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Kylian stops behind me, and I feel the moment he remembers what this place is. His guilt floods the bond, but I keep walking until I reach the largest black stone.

The one I have seen in dreams for most of my life.

It sits at the far edge of the burned circle, taller than the others, cracked down the center, its surface so dark it seems to drink the gray light.

I kneel in front of it.

My hand hovers for a moment before I touch it.

The stone is cold.

“I watched her burn,” I murmur.

Kylian’s hand grips my shoulder at once, not pulling me back, only holding on as though he thinks the memory might drag me under without an anchor.

“Little mage,” he says, and there is pain in the way he says it.

“She wanted me to look away,” I continue, my fingers spreading over the black rock. “When her eyes found me, I could tell. She didn’t want me to watch.”

My throat tightens.

“But I couldn’t.”

Kylian is silent for a long moment. Then he says, quietly, “There were no children here when they burned.”

I turn my head slowly.

His face is pale in a way I have never seen, not with fear, not with weakness, but with the terrible strain of a man realizing the history he knows is incomplete in the worst possible way.

“There were two,” I say. “You just couldn’t see us.”

His hand falls from my shoulder.

I stand and turn toward what remains of the cottage at the edge of the village.

It is mostly rubble now, one wall leaning, the roof caved in, the doorway blocked by a fallen beam and tangled vines, but the porch still exists in pieces. The old steps are broken inward, the space beneath them hidden by grass.

“From there,” I say. “Sable and I were under the porch.”

Kylian follows my gaze, and the bond floods with such sharp guilt that for one moment I can barely breathe around it.

Kylian swallows hard, and I look back at the burned ring beneath my feet.

“The whole island looks like this now,” I whisper. “Not burned the same way, but dying in pieces.”

Kylian steps closer, stopping beside me.

“Zander staying here too long did this,” he says.

“Zander helped,” I answer, looking across the twelve stones. “But this started long before him.”

The wind moves through the ruins, stirring leaves through broken doorways, carrying the smell of wet earth and old ash, and I close my eyes because somewhere inside the silence, I can almost hear Sable singing again.

When I open them again, Kylian is watching me. A girl, barefoot in the ruins of a home the world tried to erase.

“I used to think surviving meant leaving this place behind,” I say.

“And now?”