Morning broke in thin streaks of orange and soot-gray across the forest edge. The trees whispered less now, as if holding their breath.
Torren rose early, sharpening his blade with short, angry scrapes. He'd slept little. Evelyn hadn't slept at all.
The core chamber remained silent beneath them. Still humming. Still watching.
"Ready?" he asked.
Evelyn nodded, fastening her satchel across her back. The sealed journal lay deep inside. The broken Warden's badge hung from her belt. Her skin still tingled faintly with old sigils.
They stepped into the woods—away from the waystation, away from the ruin of Isenhold, and toward the southern road.
The Ember Road.
They followed an old logging path for most of the morning, staying low, watching shadows. The core inside her pulsed faintly with awareness—not power exactly, but a kind of resonance. Evelyn could feel the trees bending away as they walked.
By midday, they reached a clearing where the grass had been flattened into strange spirals. In the center lay a pile of ash.
Torren crouched beside it, frowned. "Not a campfire."
"No. It's too fine. Burned clean."
They exchanged glances. Evelyn felt the core within her thrum, as if warning her. A distant howl echoed behind them.
They moved on.
Later, they passed a broken signpost—once carved with a Guild crest, now blackened with scorch marks. Near it, Evelyn spotted a torn hunter's cloak caught in a bramble.
The blood was recent.
"There were five Guild stations in this sector," Torren said quietly. "All within a week's walk. This one's cold. The next might not be."
Evelyn knelt by the ash. A sigil had been hastily carved into the dirt near the sign: two overlapping circles, bisected.
Recognition stabbed her. She'd seen it in her mother's journal.
"A marker," she murmured. "For Echoed territory. Or worse."
They camped that night beneath an overhang of rock, their fire dim and shielded. Torren cooked root-meal in silence.
Evelyn sat across from him, tracing the pattern she'd seen into the dirt. The doubled circle. The slash. Her finger trembled.
"We should've turned west," Torren muttered. "Toward the coast. There's less activity there, fewer…"
"We're meant to go south," Evelyn said. "It's pulling me. The core."
Torren set down the pot. "And what if it pulls you off a cliff, Ev?"
"Then I hope you're close enough to catch me."
His laugh was bitter. But he didn't argue further.
That night, Evelyn dreamt again.
But this time, the silver-eyed woman was not alone.
There were others—faceless figures in a burning hall, all humming a tune that pulsed with the rhythm of her heart. Above them floated cores like suns, shattering one by one.
A voice whispered behind her ear, cool and strange:
One hundred steps to the Hollow.
One hundred hearts to break.
What burns will sing.
What sings will wake.
She woke gasping. Torren held her shoulders, shaking gently. "Another vision?"
Evelyn nodded, wiping sweat from her brow.
"We're close," she said. "To something. I can feel it."
As dawn rose behind the trees, they stepped back onto the trail—eyes forward, blades ready.
Behind them, the birds did not sing.
Ahead, the Ember Road stretched like a wound across the land.
And far in the distance, a tower of smoke rose into the sky—silent, steady, and waiting.