Page 24

24

LIORA

T he cavern bears down on us, thick with something unseen, something ancient. The very air coils tight, watching, as if the stone walls themselves breathe.

Dain is on edge. He’s hiding something from me.

The way he ripped the notebook from my hands, the wildness in his eyes, it was more than anger. It was fear.

That terrifies me more than anything else.

"Dain," I press, voice sharper than I intend. "What is this place?"

His grip tightens on the notebook, claws indenting the brittle pages. He does not answer.

"What are you afraid of?" I push again, stepping closer, challenging him.

His wings shift, tension coiling in his frame like a beast about to strike. He looks at me then, his eyes flickering molten gold, but beneath that fire, there is something else.

"I told you to stop asking questions," he growls, his voice darker than I have ever heard it.

My heart pounds. "You recognized that figurine, didn't you?" I press on. "This place means something to you."

His expression hardens. A wall slams into place.

"Leave it," he says.

No. I can’t.

There’s something important he’s hiding from me.

I can feel it in the way he moves, restless, coiled, dangerous. His steps are sharp, his claws flexing, wings half-flared, as if expecting an attack that hasn’t yet come. The moment I uncovered that figurine, that notebook, something inside him fractured.

He won’t say why.

He refuses to speak at all.

I grip my arms against the cold, but it’s not the cold that unsettles me—it’s the silence. The kind of silence that comes before something terrible.

Dain abruptly turns his head toward the cave entrance, his entire body locking up in rigid stillness. His eyes are fixed on something I can’t see. A low growl rumbles from deep in his chest, reverberating through the cavern like a distant storm.

“Dain?” I whisper, because suddenly, the darkness beyond the cave feels alive.

The shadows at the threshold shift, stretching unnaturally, spilling forward like something rising from the depths of a blackened sea.

A void. Moving.

Reaching.

Dain reacts first.

His wings flare wide, claws unsheathing, and then he lunges.

The sound that follows is not of flesh meeting flesh, but of something wrong. His claws cut through the thing, but it doesn’t react like a living creature. It does not bleed.

Instead, the darkness absorbs the impact, shifting like liquid, as if it is not bound to the laws of this world.

Dain snarls, pulling back. His hands flex, and suddenly the temperature shifts—heat ripples off him in waves.

Magic.

I don’t understand what I’m seeing, but I can feel it.

The cavern pulses in response, and then, before my mind can catch up, the entity attacks.

It lurches toward him in tendrils of blackness, serpentine and silent, moving like a mist yet solid as steel. Dain barely dodges the first strike before another tendril whips around, slamming into his side. He grunts, staggering back, and the sound that follows is wrong.

A deep, vibrating hum, almost like laughter, but not.

Not something that should exist.

Dain crouches, breathing hard, and I notice it, uncertainty.

He’s fought monsters, elves, creatures from nightmares but this thing doesn’t play by the same rules.

I press myself against the walls, my pulse hammering as I scan the cavern for anything that can help. My hands skim over the edges of the carved shelves, desperate, slipping on dust-covered relics, books, broken glass?—

And then I feel it.

Cold. The moment my fingers graze it, my entire arm stiffens.

I look down.

A book.

No cover. No title.

Only blackened pages, as if burned from the inside.

A tremor runs through me as the tome shudders, its pages rippling, though there is no wind.

Something whispers, low and sweet, ancient and waiting.

I can’t breathe. I should let go.

But I don’t.

The book flips open on its own.

A single page, stained with something dark, like ink, like blood.

The whisper turns into a voice.

Not from the cavern. Not from Dain.

From inside me.

My lips part. And I speak.

The words spill out, alien and familiar all at once. A language that is not mine, but is.

The entity turns toward me, tendrils snapping in recognition. The whisper becomes a scream.

Magic erupts.

The cavern shudders, the walls pulsing with raw power. The entity writhes as the blast of force collides into it.

Dain shouts my name. The entity wails, but the sound is distant, muted, as if coming from somewhere far away.

I cannot stop. The words are not mine to stop.

Pain splits through me, tearing from my skull to my ribs, like claws sinking into my flesh. My eyes burn, and something wet trails down my cheeks.

I blink, but my vision blurs.

I see it—red.

Blood. I am crying blood.

The voice is inside me, screaming now, demanding something I do not understand.

The book rips from my hands, its pages bursting into shadow, swallowed by the very thing it unleashed.

My knees buckle. Everything around me seems to collapse.

The last thing I see before darkness takes me is Dain’s furious, terrified face.