The twisted road felt wrong against Tyrian's boots.

  Not uneven—wrong. Like the ground itself was uncertain about what direction "down" should be. Every step required conscious thought, conscious balance, as if the laws that governed how things fell and stayed had become suggestions rather than certainties. Tyrian had walked thousands of miles in his life, and never once had he needed to think about the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other.

  Until now.

  "Don't look at the trees too long," Varden warned, his voice tight with the kind of tension that came from seeing things that violated fundamental assumptions about reality. The Dvarin was still holding his runestone slate, but the detection runes flickering across its surface kept dissolving before completing their patterns—starting strong, then fuzzing out like water poured on ink. "Your brain will try to make sense of angles that don't exist. Makes people sick. Sometimes makes them scream. Once saw a mage stare at a spatial distortion for ten minutes. Took three months before he could walk straight again."

  "Comforting," Tyrian muttered, trying not to think about how the bark on one tree seemed to spiral in three directions simultaneously, or how another tree's shadow fell at an angle that had nothing to do with where the sun actually was.

  "I aim to educate, not comfort," Varden replied, making another adjustment to his runework. "Comfort gets people killed. Knowledge at least gives you a chance."

  Calven moved forward with predatory caution, shield held ready at an angle that could deflect from multiple directions, eyes scanning everything with the methodical precision of someone who'd survived too many ambushes to take any situation at face value. His movements were economical, practiced—a man who'd learned long ago that wasted motion could mean death.

  He approached the lead wagon where the driver still sat, empty-eyed and breathing but utterly absent. Calven waved a hand in front of the man's face. No reaction. Not even a blink.

  "Kaelis. Perimeter. Now."

  The Lyfan was already moving, a blur of motion that took her up the nearest untwisted tree—one of the few that still remembered what vertical meant—with impossible grace. She moved like wind made flesh, finding handholds that shouldn't exist and using momentum in ways that defied Tyrian's understanding of physics.

  She perched on a branch that probably shouldn't have supported her weight, silver eyes scanning the forest with an intensity that belied her usual playfulness. This was a different Kaelis—the professional scout, the survivor, the woman who'd lived this long by seeing threats before they became problems.

  Several seconds passed. Tyrian found himself holding his breath.

  "Movement," she called down finally. "East side. Multiple contacts. Coming fast. Moving through the underbrush like they don't care about stealth."

  "How many?"

  "Enough to be a problem." She shifted her weight, readying herself, one hand already on a blade. "Maybe a dozen. Could be more—hard to see through this mess. Armed. Moving wrong, though. Jerky. Like they're not sure where their feet are, or like their bodies aren't quite following orders."

  Calven's jaw tightened. Tyrian saw the calculation happening behind those winter-blue eyes—numbers, positioning, threat assessment, all processed in seconds. "Bram, stay with the caravan. Keep the survivors stable. If anyone wakes up screaming, keep them quiet—we don't know what else is listening."

  "Got it," Bram said, sounding only moderately terrified, which was probably his version of calm. "Medical station. Quiet screaming. My specialty. Though I'd really prefer no screaming at all, if we're taking requests."

  "Varden, defensive positions. Give us something to work with. Make the terrain our ally."

  The Runebinder nodded, already moving to the edge of the clearing with purpose. His hands traced patterns in the air—complex geometric shapes that left faint trails of light before fading—and his runestone slate pulsed with stored power. Tyrian could feel it, actually feel the buildup of magical energy like static before a storm.

  "Camerise—" Calven started.

  "I'm with Tyrian," she said, her voice still strained but firm. She'd recovered somewhat from whatever she'd sensed in the twisted space, though she kept one hand pressed to her temple and her other three arms held slightly away from her body, as if ready to cast at a moment's notice. Her sapphire eyes held a distant quality that worried Tyrian—she was still partially elsewhere, still seeing things the rest of them couldn't.

  "Brayden?" Calven looked at the veteran.

  "Where the boy goes, I go," Brayden said simply. His sword was already drawn, his stance that of a man who'd stood on too many battlefields to be impressed by one more. But his eyes were sharp, assessing, cataloging threats with professional detachment. He'd positioned himself at Tyrian's left side—his sword arm side. Old tactics. Proven tactics.

  Tyrian felt a flash of irritation at being called "boy," but swallowed it. Brayden had earned the right to call him whatever he wanted. The man had kept him alive through childhood mishaps, adolescent stupidity, and now apparently ancient magical disturbances. Besides, now wasn't the time for wounded pride.

