Page 112 of Tower of Ash and Darkness (Tower of Ash #1)

T he stars bleed silver against the ink-black sky, their light swallowed by the endless abyss stretching before me. The night is quiet, but not in the way that brings peace—it’s the silence before a storm. The world holds its breath, waiting, watching.

I am not alone.

An unseen, undeniable presence lingers, like a cold hand gripping the back of my neck.

A whisper of something ancient curls through the air, threading itself into my bones, into my blood.

My fingers twitch at my sides, magic aching beneath my skin like a wound that refuses to heal. It knows. It always knows.

The ghost appeared before me once, a shadow of a woman lost to time, stitched into the very fabric of this war. She spoke in warnings and riddles, her sorrow wrapping around me like a tender embrace.

He cannot have it.

Those words ring in my skull like a curse. Clyde. My father. The man I once believed to be unbreakable now looms like a specter in my thoughts, his hunger for power a sickness that will never be healed.

I swallow hard, the gravity of her message laying heavy like a stone on my chest. Tell him I will always love him.

She spoke of Casper, her voice laden with longing, her love reaching through the veil of death.

The ache in her words sparked a new realization.

I thought I knew everything about Casper, about the past we both carry, but the witch’s sorrow spoke of something more. Something I was never meant to know.

The book I hold in my hands is heavier than it should be, as if the secrets bound within its pages are waiting to be unleashed.

The bleeding tree, the power of shadow walking—it’s all here, etched in ink as dark as the abyss it describes.

I fight to keep my breathing steady, but my heart betrays me with its frantic rhythm.

If I do this, if I step into the space between life and death, I risk never coming back. I risk losing myself to the shadows.

But the choice was never mine to make. It was made the moment I stepped through that portal, the moment I chose to stand against my father, against the destiny he carved for me.

Casper and Callum wait beyond the trees.

They do not speak of what we left behind, of the cost we have yet to pay.

But I see it in the way Casper watches me, in the way Callum keeps his distance as if he knows what I am becoming.

We are bound together by something greater than fate, by choices made in the dark, by the war that looms just beyond the horizon.

A sharp wind cuts through the trees, carrying the scent of rain—and beneath it, something older, something long buried that should have stayed forgotten. I close my eyes and exhale, pushing away the knot of doubt tightening in my stomach. There’s no turning back now.

The storm is coming, and we will either survive it or be consumed by it.

I tighten my grip on the book, my decision carved into the marrow of my bones.

Let the shadows devour me, let them claim me whole.