Then air slammed back into my lungs and gravity took hold.
I fell.
Light seared my eyes as I crashed into the ground, Aster hitting beside me with bone-rattling force. Sound returned all at once, crashing over me in a wave. Steel clanged against steel. Screams filled the air. Fire roared, the acrid stench of scorched metal and smoke filled my mouth, thick and choking. The smell of coppery blood was sharp, making my stomach twist.
It was chaos.
It was war.
And we had landed straight in the heart of it.
The world came back to me in fragments, sound first, then pain, then the crushing awareness of my own body. The tugging ache at my back constant.
Steel rang against steel close enough to rattle my teeth, the shriek of metal tearing metal slicing straight through my skull as if the noise itself were a weapon. Heat pressed in from all sides, not the clean warmth of firelight but a suffocating wall of it. The land was thick with smoke. My lungs burned as they dragged in air that tasted wrong, heavy with ash. I coughed hard and staggered forward, boots slipping on dead ground that was no longer anything that belonged to nature, thanks to the darkness, and now it had been consumed by war, nothing now but packed dirt, soaked bloody, that sank beneath my feet.
Bodies lay everywhere, twisted at impossible angles, armor split open, weapons discarded where hands had failed to hold them. Fire crawled across the field in pockets. Flames devouring banners, licking at fallen shields, casting the world in a sickly orange glow that made everything feel unreal. Like a nightmare that refused to release me.
For a heartbeat,I could not move.
This was not the vision. There was no distant, helpless observation here, no invisible barrier keeping death at arm’s length. I was not untouchable. I was standing in it, breathing it, feeling every tremor of the ground beneath my solesas something massive struck somewhere nearby. The impact shuddered up through my bones and lodged in my chest like a second heartbeat.
I could die here.
The thought landed sharp enough to cut through the noise, the terror, and the sheer overwhelming scale of it all. One wrong step, one moment of hesitation, one blade swung without me seeing, and I would be nothing more than another body lying in the dirt beneath the smoke.
Mortal. Fragile.Terrifyingly small.
My hand shook as I reached for my hunting knife, fingers slick with sweat as they wrapped around the familiar hilt that had been my only hope when the Rift first opened. The weight of it steadied me just enough to breathe again. To turn slowly in a full circle and force my eyes to take in the battlefield piece by piece instead of drowning in it all at once.
Figures moved through the smoke, some armored in pale steel, others writhed in darkness that crawled over their limbs like living tar. Cries rose and fell around me, pain and fury and desperation tangled together until I could no longer tell one from the other.
Somewhere to my left, a roar tore through the air, deep and thunderous, vibrating straight through me. Another sound, higher-pitched, answered it, a scream cut short so abruptly it made my stomach twist and bile fill my mouth. I flinched, heart slamming painfully against my sternum as memory surged unbidden, dragging me back to another moment of chaos. Another descent from the sky, another time I had run when I should have stayed.
Atlas’s shadow emerging from the chaos as he approached the gates of the base. The General I had once been so afraid of, trying to claim me even then. I had come so far, survived somuch. But this… this seemed immeasurable. The weight of it was close to crushing me.
Because this time,there was no place to run.
No place to hide.
The guilt followed close behind. The Way Weaver’s face flashed in my mind, silver eyes bright with resolve even as the light burned beneath her skin. The archway collapsing. Her whispered command to go. I had obeyed because I had to, because choice had been stripped down to survival. But standing here now, surrounded by the cost of that choice, the weight of it pressed so hard against my chest it stole the air from my lungs all over again.
This was the price.
So much death. I had seen my fair share of it over the years, but nothing like this. Nothing could have prepared me for the onslaught of it all.
The war we had been racing toward was no longer an abstract threat or a distant inevitability. It was here, raging and merciless, and I was standing in the middle of it. With nothing but a knife and a dagger I couldn’t use with consequence, as well as stubborn will, and the burning knowledge that Atlas was somewhere ahead of me, fighting for a world that was already tearing itself apart.
I swallowed hard, forcing my legs to move, forcing myself forward into the smoke and the fire and the noise.
If I was going to die here, it would not be frozen in fear.
And if Atlas was still alive, I would find him.
Movement snapped my focus sharp.
A shape burst from the smoke to my right, its outline wrong in a way that made my skin crawl. It moved like a man but not like any human I had ever seen, limbs jerking with unnatural speed, darkness clinging to its skin in thick, crawling ribbons. I barely had time to register the glint of a blade before my bodyreacted on pure reflex. My body stumbled back as the strike sliced through the space where my throat had been a second earlier.
Heat flared along my collarbone as the edge kissed skin, shallow but close enough to steal my breath. I cried out and slashed mindlessly, my knife connecting with something solid. The impact jarred my arm all the way to the shoulder, pain sparking white behind my eyes, but the creature shrieked and recoiled, more startled than wounded.