  "Fine," Calven said. "Standard formation. Protect the caravan, neutralize threats, and for the love of every frozen god, nobody chase them into the trees. We don't know what's in there, and I'd prefer not to find out by getting ambushed six ways from tomorrow."

  "Boring," Kaelis called from above. "But practical. You're very practical, captain."

  "That's why I'm captain and you're—"

  The first arrow came out of the forest like a whispered promise of violence.

  Tyrian saw it.

  Actually saw it—not just the shaft cutting through the shimmer-distorted air, but the trajectory. The intent behind it. The space it would occupy before it arrived. Time didn't slow. His thoughts didn't speed up. But somehow he knew where it would be, the same way he knew where his own hand was without looking, the same way he knew when someone was about to speak before they opened their mouth.

  This was different. This was certain.

  He moved.

  The arrow passed through the space his head had occupied a heartbeat before, so close he felt the displaced air kiss his cheek like a lover's farewell and heard the fletcher's feather whisper past his ear. It buried itself in a wagon wheel with a solid thunk that would have been his skull, would have punched through bone and brain and ended him before he even knew he was dead.

  His heart hammered. His breath caught. He was alive because he'd known.

  "DOWN!" Calven roared, and the world exploded into chaos.

  -break-

  They came from three directions at once—figures in mismatched armor and leather, weapons drawn, faces twisted with something that wasn't quite rage and wasn't quite fear. More like confusion weaponized into violence, desperation given form and sharp edges.

  Bandits, Tyrian's mind supplied automatically. Forest raiders. The kind that haunted trade roads and preyed on isolated caravans, the desperate and the vicious who'd chosen predation over honest work. Every kingdom had them. Every forest road knew their threat.

  But something was profoundly wrong with them.

  Their movements were jerky, uncoordinated—not the fluid efficiency of experienced fighters, but the lurching uncertainty of puppets with tangled strings. They shouted challenges, but the words were slurred, wrong-shaped in their mouths, consonants that didn't quite connect and vowels that lasted too long or not long enough. And their eyes—even from a distance, Tyrian could see their eyes were too wide, pupils dilated to the point of drowning out the iris entirely. Black pools with thin rings of color around the edges, like looking into wells that went down forever.

  One woman was crying as she charged, tears streaming down her face even as her sword came up to kill.

  Another man was screaming—not in rage, but in fear. Terrified of what he was doing even as he did it.

  "Dreamfall contamination," Camerise breathed beside him, her voice carrying horror and recognition in equal measure. "They're caught in the ripple. Walking through two realities at once. Half here, half somewhere else. They don't even know where they are. Don't know what they're doing. Their bodies are moving but their minds are drowning."

  "Can you help them?" Tyrian asked, watching a woman stumble over nothing, catch herself, and charge forward with her sword held at entirely the wrong angle—too high, too far from her center, the grip all wrong.

  "Not while they're trying to kill us," Camerise said, and something in her voice cracked. "Maybe after. If they survive. If we survive. If any of this makes sense when it's over."

  Fair point.

  Calven hit the first attacker like a battering ram wrapped in controlled violence. His shield came up to meet the man's wild sword swing, deflecting it with a practiced twist of his wrist and shoulder that sent the weapon spinning away into the twisted underbrush. A follow-up strike with the shield's edge—not a punch, but a precise application of force to the pressure point just below the attacker's ear—sent the bandit crashing backward into one of the wrongly-angled trees.

  The man slumped, unconscious but breathing. Alive. Calven was already moving to the next threat before the body hit the ground.

  No wasted movement. No excess force. No killing unless necessary. Just brutal, terrifying efficiency born from years of staying alive in a profession where most people died young.

  Tyrian had seen professional soldiers fight. Had trained with some of the best duelists House Blackwood could hire, men and women who'd made names for themselves in tournaments and wars. But watching Calven was like watching water flow downhill—utterly natural, utterly unstoppable, following the path of least resistance that just happened to involve incapacitating anyone in his way.

  It was beautiful in the way a predator was beautiful. Efficient. Perfect. Terrible.

  Kaelis dropped from above like divine judgment, landing on a bandit's shoulders and using his momentum to vault over two more in a display of aerial acrobatics that should have been impossible. Wind gathered around her hands as she landed—visible as a shimmer in the air, like heat-haze given form and purpose, like the world's breath responding to her will.

