They followed the ridgeline northeast, boots scuffing over frostbitten stone. The air had a bite now, thin and cold, the kind that scraped at the back of your throat like you'd swallowed powdered glass. Verek kept to the front—not because he liked it, not because he was built for leadership, but because silence had grown too thick behind him. Someone had to go first.
It wasn't a peaceful silence. It was the kind that settled heavy on the bones, like the ground had decided it was done speaking and now just waited for someone to crack from the weight.
Ezreal carried three shards now—fire, lightning, and silver—and Verek didn't need to look at them to feel their presence. They thudded against the side of Ezreal's coat like diseased heartbeats, ticking out some rhythm only they understood. Out of step with everything.
Nobody talked much since Silverspire. That tower had scraped them raw. Verek had tried once or twice—a question, a weak joke maybe—but every word just slid off the others like rain on oil. Everyone felt stretched thin, held together with frayed twine and a little spite.
Caylen stopped up ahead, spine stiff. "Feel that?" he asked. His voice had a rough edge, like it hadn't been used in a while. "Not presence. Absence. No birds. No wind. No insects. Not even rot."
Verek slowed. Listened. He didn't need magic to know something was wrong. That old soldier instinct twitched in his gut. He gave a sharp nod. That was enough.
Ezreal looked up, eyebrows drawn tight. The sky didn't explain anything. Just hovered too smooth, like someone had painted over the clouds and called it a day. A shimmer danced near the treeline, faint, like heat off stone. But there was no heat. Just pressure. Cold, heavy, unwelcoming.
"Something's wrong with the edges," Ezreal muttered. "Like we're in a dream that forgot its script halfway through."
Then the ravine appeared.
Not something they walked into. One blink, and it was there. A slash in the earth, sudden and sharp, like the world had torn open and never bothered to close up. Trees at the rim were scorched black, hollowed out, drained of anything that might've once passed for life.
Dax stepped up beside Verek, jaw tight. "This place feels like a memory someone else left in my head. Like everything's familiar, but wrong."
Ezreal nodded slowly. "Black shard's close. Shadowborn dragon essence. This fits."
Verek didn't speak. Just let his fingers curl toward the hilt slung across his back. The blade didn't calm him. It never did. It just reminded him that if something tried to take him apart, he could try to take it apart first.
They pushed into the ravine's shadow, and the silence thickened. Not absence. Just... saturation. Like too much had happened here, and the air still remembered.
Then they saw it.
Hanging from a dead branch, limp as forgotten laundry. Limbs twisted wrong, skin gray and waxy, neck snapped at a grotesque angle. Eyes wide. Staring. Not alive. Not gone either. Caught mid-motion, as if it hadn't decided which direction death should go.
Caylen flinched. Dax stopped short. Verek stepped in closer.
"Vinescar?" Dax whispered.
Verek didn't answer yet. Just studied the thing. Its expression, the tilt of its body. The voice when it rasped.
"You came," it said, dry and distant. The words fell apart as they formed. "But you wander blind. You wear your truths like chains, dragging them behind you, hoping no one hears the clatter."
Ezreal breathed sharp. "That's not him," he muttered. "It's wearing his face."
The world shuddered. Thorns erupted from the ground, fast and mean, sealing them in like a lid. The vines weren't magic. They were hostile. Hungry.
The voice echoed again, this time from the rocks, the dirt, the sky. "Three souls, three truths. All buried. All rotting. Follow the moonlit path or drown in the dark. It's already inside you."
The world twisted.
Verek didn't stumble, but he vanished like the rest.
Ezreal landed in a hall of mirrors, each one a broken lie. Faces sneered at him—versions of himself, some too young, some too cruel. A coward. A killer. A son who let his mother die. Each reflection hit harder than a fist.
"You ran," one whispered. "You left them to scream. You called it strategy."
He said nothing. There wasn't a lie he could offer that would feel like truth.
Caylen fell into a lake of moonlight, weightless. His brother stood on the surface, smiling, young and wrong. Then gone. Swallowed by light. "You promised," said the voice. "You said I'd be safe."
Dax sat surrounded by ghosts. The men he'd led into fire. The ones who hadn't come back. They didn't accuse. They just looked. And somehow, that was worse.
And Verek—
He stood on the battlefield again. Not flames or blades this time. Choices. A thousand moments where he could've stayed. Could've been softer. Could've dropped the blade and just… walked away. His father at a door that never opened. A child he didn't save. Himself, before the world broke him.
"You became what you swore you'd never be," the illusion whispered.
"No," Verek said, quiet. "I became what I had to."
The vision smiled. That was the truth. And it hurt.
The nightmare slipped between them, pulling form from their pain. Smoke, limbs, fragments of thought with too many eyes. It didn't want to kill them.
It wanted to unmake them.
Ezreal lit it up first. Magic flared like sparks off a grindstone. Dax charged it, his cry rough and ragged, torn straight from his lungs. Caylen moved next—no words, no panic. Just a bow raised with steady hands.
Verek stepped forward, dirty, scraped, bleeding from a dozen places. But standing. Always standing.
He didn't scream. He didn't warn.
He just walked into it. Solid. Unshaken.
The thing lunged, made of their worst memories. It met Verek's blade like a question meets an answer.
They didn't win by strength.
They survived by refusing to fall.
The shadow cracked. Then shattered. Then dissolved like fog that had overstayed its welcome.
The vines shriveled. The path cleared. And beneath the roots of a twisted old tree, buried in ash and stink, the shard waited.
Verek didn't rush. He crouched. Set his hand on the earth, grounded himself. Then picked it up.
The cold wasn't just physical. It slithered in and made a home somewhere under his ribs. But he didn't flinch. He let it settle. Like every other burden.
Ezreal said nothing. Caylen turned his face to the sky. Dax let out a breath like it had taken a week to climb out of his chest.
They climbed out of the ravine. The puppet was gone, but the taste of it stuck around, metallic and sour. The air carried bruises now.
Above, the sky sagged like it was about to fall on them.
Another shard in their hands. Another scream buried deep.
They kept walking.
Because Verek did.
And for now, that was enough.