Rulv Dask hated the Fold.

Radio signals distorted into static without warning, cutting conversations mid-sentence and making it hard to give and receive orders. Satellites blinked out over coordinates that existed one day and vanished the next, making navigation an utter nightmare. The terrain shifted just enough to ruin carefully planned routes, forcing detours that cost him time, fuel, and worst of all, patience.

Last year, the Fold had swallowed half his convoy without explanation or apology. One moment they were there, rolling across the hardpan in formation. The next, empty desert where tire tracks should have led. The year before that, it had carved a scar across his face that he still refused to talk about.

The air here pressed against his skull in a way that made thinking difficult, planning harder, and sleep nearly impossible.

But the Fold’s malevolence served his purposes as well as it frustrated them. Crown patrols avoided these twisted reaches. Skyguard remnants lost their bearings in the magnetic distortions. And, more than anything, Dask needed his rules to be the only ones that mattered.

He sat hunched on an old crate, the wooden slats groaning under his considerable weight each time he shifted position. A battered ledger lay balanced on one thick thigh, its pages filled with numbers that told stories in the austere language of profit and loss. The carbon stylus in his fingers had worn smooth from years of tallying human inventory.

Dask carried his reputation in the scars that mapped his body. He looked like he had been shaped from clay and sharpened by cruelty until only the essential parts remained. His body was thick with muscle earned from breaking men and dragging their weight across ruined roads. His skin bore the permanent tan of someone who had spent a lifetime under suns that burned too bright, leathery and lined with the accumulated damage of violence survived.

Tribal ink swirled from the base of his throat down both arms, telling stories in symbols that spoke of chains and branding irons and things better left unspoken. The deep scar that split his face from temple to jaw was newer than the tattoos, a memento from someone who had tried to silence him the permanent way. It hadn’t worked. It had just made him angrier.

When he looked up from his ledger, his eyes were cold and predatory, flat black with no gleam of humor or mercy. He never questioned the cost of what he did. He measured everything in terms of utility and profit. Pure, unbroken intent lived behind those eyes.

He scanned the faces caught in the fire’s flickering light, the kind of stare that evaluated function as worth. Then he cleared his throat, a small sound that cut through the stillness of the camp. Everyone heard it. Everyone looked.

“They doubled the order,” he stated, his voice carrying easily across the circle. “They want a full dozen now. Velari blood. No infants. No dead weight.”

Behind him, the Graven Syndicate encampment sprawled across the sand like a mechanical organism feeding on the desert’s carcass. Makeshift solar tarps stretched between the rusted frames of salvaged vehicles, their worn surfaces patched with tape. Salvaged plastic and blackout canvas rippled in the evening wind, camouflaging their position against terrain that looked like it had been chewed up and spat out by one of the Dravarran giants.

The fire burned from a cracked oil drum, its flames burning low, but hot. The light it cast was ugly and yellow, throwing harsh shadows across their circle of upturned crates and folding chairs. It generated more soot than it should have, smelling of scorched rubber and boiling animal fat.

Jel sat closest to the fire, cradling a dented metal bowl half-full of the thin broth he had managed to cobble together from their dwindling supplies. His silver beard was carefully maintained, a strange point of vanity that contrasted sharply with the soot-stained clothing and cracked boots he wore. His cheeks were ruddy and flushed, and his face held that friendly quality of a kind old man. His round frame was bundled in a goose down jacket that had been patched so many times the original fabric was more suggestion than reality.

He hummed while he stirred, a melody no one could name, but felt familiar all the same. The sound drifted through the camp, settling into the spaces between conversation and filling them with comfort. If you didn’t think too hard about where it came from.

Everything about him suggested warmth, kindness, the sort of grandfather figure who carved wooden toys and told bedtime stories. Someone whose pockets should have held cinnamon candies and folded paper birds, whose smile carried the disarming warmth that made you want to believe the world might still hold small mercies.

Which made his presence in a slaver camp all the more unsettling to anyone who bothered to consider the implications.