  She pushed, and the wind obeyed with the enthusiasm of an old friend helping out.

  A concentrated burst of air caught three men mid-charge, lifting them off their feet like children's toys and sending them tumbling backward into a heap of tangled limbs and confused shouting. One of them was still crying. Another was laughing—high, broken laughter that spoke of a mind on the edge of shattering.

  "Miss me?" Kaelis called cheerfully to no one in particular, already moving to the next threat with that impossible Lyfan grace. She was grinning, but Tyrian could see the tension in her shoulders, the way her eyes never stopped moving. This was a woman who treated fear like a joke to keep it from becoming real.

  "Every day," Varden called back without looking up from his work, his voice carrying that dry Dvarin humor. The Runebinder stood in the center of the clearing like a stone in a river, runestone slate glowing with accumulated power that made the air around him taste like copper and ozone. He touched the ground once, fingers splayed, and spoke—not in Common, but in the deep resonant syllables of Dvarin runecraft that seemed to resonate in the bones of the earth itself.

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  The earth answered.

  Roots erupted from the ground—not natural growth, but rune-forced animation that twisted living wood into temporary servants. They wrapped around legs with the grip of pythons, tangled weapons with the efficiency of spider silk, created obstacles that turned the battlefield into a maze of grasping wooden fingers.

  -break-

  Men screamed and hacked at the roots, but for every one they cut, two more took its place, growing from the stumps like hydra heads.

  "I hate when you do that," one bandit shouted, his voice carrying the slurred quality of Dreamfall contamination even as he fought to free his leg from a root thicker than his arm. "The trees aren't supposed to grab! Trees don't have opinions!"

  "Take it up with the forest," Varden replied calmly, adjusting a rune that made the roots tighten their grip just enough to immobilize without breaking bone. "I'm just the translator."

  And in the middle of it all, Tyrian fought for his life.

  The first bandit came at him screaming—wordless, animal sound that spoke of terror and confusion in equal measure—axe raised high in a clumsy overhead chop that telegraphed its intent like a banner. Tyrian's training took over before conscious thought could interfere: parry at the haft, redirect the force, use the attacker's momentum against them. His blade caught the axe handle and turned it aside with a sharp twist of his wrist, and his riposte opened a line across the man's shoulder.

  Not deep enough to kill. Not even deep enough to permanently maim. Just enough to hurt, to shock, to stop. The way Brayden had taught him—disable, don't destroy. Only kill when there's no other choice.

  The man fell back, clutching his shoulder and staring at the blood with the confusion of someone who hadn't expected consequences. His dilated eyes tried to focus on Tyrian, tried to understand what had just happened.

  "I'm sorry," Tyrian said, though he wasn't sure why. The man probably couldn't even hear him properly through the Dreamfall haze.

  The second attacker came faster—a woman with a pair of long knives and wild eyes that saw things that weren't there. She was muttering under her breath, words Tyrian couldn't make out, and her face was wet with tears. She attacked in a flurry of strikes that should have overwhelmed him, that would have overwhelmed him a year ago, that would have overwhelmed most fighters period.

  Should have.

  But Tyrian knew where each strike would land before it arrived. Knew it the same way he'd known where the arrow would be. His sword moved to intercept—not where the blade was, but where it would be. Parry, deflect, redirect. His body was moving before his mind caught up, responding to information he couldn't articulate but somehow possessed with absolute certainty.

  He wasn't thinking anymore. Couldn't think. There wasn't time for thought, wasn't space for hesitation or doubt. He was just... moving. Responding to something he couldn't name, couldn't explain, couldn't possibly understand but somehow knew with a certainty that transcended logic and reason.

  The Echo, some distant part of his mind whispered. This is what father was trying to teach me. This is the Echo-sense. The awareness of trajectories and intents and futures not-yet-written. The gift and curse of the Blackwood bloodline.

  His blade caught her knife and turned it. His boot connected with her knee—not hard enough to break, but hard enough to buckle. She went down hard, and he moved past her to the next threat, his body already tracking the next attacker before he consciously identified them.

  Three more came at him as a group. Poor tactics—they got in each other's way, couldn't coordinate properly through the Dreamfall haze. Tyrian ducked under one swing, parried another, and let the third attacker's momentum carry him past while Tyrian's boot found his ankle.

  All three went down in a tangle.

