The smoke had barely cleared.
All around the battlefield, the air shimmered with leftover magic hot, fractured, and trembling like something still alive. Shards of broken sigils pulsed faintly on the scorched earth, their meanings lost to fire and fury. The scent of blood, burned roots, and wet soil clung to the wind.
Seraphina stood at the heart of the destruction, her hands still raised, her fingertips glowing with ember-lit threads of rune energy. Her chest heaved, lips cracked from chanting, but her eyes her eyes remained wide and dry.
Behind her, Kaelen groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, dirt smeared across his bare chest where his shirt had long been torn away. One of his arms was bleeding heavily, the muscle nearly torn through. But he didn't complain. He staggered to her side without a sound, as he always did.
"You should sit," Seraphina murmured without turning.
"You should scream," he replied hoarsely.
A hollow laugh escaped her throat. It echoed too loudly.
They had won.
If you could call this winning.
Half the clearing was gone ripped apart by overlapping waves of blood sigils, fire runes, and wild werewolf rage. Malric's forces had been pushed back, but not without cost. Three witches were dead. Two wolves lay broken in their shifted forms, eyes wide and unseeing. The tree line bore scorch marks that would never heal.
And in the very center, where the earth was blackest, Seraphina's final sealing rune still sizzled faintly. A jagged spiral of magic carved deep into the ground, it pulsed red like a wound refusing to close.
A temporary prison.
That was all they had managed to create.
Malric had escaped barely. He had bled, cursed, cracked, and retreated into the veil with the help of corrupted shadows. But the worst part? He had smiled as he fled. As if this had only been the beginning.
Seraphina turned to Kaelen now, finally facing him.
His eyes flicked up to hers, and they were haunted.
"You almost didn't come back," he said.
"You didn't call me back," she whispered.
For a moment, silence dragged between them. Thick. Unforgiving.
He stepped closer and reached out, his thumb brushing the smear of ash from her cheek. "I didn't know how."
"You always knew how," she said, swallowing the tremble in her throat. "You just didn't want to."
A shadow moved behind them, and both turned, expecting another enemy. But it was Elowen, staggering forward, her body hunched from magical fatigue. Her hands were clutched around something glowing a shard of an amulet cracked down the middle.
"He left a message," Elowen said, breathless. "A vision."
Seraphina and Kaelen moved closer. The shard pulsed once, and then
The world shimmered.
A projection bloomed into view, cast from the shard's fractured magic. Malric's silhouette blurry but unmistakable stood amid swirling darkness.
His voice was slow. Confident. Cruel.
"You're not ready for what's coming."
"The bond you think you've reclaimed is still cursed."
"And when the moon dies again, you will see…"
His face twisted into something inhuman.
"You were never the savior. Only the seed."
The image shattered into particles.
No one spoke.
The witches around the clearing stirred slowly, quietly tending to the wounded. The wolves began shifting back, panting and disoriented. But at the center, the three of them remained Seraphina, Kaelen, Elowen caught in the echo of those words.
"The seed?" Kaelen asked, voice low.
Seraphina didn't answer immediately.
Her mind was racing. She had felt it too during the fight. A shift in her blood. A pull from something older than the magic she wielded. Something beneath the curse, beneath the bond.
"I think…" she said slowly, "he knows about the origin bond. The one Elowen warned us never to touch."
Elowen nodded grimly. "It's not just a curse anymore. It's evolving."
Kaelen tensed. "What does that mean for us?"
"It means," Elowen said, "that the only one who can fully explain it… is the First Huntress."
Seraphina's head snapped up. "She's dead."
"No." Elowen's eyes flashed. "She's sleeping. Beneath the Silverroot Tombs. And if the prophecy was right…"
Seraphina felt it then a soft ripple through the earth. Like a heartbeat far below her feet. Old. Familiar.
"She's waking up," Seraphina said.
Kaelen stepped closer to her, his voice quiet. "What happens if we find her and she tells you that we're doomed?"
"Then," Seraphina replied, lifting her chin, "we change fate."
Later that night…
The campfire crackled low as they gathered around its glow. Some rested, some mourned, and some sharpened blades that might never be enough.
Seraphina sat alone, her cloak wrapped around her, the weight of her power settling back into her bones.
Kaelen approached and knelt beside her. He didn't say anything, just stared into the fire with her.
After a while, she whispered, "You felt it, didn't you?"
"The heartbeat beneath the ground?"
She nodded.
He inhaled sharply. "It felt like… the end and the beginning at once."
She turned to him slowly. "You don't have to come with me to the tombs."
He scoffed, soft and bitter. "You really think I'd let you walk into ancient ruins, possibly possessed by a dead huntress, without me?"
Seraphina gave him a look.
He smirked.
But that faded quickly as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a broken locket. "This was my mother's. Before she died, she told me something I never understood until now."
"What?"
"She said… 'The bond will break before it blooms. But if you bleed for her, she'll save you anyway.'"
Seraphina stared at him. "She knew."
"I think she knew a lot of things," Kaelen said. "More than she ever told me."
They fell silent again, the night pressing in.
Then a howl echoed in the distance long, sorrowful.
A warning.
Not from an enemy, but from the earth itself.
Something was waking beneath the soil.
The next morning…
They stood at the edge of the Silverroot Forest, the sky above them pale with early light. The tombs were deep inside buried beyond the trees that never lost their leaves.
Elowen tightened the straps on her satchel, muttering protective charms. Kaelen adjusted his sword.
Seraphina closed her eyes, reaching out with her senses.
The heartbeat was louder now.
Urgent.
She opened her eyes. "Let's go."