I try to run.
My legs won’t move.
The ground beneath me turns to liquid shadow, and I’m sinking—not down but sideways. Into a space that shouldn’t exist here.
I claw at the air, reaching for anything solid. My fingers pass through matter that feels like cold syrup.
“DANE!” I scream his name this time, but the sound doesn’t travel.
The forest warps. Colors invert. My lungs compress under pressure that shouldn’t exist in this realm.
This isn’t a spell I can counter or a barrier I can break. This is Faelan’s signature—his power—recognizing something in me it considers its own.
I’ve spent my life staying free of the courts, of obligation, of being claimed.
But my blood remembers what I’ve denied.
The pattern doesn’t wait. It recognizes its own.
And pulls.
My vision fractures into fragments of light and dark. The forest disappears completely. For a suspended moment, I exist nowhere—between breaths, between worlds, between identities.
Then everything collapses inward.
And I’m gone.
I gasp. Choke. Blink.
The forest snaps back into focus. But it’s wrong.
Same trees, same rocks, same damn clearing where Dane found me several nights ago. Except the light is all wrong—too yellow, like pus under skin. The shadows don’t match the sun’s position.
I press my hand against a tree trunk. The bark feels like plastic—hollow and fake, with moisture that shouldn’t be there. When I pull away, my fingertips are clean but tingle like they’ve been burned.
“What the hell?” My voice sounds flat. No echo. No resonance.
My markers are gone. The obsidian shard, the protective circle I’d drawn at dawn, the sigil-carved stones I’d placed at cardinal points—all vanished. But the ground shows impressions where they should be, like someone removed them seconds ago.
I inhale sharply, trying to catch familiar scents. Nothing. No Dane. No pack. Just a sickly-sweet odor that clings to the back of my throat.
I spin in a slow circle, tracking the path I came from. The trail wavers, bends in places it shouldn’t. Distances seem compressed, as if the landscape is being smashed together.
“This isn’t right,” I mutter, pulling out my knife. The metal looks dull, its edge somehow less defined.
I kneel to check the dirt. When I press my palm flat against the ground, it feels ... attentive. Like it’s pressing back.
A chill runs up my spine.
The magic here isn’t just distorted—it’s inverted. Where natural magic should flow outward, this pulls inward.
The Fade. I must be in the Fade—the space between realms where Faelan’s power runs deepest. I’ve read about it in old texts, but reading doesn’t prepare you for the wrongness of actually being here.
When I stand, the trees lean slightly toward me. Not physically—their energy does. Like they’re listening.
I take a step. The ground softens under my foot, just for a second, before firming again.
The land is responding to me. Shaping itself to match my movements.