  Beside him, Brayden fought with the economical precision of a man who'd survived three decades of warfare by being better than everyone trying to kill him. Every motion served a purpose. Every strike either killed or disabled. No flourishes. No show. No wasted energy. Just the art of staying alive reduced to its purest, most refined form.

  A bandit came at Brayden with a spear—good reach, smart weapon choice. Brayden stepped inside the thrust, his sword taking the spear haft and pushing it aside while his off-hand delivered a palm strike to the attacker's solar plexus. The bandit's eyes went wide, all air leaving his lungs in a rush, and he folded.

  "On your left!" Brayden called, his voice cutting through the chaos with parade-ground clarity.

  Tyrian spun, blade coming up—and parried a blow he hadn't seen coming. Hadn't heard approaching. Hadn't consciously perceived at all. An axe that would have taken his arm off at the shoulder.

  The bandit stared at him in confusion, as if unable to understand how his surprise attack had failed, how this young noble had known to turn at exactly the right moment, at the precise instant needed. His eyes were dilated black pools with thin rings of brown at the edges, and drool hung from his slack mouth.

  He was crying.

  Tyrian used that confusion to disarm him with a twist of his wrist that sent the axe clattering across the wrongly-angled road. Then he punched the man in the temple with his pommel—hard enough to stun, not hard enough to kill.

  The bandit went down.

  "Good," Brayden said, never breaking his own rhythm as he disabled another attacker with a strike to the wrist that sent a sword tumbling. "You're learning to trust it. The Echo doesn't lie. It can't lie. It's just... information. The world telling you what's about to happen."

  Tyrian didn't have breath to answer. Didn't have time to process. Just moved to the next threat, and the next, his sword singing through air that tasted like metal and fear and something else—something old and vast and watching.

  At some point, he found himself moving in sync with Calven. Not planned. Not coordinated. Just... happening. The captain would drive an attacker toward Tyrian with his shield, and Tyrian would be there to intercept without either of them speaking. Tyrian would parry a strike and redirect the attacker's momentum, and Calven would capitalize on the opening without missing a beat.

  Two fighters moving like one organism. Like they'd trained together for years instead of meeting an hour ago.

  Calven noticed. Tyrian saw the captain's winter-blue eyes flick toward him between engagements, sharp and assessing. Saw the almost imperceptible nod, the slight shift in positioning that meant Calven was now fighting with him instead of just near him.

  Approval. Recognition. Or maybe just acknowledgment that the noble boy could fight and wouldn't be a liability.

  Tyrian would take it.

  The fight couldn't have lasted more than five minutes, but it felt like hours. By the time the last bandit either fell unconscious or fled stumbling into the forest with Dreamfall madness still glazing their eyes, Tyrian was breathing hard. His sword arm trembled with adrenaline and exertion. His heart hammered against his ribs like it was trying to escape. Sweat ran down his face despite the cool air.

  He'd never fought in real combat before. Training, yes. Sparring, certainly. Exhibitions where the worst consequence was embarrassment and his father's disappointed silence.

  But this—this mattered. One mistake and he'd be dead. One moment of hesitation and Camerise might be dead. One wrong move and someone who trusted him to fight beside them would pay for his failure.

  The weight of that settled on him like a physical thing.

  "Everyone alright?" Calven called, already moving to check on the others with the brisk efficiency of a commander who needed information, not comfort. "Sound off."

  "Peachy," Kaelis said, landing beside him with barely a whisper of sound despite dropping from twelve feet up. "Though I think I twisted my ankle. By which I mean someone else's ankle. It was attached to them at the time. They seemed upset about it. Very vocal, actually."

  "Bram?"

  "Alive!" the medic called from near the caravan, his voice shaking but determined. "Also terrified! But definitely alive! The survivors are stable! Well, as stable as people with empty eyes can be! Which isn't very stable at all, technically, but they're not getting worse!"

  "Varden?"

  "Fine. The runework held." The Dvarin was already releasing the roots with another series of deep syllables, letting them sink back into earth that probably didn't work the way earth was supposed to work anymore. "Though the ground here is... strange. Resistant. The runes don't want to set properly. Like trying to write on water, or convince stone to be something it's not."

  "Lovely," Calven muttered. His eyes found Tyrian, and something in that gaze made Tyrian stand straighter. "You?"

  "I'm..." Tyrian looked down at his sword, saw blood on the blade—not much, but enough. His hands were shaking. His legs felt like water. His breath came in gasps. "I'm fine."

