The flames had died down by morning.
Ash floated like gray snow over the smoldering camp. The pyre had burned through the night—Eliane's body laid atop with her blade clenched in both hands, veiled in wildflowers Liora had gathered herself. No rites. No last words. Just fire. Pure and final.
Liora didn't cry.
Not because she didn't want to.
Because if she started, she wouldn't stop.
She sat apart from the others, legs crossed, the blackened soil still warm beneath her. Her fingertips were stained with soul ink, glyphs scratched into her forearms—half protective, half experimental. The Echo Rites had left her altered. Voices whispered from beyond the Veil now, but only when she bled.
And she was always bleeding.
"Is this what power tastes like?" she whispered, staring into the rising sun. "Ash and silence?"
She didn't expect an answer.
But someone sat beside her anyway.
Dareth.
He said nothing for a long time. His clothes still carried Eliane's blood. He hadn't changed. Maybe he wouldn't.
"I should've been there," he said, voice like crushed gravel.
"We both should've."
Silence again. The wind picked up, swirling cinders like falling stars. Liora watched them dance, eyes distant.
"There's something I didn't tell you," Dareth finally muttered.
She turned.
"About Eliane. And your brother."
Later, in the hushed gloom of the travel tent, Dareth unrolled a worn parchment from his satchel. It was old—creased a dozen times over, bloodstained and burned on the edges. A map, yes—but also more.
"We didn't just find your brother's name in a list of the dead," he said. "Eliane… she found this. Months ago."
Liora leaned in.
Her breath caught.
The map showed the fortress ruins of Black Hollow, deep beyond the Reachlands. But the parchment had been written over in fragmented code, and in the margins was a name circled in frantic ink: Alric.
"She thought he might've defected," Dareth said quietly.
"No," Liora whispered, trembling. "He wouldn't."
"Not defected to the White Circle. But to something else."
The White Circle had many faces.
Wealthy nobles. Fanatical priests. Enslaved mages.
And now, at the top of that pyramid, Liora had a name.
Mavrek.
She said it aloud that night in front of the remaining camp.
"He killed Eliane. I don't care whose hand wielded the dagger. I know whose will commanded it. He's the one pulling strings behind every shrine-burning, every village slaughtered, every orphaned soul we've buried. It ends with him."
They were quiet. All of them. But no one looked away.
"This is no longer about survival," she said. "This is war."
In the dark chambers beneath the ruin of Oram Vale, Mavrek stood before a blood mirror. He was dressed in silks embroidered with screaming mouths, his silver hair bound in a crown of bone shards.
Behind him, a new figure emerged from shadow. Slender. Cloaked. And smiling with teeth too sharp for any human.
"She's awakened, then?" the creature rasped.
"She's chosen," Mavrek said. "The war begins now."
Later that night, as the others slept, Liora sat beneath the open sky.
Alone.
Again.
But not entirely.
From the ether, summoned by the symbols etched into her arms and her grief, came a figure half-shrouded in blue flame.
It wasn't Eliane.
It wasn't her brother.
It was a part of her—pulled from the soul fusion ritual days before.
Her eyes widened.
"You… you're me."
The soul-fragment nodded. "The part you buried to survive. But you'll need me now. Because where we're going…"
She reached forward, touching Liora's heart.
"...only monsters survive."