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“First, we survive. We get to Ravencross. After that, I’ll need to see what the world has become in my absence.”

She doesn’t appear entirely satisfied with this answer, but doesn’t press further. Instead she wraps her arms around herself, and rests her cheek against her knees.

I lift one hand toward the far corner, and draw shadow into shape. A resting space. Warm, enclosed, safe.

“Sleep. Tomorrow will be another long day of walking.”

She stands and walks over to it, testing it with one hand, then lies down, facing me. It doesn’t take long for her to fall asleep. Once her breathing slows and deepens, I stand up and step outside.

Here, under the sky, with no witnesses, I can finally do what I have ached to do since first setting foot outside of the tower.

I lift my arms, palms up in silent invocation. My eyes close as I reach out, not with sight or sound, but something deeper. Toward a presence carved into me long before chains and bindings.

My shadow familiar. My other half. My most loyal servant and closest companion.

Forced into exile when I was bound, surviving somehow in the darkness between places, while I languished in my prison.

“Find me,” I whisper into the darkness. The words carry power, vibrating through the shadows coalescing around me like ripples in still water. My voice, unused to commanding rather than surviving, cracks with emotion I will never allow anyone to witness. “Return to me.”

I pour my will into the command, every fiber of my being focused on sending it racing through the night.

My call passes far beyond physical limitations, beyond mere distance, reaching into spaces where darkness holds dominion.

Wherever my familiar has survived all these years, whatever form it has taken to endure, it will hear me.

It will feel the sundering of my chains.

It will know its master is free once more.

For a moment nothing happens. Just night sounds and distant stars.

Then the night shifts, almost imperceptibly at first, then with undeniable intent.

The sky itself seems to shudder in response, stars briefly dimming as though something has passed between them and the earth.

Something stirs in the vast darkness. Distant yet, but aware now, awakening to my summons.

I feel an answering pulse, faint but unmistakable. Like a heartbeat synchronizing with my own after years of separation.

Recognition. Acknowledgement. Longing that mirrors my own. After all this time, I am no longer alone.

I lift my hands, and darkness answers. Shadows pour from every direction, gathering around me in a swirling vortex of pure night.

I shape it, mold it, command it to take form after form.

Weapons. Creatures. Structures that defy normal physics.

The power builds, flowing through channels long denied, filling with me its presence.

It fills me. Not fully. Not yet. But enough. This is the threshold, not the summit.

By the time we reach Thornevale Ridge, I will be close to my former power.

And then … then they will remember why they feared me.

The Authority believes they have neutralized me. That I am no longer a threat to their order .

They are mistaken. They merely delayed the inevitable.

Their purges. Their persecution. Their attempts to erase magic from this realm. All of it will be answered for.

I turn my gaze eastward, toward the mountains hidden beyond the night sky. Somewhere out there, the remnants of my network may still exist. Loyalists who remember me, who kept faith during my long absence. I need to find them, mobilize them, and prepare them for what’s to come.

And Ellie?

I glance back toward the shelter where she sleeps, unaware of the forces swirling around her. She has served her purpose by breaking my chains and freeing me from the tower. Logic suggests she has outlived her usefulness.

Yet something about her continues to intrigue me.

The tower responded to her in a way it shouldn’t have, in a way it never responded to anyone else who may have approached over the decades.

She was drawn here from another world when my spell should have found someone native to this realm.

She broke a binding that should have transferred to her instead, imprisoning her in my place.

And she opened the door of the tower when its purpose was containment, not liberation.

These are not coincidences, and I do not believe in accidents of fate.

Even her strange lack of fear when confronted with my abilities suggests something unusual about her nature.

What is she, this woman who sleeps peacefully surrounded by my shadows?

What role might she play yet in what’s to come ?

I find myself reluctant to dismiss her as merely a tool that has served its purpose. Another curiosity to examine when time permits.

The night deepens around me. I extend my senses, feeling the desert for miles in all directions. Nothing approaches. Nothing threatens. We are alone—the freed prisoner and the woman from another world, moving toward a future neither of us can fully comprehend yet.

But one thing is certain.

My time has come again. And the reckoning begins.