The sky was wrong.
Evelyn felt it before she saw it—a tension like metal on metal, a soundless discord that rippled across her skin. Morning mist still clung to the undergrowth, silver-veined and slow to rise, but it wasn't the cool of dawn that made her shiver. It was the silence. Not the ordinary hush of the Wastes, but a stilled hush. Expectant. Holding its breath.
She stood on the edge of a moss-slick ridge, Torren crouched beside her, squinting into the southeast. Smoke curled there. Thin at first. But spreading. It rose not like the lazy spirals of cookfires or forge-huts but in the broad, choking fingers of something vast.
"That's Vaelbridge," Torren muttered. "Or what's left of it."
Evelyn didn't answer. She hadn't spoken since before sunrise, since the dream.
In it, the silver-eyed woman had returned.
This time she sang in a language Evelyn almost understood. The syllables curled in her mind like living things, each note strung with a memory Evelyn couldn't place: a red door, a name burned into wood, a cradle of light hidden beneath earth. When she awoke, her palms had glowed faintly. The ember within her core—the shard she had consumed to survive—pulsed with quiet awareness.
The Wastes didn't care. Nor did the beasts that prowled them.
They descended toward the lowlands as the smoke grew thicker, the trees thinning until the land stretched into scorched heather and mud-blanketed gullies. Vaelbridge should have been visible from here—a small trade village nestled between the stone-laced riverbanks. Instead, there was only ruin.
A charred post jutted from the ground like a snapped bone, and the first hut they found was little more than a skeleton. The air reeked of old fire, of burnt meat and cracked iron. Torren moved ahead, sword unsheathed, his shoulders tight.
Evelyn bent by a ruined hearth. Blackened toys lay scattered in the ash. A wooden hoop. A melted shard of glass that might once have been a prism. Her breath hitched, but she didn't cry.
She hadn't cried since Isenhold.
They found the bodies in the well.
Torren's jaw locked when they saw the tangle of limbs below, arms still reaching toward the rope that had snapped. One child. Two elders. All marked with the sigil of freeborn tradesfolk. Not warriors. Not corebearers. Just people.
"It wasn't just beasts," Torren said. "This was done clean. Precise. Look at the scorch pattern. Someone herded them."
Evelyn stared at the burn-line etched in the dirt. Curved, unnatural. Not random destruction but shaped flame.
Corefire.
Her core thrummed in recognition.
She walked past the ruined carts and the shattered kiln house until she reached the stone arch that once marked the village square. And there, half buried in soot, was the handprint.
Not scorched. Not seared.
Melted.
The stone itself had been softened and pressed, as though by fingers made of molten sun. She knelt, heart hammering.
Torren hissed sharply. "Evelyn, we need to go."
But she couldn't move. Not yet. Not when something beneath her skin whispered in recognition.
She pressed her own palm against the mark.
Pain lanced through her like lightning. Not physical—not quite. But ancient. A scream without sound. A memory not hers.
A battlefield. Thousands of voices. A woman with fire for eyes.
Evelyn jerked back, gasping. The mark on the stone glowed faintly where her hand had touched it.
Torren pulled her upright. "We leave. Now. There could be Guild remnants. Or worse."
But Evelyn turned back once before they crested the hill. And in the flickering light of the ruin, she saw a silhouette.
Not real. Not yet.
But watching.
She didn't tell Torren.
They made camp that night far from the remains of Vaelbridge, hidden in the roots of an old felwood tree. The bark was black-veined and humming with dormant ward traces—evidence that this place had once been patrolled. No longer.
Torren brooded by the fire, sharpening his blade with quick, angry strokes. Evelyn sat across from him, the ember flickering between her fingers. It danced now when she called to it, heatless but bright.
"You felt something," Torren said at last.
She nodded. "Someone left a sign. A message. Maybe a warning."
"Or a lure."
She didn't argue.
He exhaled, rubbing the back of his neck. "You touched corefire raw. Again. That's twice now without training. Evelyn, that kind of instinct shouldn't be possible."
She looked at him, voice quiet. "It's not instinct."
He frowned. "Then what?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she stared into the fire, the ember pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat.
Far in the distance, the night held its silence.
But Evelyn knew it would not last.