The dusk never left.
Kaelen woke to the stink of iron and ash, his cheek pressed to the torn earth where blood had dried black. The battlefield stretched to every horizon — a wasteland of shattered spears, rusted banners, and carrion birds fattening on the dead. Their wings turned the twilight sky into a storm of feathers.
His chest burned.
He pressed a hand against the wound he should not have survived. Beneath skin and scar-tissue, something harder than bone pulsed faintly, like a second heart. The shard. Even now it throbbed with a rhythm that wasn't his own, humming in the silence between crow-cries.
The bodies around him whispered. At first he thought it was the wind in the armor, but no — the voices came from shadows. The corpses cast no ordinary dark; their blackness writhed, stretching toward him.
"Kaelen…" they hissed.
He staggered to his feet, vision swimming. Once, he had been a knight of the Hollow Crown, sworn to defend its dying king. Now he was nameless, a deserter, a relic of a war no one had won. His sword was gone. Only his shadow remained — and even that…
It moved before he did.
Kaelen froze. The silhouette cast by his body rose upright a heartbeat before he straightened, a smear of black peeling itself from the earth. It tilted its head, mocking his own movement. And then it smiled — a mouth stretching wider than his should allow.
The shard inside him pulsed harder, answering the thing.
The crow-swarm scattered at once. Something vast stirred beneath the earth, deep in the mountains at the edge of sight. Kaelen's shadow turned toward them, and he saw the impossible: the stone itself bleeding, rivers of tar-black spilling down the cliffs like veins torn open.
A whisper slithered inside his skull.
When the sun rises, you will break the chains.
Kaelen's knees buckled. The battlefield was silent but for his own ragged breath. When he looked up, a figure stood among the corpses — cloaked in red, eyes reflecting the dusk like molten glass. A woman's voice spoke, clear and cold:
"You carry a god's rib in your chest, knight. And soon, it will carry you."