No one in the camp could quite explain what Jel did for the Graven Syndicate. He never carried weapons, never spoke during briefings, never participated in the violence that defined their profession. But he was always nearby when the newest captives arrived, especially the youngest ones. Always humming. Always smiling. Always watching with those warm, friendly eyes that could pick flesh from your bones.

Phessra Vein had once called him “a terrifying comfort.” Dask preferred “necessary horror.”

But the children had their own name for him, whispered in the darkness of transport containers and holding cells. They called him Uncle. And Uncle Jel always sang them to sleep.

“No way we’re catching that many the usual way,” came Uxx’s voice from the shadows beyond the fire, raw and hollow like it had been scraped out of a grave with bare hands.

He stood just shy of seven feet, all bone and tendon under a thin layer of yellowed, waxy skin. His elbows and knees were held together loosely, effectively bending both ways in equal measure. His body seemed more improvised than designed. His eyes were black hollows set too deep in their sockets, unnervingly still. Rumor had it he was a corpse that had ceased decaying halfway through.

He leaned against the hood of a rusted cargo truck, braced on an elbow in an awkward attempt to look casual. The olive-colored military uniform he wore hung on his emaciated frame like a tent draped over sticks, sleeves torn at the elbows and pants jagged at the knees. Nothing about it fit properly, as if it once belonged to a much larger man who had decided to never eat again.

A long-handled war hook rested against his shoulder. Not slung for quick access, not readied for immediate use, just resting with the casual intimacy of a trusted, lifelong companion. The blade’s serrated edge caught the firelight, revealing stains that spoke of old gore and recent use. He called it his Gravemaker, and from what Dask had seen, the name was well earned.

Across his throat, thick black stitches crisscrossed like the remnants of some butcher’s mistake, sewn shut with wire that looked more industrial than medical. His head, arms and legs were void of hair, not by razor but hypotrichosis. That was characteristic of his kind, called the Tallow Breed, a malformed remnant of Ilhari descent. Though any self-respecting Ilhari would deny such a connection.

Dask looked over at Uxx and shrugged with the careless confidence of someone accustomed to finding solutions to impossible problems. “Then we’ll catch them the not-usual way.”

After a moment enduring Uxx’s hollow stare, he continued, “The Crown’s paying double for quick delivery. They want something specific, and they want it fast.”

“Like what?” Uxx asked, his voice carrying no particular curiosity.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Dask replied. “But they’re paying double, so… pretend to care.”

Phessra lingered at the fire’s edge, the embodiment of smoke, if it had malicious intent. She didn’t speak often, and blinked even less. She was an unsettling presence that lingered eerily on a plane outside normal reality. Her black dress was loose fitting and stitched in patterns that suggested either careful maintenance or obsessive compulsion. Blood had dried at the hem in ways that might have been decorative if you didn’t look too closely.

She was pale in the way that suggested deliberate cultivation rather than simple genetics, as if she had been kept from sunlight on purpose or drained slowly over time. Her long black hair ended just above her elbows, and her lips held that just-bitten look of someone perpetually on the verge of saying something terrible and choosing silence instead.

Her eyes were dark and followed movement without alerting you to their attention, tracking motion with the patient focus of a predator waiting for exactly the right moment. There was a sharpness in her quiet, a kind of patience that suggested she had seen a lot of things die, and liked to watch how they did it.

She held a book against her chest the way a mother might a child, cradling it with protective intimacy. Her thumb traced its spine in slow, reverent circles, and occasionally she whispered to it. When she looked up from its pages, her eyes held the eager anticipation of someone who preferred bedtime stories that ended in blood.

“Twelve’s a bad number, Chainfather,” she purred, her voice soft as settling ash.

“Yeah?” Dask asked, raising one eyebrow in the kind of indulgent curiosity he reserved for Phessra’s cryptic observations. They rarely made immediate sense, but they had an uncomfortable habit of proving themselves prophetic. “And why’s that?”

She smiled with the private satisfaction of someone sharing a secret with the flames themselves, her laugh soft and intimate like she was letting the fire in on a joke nobody else could understand.

