The word "Hunters" hung in the air, sharp and cold as a shard of ice. The relative peace of the sanctuary tree shattered. The deep, ambient shadows of the Gloomwood, which Aria had just started to see as potential partners, now felt like a hundred unseen threats, a hundred places for monsters to hide.
"How many?" Aria asked, her voice a tight whisper. Her hand instinctively went to the Aegis, its cold surface a terrifying comfort.
Kael didn't take his eyes off the perimeter of the clearing. "Three," he said, his voice grim. "Moving fast. Fanning out to surround us. They're good. They move like ghosts." He glanced at her, his storm-gray eyes intense. "They're Lyra's personal guard. Malakor isn't playing."
He grabbed the backpack and slung it over his shoulder. "We can't fight them. Not here, not now. You're not ready, and I can't take on three of them while protecting you. We have to run."
"Where?" The Gloomwood was an endless, terrifying maze.
"The Gloomwood Exchange," Kael said, already moving toward the edge of the sanctuary tree's protective aura. "It's our only hope for a neutral ground. But we have to get there first." He pointed with his sword toward a particularly dense patch of the forest. "That way. The terrain is rougher. It'll slow them down, but it'll be harder for us too. Stay right behind me. Do exactly as I do."
He plunged out of the relative safety of the silver-leafed oak's clearing and into the oppressive dark of the woods. Aria followed without hesitation, her brief moment of triumph with the shadow sphere evaporating into pure, adrenaline-fueled fear. The silvery path her Umbral Sight had shown her before was gone. Here, off the main trail, there were no wards, no guides.
The forest floor was a treacherous mess of gnarled roots, sucking mud, and sharp rocks hidden beneath the glowing moss. Kael moved with a supernatural grace, his feet seeming to find purchase where there was none. Aria scrambled to keep up, stumbling, her ankles twisting, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
A sound, like the whisper of cloth, came from the darkness to their left. Kael didn't break stride. "Don't look," he commanded. "Looking just tells them you know where they are."
Easier said than done. Aria's head was on a swivel, her eyes darting into the oppressive gloom. Her Umbral Sight, which had felt like a gift moments ago, was now a curse. It showed her fleeting glimpses of movement, silver-outlined shapes flitting between the black trees, always just at the edge of her vision. They were flanking them, herding them.
A high-pitched whistle, thin as a needle, cut through the air. A black streak shot out of the darkness, aimed directly at Kael's back.
"Down!" he yelled, throwing himself to the side. Aria dropped, hitting the damp moss with a jarring thud. The projectile slammed into a tree trunk just past where Kael had been. It was a wicked-looking crossbow bolt, fletched with black feathers, its tip glowing with a faint, sickly purple light. A wisp of black smoke rose where it hit the tree, and the bark began to sizzor and decay at a visible rate.
"Poison," Kael grunted, pushing himself back up. "Necrotic blight. A scratch is fatal. Move!"
They ran, a new, desperate urgency in their flight. The Hunters were no longer just herding them; they were trying to kill them. Another bolt whizzed past Aria's ear, so close she felt the air stir. She cried out, stumbling over a root and falling hard to her knees.
Pain shot up her leg, but Kael was there in an instant, hauling her to her feet. "They're trying to separate us!" he yelled over the sound of another bolt thudding into the earth nearby. "Stay with me!"
He pulled her behind a thick outcropping of black rock. The whistling of the bolts stopped for a moment. The woods fell into a terrifying, listening silence.
"They're closing in," Kael whispered, peering around the edge of the rock. "They have us pinned." He looked at her, his face grim in the eerie green glow of the moss. "I'm going to draw their fire. It'll give you a ten-second head start. There's a ravine about two hundred yards that way." He pointed deeper into the woods. "Follow the edge until you see a fallen log bridging it. Cross it. I'll meet you on the other side."
"No!" Aria protested. "I'm not leaving you!"
"That's an order, not a suggestion!" he snapped, his voice hard. "You are the mission. Your survival is all that matters. I can handle myself. Now go, when I tell you!"
Before she could argue further, a figure detached itself from the shadows not thirty feet away. It was one of the Hunters. Clad in dark, form-fitting leather, their face obscured by a hood and a shadow-mask, they moved with an unnatural silence. In their hands, they held another of the sleek, deadly crossbows.
Kael didn't hesitate. He burst from behind the rock, his sword a blur of silver. He didn't run at the Hunter, but away, at an angle, drawing their aim. "Now, Aria! Run!" he roared.
The Hunter, surprised by his sudden move, swiveled and fired. The bolt streaked toward Kael. He twisted in mid-stride, the bolt grazing his side. He grunted in pain but didn't slow down, disappearing into the tangle of trees.
For a heartbeat, Aria was frozen, her gaze fixed on the spot where Kael had vanished. Then his words, *You are the mission*, echoed in her head. Swallowing her fear, she turned and ran in the direction he had pointed.
The forest was a nightmare of grasping branches and treacherous ground. Every shadow seemed to hold a waiting Hunter. She ran blindly, fueled by terror, tears of panic and frustration blurring her vision. She could hear sounds of fighting behind her—the clang of steel, a shouted word in a harsh, guttural language, then silence.
