They saw the village long before they reached it: a smudge of roofs gone flat against the pale afternoon, the kind of stillness that made sound behave like a guilty thing. No smoke from chimneys. No dogs. No laundry strung between eaves. Only a thin, low breath of darkness that lay over the lanes and doorways like damp cloth.
"Hold here," Kael murmured.
They crouched among scrub and stone. The locator's morning lines had set them on this vector—dew-script bright, code unchanging—and the land had run out of excuses to look normal.
Mira flicked one ring and breathed across her knuckles. A disk of water unfolded, mirror-smooth, and drifted forward at shin-height. "Hydro Mirror out," she said. "I'll map alleys and open wells. Follow the marks."
"Wind Barrier," Elira called softly. The air thickened around them in a narrow sleeve, not a shining wall but a pressure you felt as a weight on your skin. Lumeveil stayed quiet—present, watchful. Elira kept the light sealed and small inside the blade.
They crossed the verge.
The dark lay everywhere, not smoke and not fog. It pooled at lintels, flowed along gutters, oozed out of the cracks between step and door. The wells breathed the same hush the lanes did. Footsteps sounded wrong—too close to the ear, too far from the ground.
Something unfastened itself from a doorway and stepped toward them.
It had the outline of a person only if a child had painted one with ink and then dragged a finger down the page. No face. No seam. Its edges stuttered, then snapped tight. When it hit the barrier, Elira felt the tug—a scrape along the grain of her magic, the taste of something trying to drink.
"Not Type I," Mira said under her breath. "Absorption on contact."
"Keep wide," Kael answered. "Test what it hates."
Mira drew a thin line of frost along the lane and another across the threshold. "Ice line. Boundaries." The form jerked at the first line and slowed, shuddering like a harp string plucked too hard. Another slid out of a gap in the fence; a third uncoiled from a low roof; more came, not fast, not loud, but all at once.
Kael stamped twice. The ground answered. Two open wells sealed with a muffled thump; a loose beam shook itself down across a mouth of alley as if it had always wanted an excuse to fall. He took the rear, fists ready, steps heavy enough to speak to the stone without shouting at it.
Elira cut the ones that squeezed past the frost and pressed too close to her sleeve of air. "Breeze Edge." The wind sharpened along her blade with a thin, clean sound. The first stroke shaved an arm from a body that didn't have bones; the second took both legs at the knee and left the thing twitching on the ground like torn ink trying to remember how to stand. She kept the motions small, the pressure steady. The barrier thinned once as something strong leaned and drank, and she layered more air, more weight, less shine.
"Left," Mira said, the mirror showing a clear swing around a toppled cart. "Then right. Keep to the wall."
They moved.
The dark did not rush; it accumulated. When they neared the shrine at the village center, it thickened as if every house had been slowly breathing toward this one point for days. A hairline crack ran down the front step and into the stone threshold like a thread someone had pulled too hard and then let go.
The pendant under Elira's shirt went cold, then hot, then cold again. The black breath leaned. It bent—not at the mirror, not at Kael's weight, but at her—like an ear turning to a whisper it understood.
Lumeveil's voice slid through her like the edge of silk. Do not answer, Elira.
Her hands wanted to. Some unhelpful part of her wanted to open her palm and see what the dark would do if she let it. She did not move that way. "Root lock," she whispered instead, and sent grass-magic down—thin, patient, stubborn threads that nosed into the crack and laced themselves into a stitch. Then she pressed—not a shove, not a blow, only a long, steady breath of wind that discouraged the dark from coming nearer while the roots set. The pull at the barrier eased.
"Path clear," Mira said. She'd drawn a clean route back out with ice ticks at ankle height where only they would look. Her mirror showed the square behind them emptying—nothing there now but the pressure of absence.
"Move," Kael said.
They did not search the houses. They did not call names. At the lane, Mira raised a small plaque of ice and etched four plain sigils with the edge of a ring—Do not enter. Mana consumed.—the kind of warning travelers and traders respected without argument. Kael sketched the square on his scrap and crossed it in red. Elira looked once over her shoulder and watched the breath lift and settle over the shrine, slow and satisfied, as if it considered the matter politely tabled.