  It was a lie. He wasn't fine. He'd just fought for his life, had almost died, had hurt people who couldn't help what they were doing. But he was alive, and that would have to be enough.

  "You fought well," Brayden said quietly, moving to stand beside him with a hand on his shoulder—brief contact, grounding. "Better than well, actually. That last parry was pure instinct, not training. You're Echo-sensitive. More than your father probably realized. Maybe more than you realized."

  Tyrian nodded, not trusting his voice. The adrenaline was wearing off now, leaving behind the shakes and the cold realization of how close he'd come to dying. How many times he should have died. How many futures where he didn't see that arrow, didn't dodge that axe, didn't parry that knife.

  How many futures where Camerise stood over his corpse.

  "Breathe," Camerise said, appearing at his other side. Two of her hands steadied him while the other two hung at her sides, ready to catch him if he fell. "You did what you had to do. Protected people who needed protecting. Stopped people who were trying to kill us. That's all anyone can ask."

  He breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, counting to four on each. Let the shaking work its way through his system instead of fighting it, the way Brayden had taught him years ago. Adrenaline had to go somewhere. Better to let it out than to bottle it up.

  "First real fight?" Kaelis asked, her usual playfulness tempered with something like understanding. She'd perched on a fallen log, wiping blood from her blades with a practiced efficiency that spoke of too many fights to count.

  "Yes."

  "You did good, noble boy. Didn't freeze. Didn't run. Kept your head even when that bastard almost took it off." She grinned, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. "Plus you didn't die, which is always a strong showing. Top tier survival, really."

  "I'll add it to my list of accomplishments," Tyrian managed, finding his voice.

  "That's the spirit. 'Survived first real combat.' Very impressive on a resume."

  Despite everything—the fear, the exhaustion, the trembling in his hands—Tyrian felt a smile tug at his mouth.

  -break-

  The caravan survivors were in bad shape.

  Bram was tending to them with brisk efficiency that belied his earlier panic, checking pupils with a small light-stone that cast pale blue illumination, taking pulses with gentle fingers, asking questions in that soft voice that somehow made him sound competent despite his tendency to drop things under pressure.

  "Can you hear me?" he asked the driver, waving a hand slowly in front of the man's face. "If you can understand me, blink twice."

  Nothing. Just that empty stare.

  "Right. Okay. That's... that's fine. We'll work with that." Bram pulled out a small vial of something that smelled sharp and medicinal. He waved it under the driver's nose.

  The man's head jerked back slightly. His eyes focused, just a little.

  "There we go," Bram said encouragingly. "Come back to us. That's it. You're safe now. Well, safer. Relatively speaking, which is the best we can do in current circumstances."

  The driver had regained some awareness, though he still looked distant, disconnected, like a man trying to remember how to be human after spending time as something else.

  "What happened?" Calven asked, crouching beside him. Not gentle, but not cruel. Just direct. The voice of someone who needed answers and needed them quickly. "Can you tell us what happened?"

  The driver blinked slowly, as if the question had come from very far away and had to travel through layers of fog and confusion to reach him. "We... were traveling. Standard route. Brighthold to Temair. Safe road. Always safe. We've run it a hundred times." His voice was flat, emotionless, like he was reading from a script he didn't quite understand. "Then the forest... changed."

  "Changed how?" Calven pressed.

  "The trees. They weren't where they should be." The driver's hands trembled. "The road curved wrong—bent in directions roads don't bend. Impossible angles. And the whispering..." He shuddered, the first real emotion showing through the haze. "Voices in my head. Not words. Just... pressure. Like someone was inside my skull, pushing. Demanding. Pulling me somewhere I didn't want to go, couldn't resist going."

  Camerise knelt beside him, two of her hands taking his in a gesture of comfort while her other pair rested on her knees. Her sapphire eyes carried sympathy and concern in equal measure. "The bandits. Did they seem strange to you? Before they attacked?"

  "They were... wrong. Moving wrong. Speaking wrong." The driver's eyes focused slightly, finding her face like a drowning man finding driftwood. "Like puppets. Like something was making them dance. They didn't want to be there—I could see it in their eyes, in their faces. They were scared. Crying. But they attacked anyway. Couldn't stop themselves. Tried to scream warnings but their mouths wouldn't work right."

