“And you’re calling it now.” Thane’s voice carries no judgment. Just cold assessment. “For her.”
“For all of us.” I gesture at the veins. “Ethos is using her Ether the way the Nightmares once used fear.”
Silence stretches taut as wire.
“Can Ethos be stopped?” Thane asks finally.
I stand, brushing ash from my hands. “That’s what we need to find out.”
“How?”
I meet his eyes. “We get her out of here first. Then we deal with him.”
The veins flicker.
A tremor runs through the stone beneath our feet—subtle at first, then stronger. The silver light pulses brighter, faster, like a heartbeat accelerating.
Theo’s head snaps up, eyes going distant. When he speaks, his voice is hollow.
“They heard you.”
I feel it too—a shift in the air, a change in pressure. Something moving through the dark, drawn by my voice carried through the Void’s twisted pathways.
Something answering.
Gray lifts his head, a low growl rumbling in his chest. Sharper now. More alert. The wolf growing stronger with every passing hour.
Rhett’s fire burns steady in his palms—blue flames that would’ve been impossible when we first arrived. “How long?”
“I don’t know.” I stare at the veins, watching them pulse.
“Could be hours,” Theo murmurs. “Could be minutes.”
Jace’s blade appears in his hand, reflecting the silver light. “And when they get here?”
I don’t answer immediately.
Because the truth is, I don’t know what they’ve become in the centuries since I left them behind. I don’t know if they’ll remember our pact or if the Void has twisted them into something unrecognizable.
I don’t know if calling them was salvation or suicide.
But it’s too late to take it back now.
“When they get here,” I say quietly, “we’ll find out if the dark remembers its debts.”
The veins pulse brighter—steady, certain.
And somewhere in the distance—faint but unmistakable—I hear hoofbeats.
Chapter 5
Rhett
The hoofbeats are louder now.
Not just sound—pressure. Each one reverberates through the obsidian floor, up through my worn boots, into my bones. Rhythmic. Relentless. Like a heartbeat that doesn’t belong to anything living.
My fire responds before I can think, heat prickling under my skin in answer to the wrongness of it all.