They walked until the village was a black seam stitched into the trees behind them and the air smelled like the world again. Only then did they let the barrier ease and the water disk fall and shatter like a sheet of glass.
They stopped in a stand of pines whose needles muted the wind. Kael set ward-stones. Mira checked the edges of her rings for hairline cracks. Elira sat with her back against a trunk and let her heart catch up to her hands.
"We should report," Kael said. "That was new. That was wrong."
"It was both," Mira said, "and the locator is still right." She nodded at the pendant. "The code hasn't moved in two days. We're aligned. If we turn back now, we might miss whatever the morning window keeps giving us."
Elira rubbed her thumb over the pendant through her shirt. "And Nakea said another half would wake." She didn't say whose half. She didn't need to. "If we stall, we let her choose when."
Kael scratched a dent in his gauntlet with one blunt fingernail. "Seventy-two hours. We push three dawns. If nothing new, we turn and carry everything to someone who can write it into a book and force people to read it."
"Deal," Mira said. She blew out a slow breath. "I'll mark that village for quarantine in my notes."
They had just begun to settle—bedrolls loosened, water warming, a thin line of smoke allowed to drift up for the first time all day—when the smoke vanished.
Not blown away. Smothered.
Kael was on his feet before the pot finished tipping. "Quiet step," he said. "Right side, six."
"Left, four," Mira answered. Her rings slid to a balanced guard, neither fire nor ice, each warmed enough to wake without waking what watched them.
Elira stood without drawing, her fingers resting on the wrap at Lumeveil's hilt. The pines were old, their bark thick and dark. Shadows loosened from them and rearranged into men.
Cloaks. Helmets without crests. Armor finished to a sheen that didn't care about light. Every pauldron bore a mark the three of them knew too well: a triangle with three stars at its points, muted, the color of iron and old roads.
"Don't," Kael said, low, to the nearest shape. The shape stopped a step beyond the ward-stone.
A woman stepped through the line. She was not Sirena, but the way she carried her weight made Elira think of her all the same. The woman's gaze found each of their faces in turn and did not linger or flinch. Her voice was even.
"By order of the Commander," she said, "you will come with us. Now."
"Under whose authority?" Mira asked. Not mocking. Not sweet. A line drawn in polite ink.
"The Third," the woman said. "You will be safe. Your notes will be reviewed. Your maps will be copied. You will be debriefed." She looked at the small tin cup beside the bedroll where the Library's clear slips rested. "And those will be returned to where they belong."
Kael shifted a half-step to keep himself between Elira and the line. "We cooperate," he said, "with conditions. We keep our originals. We speak to the one who gave the order."
The woman inclined her head the way you do to a reasonable point you had prepared for. "You will keep your originals," she said. "You will speak to the one who gave the order."
A breeze moved through the pines and went out again. Somewhere behind them, far back in the trees where the village lay, the dark breath made a small, pleased sound and settled deeper.
Elira's hand stayed on Lumeveil. She could feel the spirit like a cool thread along her palm. Do we go? she asked without words.
We go, Lumeveil answered. We listen. We do not give what is not ours to give.
Elira nodded.
Mira knelt, wrote two words on a scrap—black wells—and burned it in the small flame of a cooking wick. Kael doused the fire until the last hiss was silence.
"Lead on," Elira said.
The Third's line opened just wide enough to admit them, then closed around them with the quiet certainty of a door that had been built to fit. The pines thinned. Night came up from the ground rather than down from the sky.
As they walked, Elira let herself look back once. The place where their fire had been was only a smudge on the ground. For an instant—one heartbeat, maybe two—the locator's unseen geometry wrote a faint wedge across the needles, bright enough that only she and the two beside her would notice.
The line pointed past the soldiers, past the trees, past the stones sunk in the hill. It pointed exactly where they were going.