My eyes snapped open to nothing.
No ground beneath me. No sky above. No sense of distance or direction. Only darkness pressing in from every side and something inside it, watching.
A voice moved through the black. Calm. Measured. As if it had always been there.
"You feel it, don't you? The climb. The effort. The illusion of progress."
I tried to move. The moment I thought I understood where I was, the space shifted. Up lost all meaning. Left and right bled together. My body no longer followed any rules I recognized.
"You rise," the voice continued. "You struggle. You bleed for each step. And still you remain beneath something greater."
Pressure built behind me. Deeper than weight. As if the act of being watched had taken physical shape. The darkness warped, bending around something massive just beyond sight.
For a single heartbeat, I almost saw it. Not a form. Not a body. Something wrong, something that refused to settle into an outline, that kept sliding away from whatever part of my mind tried to hold it.
My chest tightened. "What… are you?"
It didn't answer directly.
"I am your salvation."
It drew closer. The pressure sharpened, curling around me without ever making contact.
"What you lack is inevitability."
The words settled into me like something swallowed. Heavy. Inescapable.
"I can—"
The thought never finished. Replaced before it could form.
"You will reach for it regardless."
Something passed through me. Not pain, something colder. Deeper. As if a presence had brushed the core of who I was and left something behind without asking.
I tried to pull away. Something seized me and dragged me backward with sudden force.
The pressure vanished. The distortion stilled.
Silence swallowed everything.
"We will meet again," the voice said, already fading. "Until then…take this."
Light burst across my vision.
Sound followed a moment later. Dull and ringing. Air tore into my lungs, hot and thick with dust and ozone. Pain came with it sharp and all-consuming.
I was at the bottom of a crater. Enormous. Wider than Riverdale itself. The forest around us had been erased, trees splintered to nothing, earth scorched black in a perfect circle. The air still tasted like something had been burnt.
Layla lay a few feet away. Unmoving. Her left arm twisted at a sickening angle beneath her.
I tried to push myself up. My body barely responded.
Then an arm came around my waist.
Dormin. Dragging me across the broken ground toward Layla, his breathing ragged, face tight with exhaustion. Faint crimson sparks still flickered along his shoulders and arms, guttering like a fire running out of fuel.
"Dormin…" My voice came out hoarse, barely holding together. "…what happened?"
"I don't know," he admitted, low. "When her attack came at us, something else struck at the same time. I felt the impact, then nothing. As if it never fully landed." He set me down gently beside Layla. "We need to move. That attack was massive. People will come, and if they see us here, the Society gets blamed."
Rue walked up through the debris, kicking sticks and loose rock out of his path. His armor was battered and still smoking in places. "No sign of Catarina," he said flatly. "The compound is completely destroyed. We failed." He sat down beside us and pressed a hand over his face.
The questions came before I could stop them. How powerful could someone get? What had that vision meant? They dug into me like splinters I couldn't reach.
"Oren." Rue held his palm over me. Warmth spread from it. A slow, deliberate heat that moved through torn muscle, sealed open wounds, eased the deep ache in my bones until only faint soreness remained. "Can you stand?"
I stood. Tested my arms.
The usual edge was gone, the constant scrape of magick straining at its limits. In its place was something sharper. Stiller. Waiting. I clenched my fists, and shadows stirred around me without being called, dark tendrils threading through the air from the ground as if they'd been there the whole time.
Rue and Dormin looked at me. Neither spoke. Curiosity. Caution. Something harder to name.
"Oren, carry Layla," Dormin said. "We need to make camp."
I bent down and lifted her carefully. She didn't stir. Her breathing was slow and shallow. She'd taken the hit head-on, no question. I settled her weight across my shoulder and followed the others out of the crater.
Rue had camp up by the time we got there. He'd found a clearing set back from the scorched earth far enough that the smell of ozone faded into pine and cold dirt. A fire was already going, the wood still catching and spitting. A deer carcass hung from a low branch nearby, freshly dressed, blood still dripping dark into the ground beneath it.
I set Layla down as gently as I could. She cried out anyway, the sound thin and involuntary.
Rue knelt beside her without a word. One quick, practiced motion, her arm snapped back into place. She gasped, and then his hand went to her forehead and her face went slack. Sleep pulled her under before she could fully register the pain.
Rue stood. Made it two steps before his legs went out from under him.
He caught himself against a tree, one hand braced against the bark, breathing gone ragged and heavy. For a moment he just stood there, holding himself up by sheer stubbornness. Then his knees buckled and he slid down the trunk and hit the ground. His eyes were already closing.
"I'm just going to rest here," he muttered.
He was asleep before he finished the sentence.
Dormin hadn't moved. He was standing at the edge of the camp, staring out toward the crater or what was left of the world around it. His aura was completely gone. Completely normal. As if it had never existed at all.
"What do we tell Damian?" I asked. "Do you think he knew she'd be there?"
Dormin was quiet for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat. Controlled.
"Rue and I will handle Damian." He didn't look away from the crater. "This was a complete failure of intelligence on his part. He sent us in blind." A pause. "And if it wasn't blindness, if he knew then he sent us to die."
He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.
I lay back in the dirt. My body sank into itself. Sleep came fast, and it didn't feel like rest.
● ● ●
The dreams didn't let me go easily.
Damian's knife. Catarina's black orb splitting the air toward my face. The pressure of whatever had spoken to me in that dark, the wrongness of it, the weight of being seen by something that vast and that patient.
And beneath all of it, quieter than the rest: Layla's lips against mine.
I woke with that last part still on me, sitting somewhere between memory and dream, and for a moment I didn't move. Just stared up at the night sky, the stars sharp and indifferent overhead, and tried to decide what to do with the feeling.
I didn't come up with anything.
Layla was up. She was talking quietly with Dormin and Rue near the fire, her injured arm resting in a makeshift sling, her voice low. She looked steadier than she had any right to.
"Oren." Rue crossed over and helped me to my feet.
Layla was there before I was fully up, her good arm wrapping around me, her face pressed into my chest.
"I'm so glad you're okay," she murmured.
I didn't say anything. I put a hand on the back of her head and held her there for a moment.
Rue brought the horses over by their leads. "Come on. Let's move."
I helped Layla onto her horse, then climbed onto mine. We rode out into the dark.
The pile of hunters was still there when we hit the road again. Animals had found them in the night. Shapes moving through the bodies in the torchlight, unhurried.
A group was coming toward us from down the path.
Eratiell Knights. Full black and red armor, riding in formation. I scanned for Valor. He wasn't with them.
Their commander dropped off his horse and walked toward us. Rue dismounted to meet him.
"Are you responsible for the battle that took place yesterday?"
"We were involved," Rue said. "Our actions were purely defensive and fall within the Society's directive of free action."
The commander glanced back at his group, then returned his attention to Rue.
"That may be. But King Elyas has requested that anyone responsible be brought in for questioning."
Rue sighed. "Very well but I request a representative of the Society be there during the questioning." Rue replied walking back to his horse.
"Lead the way."