  "Dreamfall contamination," Varden said grimly. He'd joined them, runestone slate tucked under one arm, his other hand stroking his braided beard in a gesture that suggested deep thought and deeper worry. "The ripple we saw—it's not passive. Not just an echo or a thin spot. It's... influencing things. People, probably animals too. Pulling at consciousness like a tide pulls at ships, dragging them somewhere they can't resist."

  "Can it be stopped?" Tyrian asked, though part of him didn't want to know the answer.

  "Depends on the source. If it's natural—a crack in the Dream-boundary, a thin place between worlds where reality wears thin—maybe. Dreamweavers can sometimes seal those with enough power and the right ritual, given time and resources." Varden's expression darkened. "If it's being caused deliberately, if something or someone is generating the distortion... that's another matter entirely. Much more dangerous. Much harder to stop."

  "Then we find what's causing it," Calven said, standing with the finality of a man who'd made a decision and wouldn't be swayed. "And we end it."

  Simple. Direct. No room for doubt or hesitation or fear.

  One of the guards stirred, groaning. He was younger than the driver, maybe thirty, with a scar across his jaw. But his eyes held the same distant quality.

  "The lights," he mumbled. "Between the trees. Flickering. Blue and silver and wrong. Colors that hurt to look at."

  He grabbed Camerise's arm suddenly. "The forest pulled at us. Tried to drag us into the trees. The bandits—they were already caught. Already drowning. We could hear them calling for help, but their bodies kept attacking."

  "Easy," Bram said, prying the man's fingers loose. "You're safe now."

  But Tyrian saw the lie in it. They weren't safe.

  -break-

  They were gathering the wounded bandits when it happened.

  One of them, a man with a broken arm that Bram had splinted, looked directly at Tyrian. Recognition flashed across his face.

  "You," he snarled, lurching to his feet. "You're him."

  Tyrian tensed. "I don't—"

  "Blackwood." The word was an accusation. "So the little lord sends his bastard heir to die with sellswords? Fitting. Always was weak, that bloodline. Hiding behind walls and ancient names."

  The clearing went silent.

  Calven had frozen. Those winter-blue eyes locked on Tyrian.

  Kaelis's eyes went wide. "Wait. Blackwood? Like, the Blackwoods?"

  Varden muttered in Dvarin. "Well. That explains the Echo sensitivity."

  "Blackwood," Calven repeated slowly. "House Blackwood. The Echo-lords of the Draakenwald." He paused. "You didn't mention that."

  "I didn't lie," Tyrian said. "I just—"

  "Didn't volunteer the information. Smart. Names like that carry weight." Something shifted in Calven's expression. "I can respect that."

  "You're not angry?"

  "Why would I be? You paid. You fought well." Calven turned to the bandit. "You have ten seconds to explain how you know who he is."

  The bandit laughed—a broken sound. "Everyone knows. The Blackwood heir. The forest knows. The deep knows. The old things remember your bloodline, boy. Remember what you did. Remember what you took. And they're hungry."

  Camerise's face went pale. "What did you just say?"

  "The deep knows," the bandit repeated, but his voice was changing. Multiple tones. "The roots remember. The wells call. Return, return, return—"

  He collapsed.

  Bram rushed forward. "Alive. But something was using him."

  "It wasn't human," Camerise said. "The consciousness behind it was vast. Old."

  "You're Blackwood stock," Calven said. "That makes you our problem. If something is stirring in your forest—it's my problem."

  "Thank you," Tyrian said.

  "Don't thank me yet."

  -break-

  They made camp. As night fell, the forest grew quiet. The wrong quiet.

  Camerise walked to a twisted tree and placed her hand against it. Her eyes went distant.

  Images flashed to Tyrian:

  An old observatory. A broken well. A serpent of light. Something vast beneath, waking.

  "I saw it," she whispered. "The source. An observatory. And something beneath it."

  A whisper cut through: "Return, Blackwood."

  Then, from deep in the forest, came a roar.

  Primal. Ancient. Resonating in bone.

  "...that wasn't an animal," Calven said.

  "We're going to die," Bram whispered.

  "You still want to find the source?" Calven asked Tyrian.

  "Yes. We have to."

  "Then at first light, we head for that observatory." He looked around. "Anyone who wants to leave, now's your chance."

  Nobody moved.

  "Idiots," Calven muttered. "All of you."

  The night settled, and Tyrian wondered what morning would bring. What his bloodline had promised. And whether he was ready for the answers.