Nyx's POV
Not with my ears. With something deeper than that — that same wordless sense that had felt their pulses from a distance, that strange and untrained instinct that had surfaced when everything else had failed. I followed the thread of it inward, past the wrongness of the rhythm, past the external force maintaining it, down into the dark until I found the edges of their minds.
I pressed gently against the first one.
It went still.
The world outside ceased to matter. I was somewhere else entirely — somewhere interior and vast and suffocating, and what I found there made my breath catch in my chest.
Black webs. Thick and ropy and dense, layered over everything, filling every corner of the space like something had been growing here for a very long time. They had the quality of old magic — patient and purposeful and deeply, deliberately cruel. And in the very center of it all, half-buried beneath the dark tangle, was a small and struggling light.
