into more questions.

And always, that flicker of black lingered.

“I’m starting to think I’m just terrible at this,” Taly muttered one evening, trudging into her bedroom after yet another failure.