“You’ll see.”

“Shut the hell up, you weird freak,” Kivven snapped as she stepped out of the shadows beyond the tents, her voice attempting to shred Phessra’s mystique.

The firelight caught her in stages as she approached. First her boots, military surplus scuffed by hard use and thick with accumulated soot. Then her legs, lean muscle wrapped in tight black denim that had faded to charcoal. Her tank top had probably been white once, but now it bore the accumulated stains of someone whose profession left marks on everything it touched.

Her face appeared last, glistening with a thin sheen of sweat. She wasn’t pretty in any traditional sense, but her face was fierce, all sharp angles and controlled aggression. Her mouth was twisted in a permanent scowl that could have cut through steel cable, and she moved with the casual menace of violence held in careful check.

Behind her came Bale, still fumbling with the buttons on his trousers and wearing a satisfied grin. He was built as solid a cargo container, with the casual over-confidence of a man who made up for his imbecilic mind by flexing his biceps. His beard bristled with fresh sweat, and his shirt clung in damp patches to the considerable slope of his gut. There was a fresh scrape across his knuckles that hadn’t been there an hour ago. When he fell into step beside Kivven, the side of his hand brushed her hip with the casual possessiveness of ownership claimed and acknowledged.

Neither of them looked at the other, but the space between them hummed with the kind of tension that spoke of transactions completed and debts settled.

“Your creepy little riddles get really old,” Kivven muttered as she dropped onto an overturned crate, shooting a glance toward Phessra that could have drawn blood. “Say what you mean or shove a knife in your throat. Save us the anticipation.”

Phessra didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t acknowledge the threat in any way that suggested it mattered. Her voice came soft and even, like steam rising from a pot heated past its breaking point.

“Maybe if you opened your mind as often as you open your legs, you wouldn’t be so confused all the time.”

Kivven’s laugh was sharp and abrupt, carrying more edge than humor. “Awww, the little porcelain doll sounds jealous.”

Phessra tilted her head with the slow deliberation of someone considering an interesting specimen. “And yet here you are, barking for my attention like a bitch in heat.”

“You think I want your attention?” Kivven scoffed. “You’re a walking funeral. I’d rather fuck a corpse.”

“Attention’s for strays and street girls,” Phessra murmured, her smile widening just enough to show teeth. “No wonder you’re starving for it.”

Bale coughed out a laugh that made his considerable belly bounce with appreciation. Kivven shot him a glare that could have curdled milk, then snapped her eyes back to Phessra with renewed venom.

“Say one more thing, witch. See what happens.”

Phessra’s smile turned predatory. “You’ll posture. You’ll threaten. Then you’ll crawl back to your corner and sulk until someone pays attention to you again.”

Bale wheezed out another laugh, louder this time. “She’s got you figured out, Kiv.”

This time Kivven didn’t just glare. She pulled a knife from her boot and sent it spinning through the air toward Bale’s thigh, the blade whispering as it cut through the space between threat and consequence. He jerked aside just in time, his bulk lurching from the crate with a grunt of surprised effort.

He laughed again, the sound reverberating through the camp.

“Gods,” he bellowed, wiping tears from his eyes, “only thing worse than a mouthy bitch is two of them trying to out-talk each other. Puts a man right off his appetite.”

“Then starve,” Kivven snarled, another blade already in her hand, eyes daring him to speak again.

“You’re both just wet holes with too much air between the ears,” Bale muttered, spitting into the dirt as he shook his head with exaggerated disappointment.

Kivven rose in a single fluid motion, pivoting to lock eyes with him in a way that promised immediate violence. “Keep smiling, fat boy. I’ll carve up that gut and use it to fry trenchroot.”

Bale leaned forward, slow and heavy, the humor draining from his face like water from a broken vessel. One hand lashed out to grab her between the legs with casual brutality. “I’ll split you in half,” he growled, “and leave you begging for more.”

Her blade came down fast toward his forearm, but he flinched back just in time to keep the skin.

