I was so absorbed in reading that I missed the footsteps until a shadow fell across the table.
An Anointed One stood in the doorway. His obsidian mask reflected my face in a dozen fracmented angles—eyes wide with terror, blood still painting my hands, looking like the ghost I was about to become. His hand went immediately to the alarm crystal at his belt, a red stone that would shriek our location to every guard in the temple.
I didn't think. My hand found Penny's jar, still warm with her fading life, and I hurled it at his face with all my desperate strength.
The jar shattered against his mask in an explosion of glass and light. The released magic—Penny's magic, her potential, her stolen future—erupted outward in a burst of silver-white fire. The Anointed One screamed as it burned through his mask, into his face, his eyes. He clawed at himself, trying to escape the beautiful, terrible fire of a sixteen-year-old girl's unlived life.
I ran.
Behind me, his screams turned to rage, and I heard the sharp crack of the alarm crystal activating. Red light flooded the corridor as every crystal in the temple began to pulse in response, their shriek building to a crescendo that made my teeth ache.
They knew I was free. They were coming.
And somewhere in the chaos, I could have sworn I heard Penny's voice one last time—laughing, wild and free as her magic burned through the man who'd helped kill her.
Thetempleeruptedlikea kicked anthill. Cultists poured from every doorway—Anointed Ones with their obsidian masks, guards in leather armor that creaked with each step, even broken prisoners who'd been turned into servants, their eyes empty of everything but obedience.
I ran without thinking, without planning, pure instinct driving me through corridors I'd never seen. My body moved wrong—too fast, too fluid, dodging hands that grabbed for me before I consciously saw them reaching. When a guard swung his obsidian blade at my head, I ducked under it with impossible grace, as if I'd known the arc of his swing before he did.
Something was happening to me. My body was changing, responding to danger with abilities I didn't have three weeks ago. My bare feet found purchase on stones that should have been too smooth to climb. My fingers caught holds that should have been too small to grip. When I jumped to avoid a cultist's tackle, I cleared his head entirely, landing six feet away in a crouch that should have shattered my knees.
I didn't understand it, but I didn't question it. Gift horses and open mouths and all that.
A servant's door appeared on my left—wooden, ordinary, marked with the same symbols as the kitchen passages. I shoulder-checked it open (wrong shoulder, white-hot agony, vision going black at the edges) and stumbled into morning sunlight that hit me like a physical blow.
The courtyard spread before me, and beyond it—the cliff.
The Hollow Shrine was built into the mountain's face, carved from living rock. From here I could see the path I'd only glimpsed from my window: a narrow track switchbacking down the cliff face, barely wide enough for single file, with drops that would turn bodies into paint smears on the rocks below.
It was suicide. But staying was death, certain and screaming.
I ran for it.
Behind me, the temple doors exploded outward, and things poured out that weren't quite human anymore. They moved like smoke given malevolent form, flowing rather than running, their bodies constantly shifting between solid and vapor. Where they touched stone, it blackened and crumbled to ash. They had too many limbs that bent in too many directions, and their faces—
No. They didn't have faces. Just smooth darkness with holes where eyes should be, voids that pulled at my vision, trying to drag me into their emptiness.
I hit the cliff path at a dead run, stones crumbling under my feet. The shadow-creatures followed, some flowing down thecliff face itself, others taking the path, herding me like wolves with a deer. They weren't trying to catch me, I realized with sick certainty. They were driving me somewhere specific.
The path led into a dead forest, trees that had been killed by the temple's corruption standing like skeletal fingers against the sky. The shadow-creatures flowed between the trunks, sometimes solid enough to snap branches, sometimes vaporous enough to pass through entirely. They whispered as they moved, voices like wind through empty skulls, speaking words that tried to crawl inside my ears and nest there.
I ran faster, my enhanced body moving with desperate grace through the maze of dead trees. But they knew this territory. They'd hunted here before.
The forest opened onto a field of volcanic glass—ancient lava flow frozen mid-pour, creating a landscape of razor edges and mirror-smooth surfaces. My feet, already bloody from the escape, left red prints on the black glass. Each step was agony, glass shards embedding deep, but stopping meant letting those things catch me, and I'd seen what they did to stone. I didn't want to know what they'd do to flesh.
They herded me up a ridge, the path narrowing until it was barely a ledge. The shadow-creatures flowed along both sides now, above and below, their whispers growing louder, more insistent. .
The ridge ended at a cliff.
Three hundred feet of empty air, and below, jagged rocks like teeth waiting to chew. The morning sun painted them gold and red, beautiful in the way deadly things often were.
The shadow-creatures coalesced behind me, forming a semi-solid wall of darkness that pulsed with unholy life. To my left and right, cultists emerged from hidden paths, obsidian weapons drawn, moving with practiced coordination to cut off any escape.
"That's far enough, little bird."
The voice was cultured, controlled, with an undertone of ownership that made my skin crawl. Lord Varek Solmar stepped from behind the shadow-wall, and the creatures parted for him like water. He looked exactly like what he was: wealthy, powerful, and utterly without mercy. His pale robes remained pristine despite the chase, his silver hair perfectly arranged. Only his eyes betrayed his fury—cold and flat as a shark's.
"You've caused considerable damage," he said, approaching slowly, hands visible and empty in the universal gesture of 'I'm harmless, trust me.' "Killed one of my Anointed Ones. Released extremely valuable essence. Set back our work by weeks, perhaps months."