*Is he okay? Did they get him?* The thoughts were a torrent of panic, but she forced them down, forced her legs to keep moving. She reached the ravine Kael had described. It was a deep, jagged scar in the earth, maybe fifty feet across, its bottom lost in impenetrable darkness. A cold mist rose from its depths.
She ran along the edge, her eyes scanning desperately for the log. There. A massive, moss-covered tree trunk spanned the chasm, a precarious bridge to the other side. She didn't hesitate. She scrambled onto it, her feet slipping on the damp surface. She didn't dare look down. She focused only on the other side, her arms out for balance.
She was halfway across when a voice, smooth and cruel as silk, spoke from behind her. "Nowhere left to run, little bird."
Aria froze, her blood turning to ice. She turned her head slowly. Standing at the edge of the ravine she had just left was a new figure. This one was not masked. It was a woman with a cascade of raven-black hair and a predatory smile. Lyra. Even without knowing her name, Aria knew this was the leader. Her presence radiated a cold, confident lethality that made the other Hunters seem like amateurs. She wasn't holding a crossbow, but a pair of long, curved daggers that gleamed in the dim light.
"That was a valiant effort by your watchdog," Lyra purred, taking a step onto the log herself. She moved with the impossible balance of a cat. "But he is… preoccupied." She gestured vaguely back into the woods, and a brief, pained cry—Kael's voice—echoed faintly.
Aria's heart seized.
"Don't worry," Lyra continued, advancing slowly, her daggers held low. "I've instructed my pets to keep him alive. For now. My Lord Malakor wants to speak with him. But you… you he gave to me. He wants you broken. And I do so love a new project."
Aria backed away, her heel slipping on the edge of the log. She flailed, catching her balance just in time. She was trapped. In front of her was a master assassin. Behind her, the other side of the ravine. Below her, a fall into blackness.
Rage, hot and desperate, surged through her, eclipsing her fear. This woman was hurting Kael. This woman served the man who had murdered her parents.
"You killed my family," Aria snarled, the words raw.
Lyra's smile widened. "Did I? I've killed so many families, it's hard to keep track. Was it the historians in Sterling? Ah, yes. A messy job. All that fire. I much prefer the quiet intimacy of a blade." She took another step, her movements hypnotic. "They were weak. Just as your father was weak. All that power, and he used it to defend, to protect. Power isn't for protecting, little bird. It's for taking."
This was it. The choice Kael had given her. Run until they catch you, or fight back. She was done running.
Aria closed her eyes, shutting out the sight of the advancing assassin. She reached for the song of the shadow, for the hum of the Umbral Realm. It was there, a roaring sea of power all around her. The chasm below her was not empty; it was filled with it, a vast reservoir of darkness.
She didn't try to persuade it. She didn't invite it. She let her grief, her rage, her terror pour into her will. She didn't just ask the shadow to be her partner; she became one with it.
*Mine,* she thought, not as a command, but as a statement of fact. *You are mine.*
The Aegis on her chest blazed with cold fire. The darkness in the ravine responded. It wasn't a tendril this time. The entire chasm of shadow surged upward, coalescing around her. It didn't consume her; it *armored* her. Two great, sweeping wings of solid, silent darkness erupted from her back, stretching ten feet to either side. They were not feathers, but tangible voids, edges sharp as obsidian, drinking the green light of the moss.
Lyra stopped dead, her predatory smile replaced by a look of stunned disbelief. "Impossible," she breathed. "Shadow-weaving on this scale… it takes decades of training."
Aria opened her eyes. They were no longer the frightened eyes of an archivist. They glowed with a faint, violet luminescence, the same color as the Aegis's light. She looked at Lyra, not as prey, but as an equal. The power thrumming through her was immense, terrifying, and utterly exhilarating.
"He told you to break me," Aria said, her voice a low, resonant echo, amplified by the shadows that now clung to her. "Come and try."
Lyra's shock morphed into a sharp, feral grin. "This just got interesting." She crouched, her daggers ready.
With a beat of her new, impossible wings, Aria pushed herself off the log, rising into the air above the chasm. The sheer, raw power of it was intoxicating. For the first time since this began, she wasn't running. She was fighting.
But as she hung there, suspended on wings of pure night, a new voice cut through her rage-fueled concentration—not Lyra's, but another's, one that dripped with ancient malice. It echoed not in the air, but directly inside her head, a psychic intrusion that felt like spiders crawling over her brain.
*So, the little mouse has claws,* the voice sneered. It was a voice she recognized from the vision in her office, the voice that had spoken of heirs and awakenings. It was Lord Malakor. He was watching through his assassin's eyes.
*I saw your father die,* the voice whispered, a cruel, intimate poison. *He screamed your name as he burned. Just. Like. This.*
Suddenly, the shadow wings convulsed. The power she was holding, the rage she was wielding, turned on her. A phantom fire, cold as the void, ignited along her nerves. It was an agony beyond anything she could have imagined, the feeling of being burned alive from the inside out, a perfect psychic echo of her father's death.
She screamed, a raw, piercing sound of pure agony. The shadow wings disintegrated. The power vanished. Her connection to the darkness was severed, leaving her utterly empty and helpless. She hung in the air for a single, weightless second, and then she fell, tumbling down into the waiting, endless blackness of the ravine.