“Keep smirking like that,” she snarled, “and I’ll cut the smile right off your face.”

Phessra’s grin widened with obvious delight. “Might be an improvement,” she murmured.

Kivven spun toward her, blade raised, feet set to charge. That’s when Dask decided he had heard enough. He stood slowly, his considerable frame unfolding with deliberate menace, and spoke a single word that cut through their bickering like an axe through kindling.

“Silence.”

The command hit the air with the sound of a cracking whip. Banter died mid-syllable. Threats withered in throats. Even the fire seemed to crackle more quietly, as if it understood the hierarchy being enforced.

Dask’s eyes moved slowly from one face to the next. Phessra, calm as always. Kivven, still radiating fury. Bale, suddenly intimidated despite his size.

“You want to bleed, do it on your own time,” he scoffed, his voice carrying the reasonable tone of someone explaining obvious facts to slow children. “Out here, we work. We take. We get paid. That’s all that matters.”

Nobody spoke. The lesson had been delivered and received.

“Next one to bark without purpose gets left out with the dogs,” he added, settling back onto his crate with the satisfied air of someone whose authority had been acknowledged and accepted.

Kivven muttered under her breath but dropped back onto her crate, the blade still resting in her palm just in case. Bale snorted but kept his mouth shut for once, apparently deciding that discretion was the better part of not getting throat-cut in his sleep.

About that time, Meera emerged from between two tarps, clapping her hands together to knock off dirt. Her high cheekbones and arched brows were sharp in the firelight, her lips set in the kind of subtle pout that suggested constant dissatisfaction with the world’s failure to meet her standards. She possessed an understated beauty that was almost too severe, as if a sculptor had carved her from stone and forgotten to sand down the edges.

She wore a fitted jumpsuit the color of dried grass, cinched at the waist and smudged with soot from whatever fires she had been setting. Her movements were precise, economical, carrying the efficiency of someone who didn’t waste energy on unnecessary flourishes.

She didn’t joke often, rarely smiled, and when she spoke it was usually to point out problems that everyone else had missed.

Her eyes swept the camp, taking in the lingering tension, and she asked with characteristic directness, “What did I miss?”

From the shadows beyond the fire, Uxx’s hollow voice drifted across the clearing. “The Chainfather was just about to tell us the not-usual plan.”

Dask looked back down at his ledger, turning the page with one thick finger and speaking as if the conversation had never been interrupted.

“We sweep the town,” he explained. “Start at the square, work our way outward. Take the quiet ones. Younger they are, the better they sell.”

His gaze shifted toward Phessra, who continued stroking her book’s spine with reverent attention. “If you find anything with Thornwalker markings, we bury it. Quietly.”

She gave a slow nod, her eyes drifting closed.

“No bodies left behind,” Dask continued. “No names. No questions. And for the love of all that’s profitable, no fire in the Fold.”

“Why not fire?” Bale asked with the kind of genuine confusion that suggested stupidity was a natural state rather than an affectation.

Phessra’s voice barely rose above the wind’s whisper. “Because fire makes it hungry.”

A hush settled over the camp, broken only by the soft shifting of sand and the distant sound of heat lightning. The wind picked up, cold and damp, carrying the metallic taste of electrical discharge.

Dask slid his ledger into his pack and scanned the camp one final time, making sure his crew understood the stakes.

“We move at dawn,” he said, his voice dropping to a more intimate register. “Pack light.”

Uncle Jel began humming again, soft and aimless. It wasn’t particularly soothing, but it filled the spaces between words and made the silence less oppressive.

Everyone else fell quiet, lost in their own thoughts of the responsibilities of tomorrow.

Their journey had led them to the fringe of the Fold, where Kareth-9 sat dormant against the horizon. Talon had helped build the outpost years ago, back when the Skyguard still had purpose and the hope of a future. Kareth-9 had been designed as both a hidden relay shelter and a fortified fallback stronghold, a place where scattered units could regroup and resupply before embarking on a new mission.

It was still standing, which was more than could be said for most Skyguard installations.

But it wasn’t as he remembered it.

The gate hung in two pieces, its composite frame strangled by cables of aggressive vines and the slow, inexorable crush of time left unattended. Like a disease, rust had devoured the hinges, leaving behind only suggestions of what had once been functional hardware. The outpost’s main power conduit had been severed, its protective housing gutted and left open to weather that showed no mercy. The beacon tower loomed against the sky, dark and silent, showing no pulse, no heat signature, no indication it had ever mattered at all.

The place had been abandoned for months, possibly longer. No fresh tire tracks marred the dried mud around the perimeter. No recent drone flyovers registered on the passive receivers. Just silence, the persistent smell of mildew, and the faint metallic tang of oil that had been left to oxidize under an unforgiving sun.

Talon stood in the doorway without speaking. One hand pressed against the frame, his fingers tracing the cold alloy. The outpost was a carcass now, a hollowed shell of what it had been when it was in operation. He had brought her here because it was supposed to represent safety, familiarity, defensibility. Instead, it was just another shadow of better times, another reminder that the world moved on regardless of sentiment or hope.

Kaela watched him in silence, her perceptive eyes catching the disappointment he tried to hide. This was the closest she had seen him to accepting defeat, to acknowledging that maybe some things couldn’t be protected or preserved through will alone.

But the walls still stood, solid and unyielding. There were no signs of recent Dominion patrols, no evidence of Syndicate activity. The isolation that made it feel abandoned also made it secure.

For now, that would have to be enough.

The fire Talon built was deliberately small, its glow low and steady, controlled like everything else he did. He sat close enough to feel its warmth, his shoulders no longer held with the rigid tension that had defined his posture for days. His eyes had stopped their constant scanning of the darkness for shapes that didn’t belong, threats that might materialize from shadow and silence.

For the first time since they had begun this journey, he allowed himself a charitable amount of relaxation.

Kaela sat beside him on the cracked stone floor, cross-legged with a dented metal bowl cupped in both hands. The broth inside was thin, more hydration than sustenance, but at least it was hot. She sipped it with a quiet and grateful contentment. There was a softness in her posture that might have been comfort, or perhaps simply exhaustion.

She leaned gently against him, nudging his arm with her elbow in a wordless gesture. Light but intentional, a conversation without words.

He looked down at her, and for a brief moment, the lines of tension around his eyes eased into the closest thing Talon Veyr could get to peace.

“You snore,” she said without preamble.

“I don’t,” Talon replied automatically.

“You do.”

He studied her face, searching for signs of mockery and finding only gentle amusement. “I’m trained for silence.”

“Well,” she muttered between careful sips, “you’re bad at it.”

He made a sound that fell somewhere between a laugh and a snort, the kind of involuntary response that slipped past defenses he had spent years constructing. Once again, he could feel the wall he had built around himself beginning to crumble, not through assault but through the gentle persistence of someone who refused to be kept at a distance.

As if she could sense the shift in his emotional architecture, she smiled with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had accomplished something important.

“In the morning,” he said, his voice dropping to the intimate register reserved for confidences, “I’ll see what I can do with the equipment. Maybe get a radio signal out. Try to find somewhere safe for you. Somewhere permanent.”

She nodded, her emerald eyes studying his face in the flickering firelight. He looked older than the stories painted him, she realized. Not like a hero from the old tales, but like someone who had survived things that no one should have to endure and somehow managed not to turn to stone in the process.

“Why do you do it?” she asked softly. “Keep fighting. After everything?”

Talon considered her question, staring into the flames as if they might hold the answers to all the questions he had been avoiding. His eyes grew distant, clouded by memories that felt heavier than armor.

Then, almost in a whisper, she added, “Do you think any of this really matters?”

He turned to look at her, the question hitting deeper than she realized. It was the first time he had paused long enough to truly consider the possibility that maybe nothing they did made any difference in the end. Most of his life had been spent defending things that no longer existed, rebelling against systems too large to topple, and running from consequences that followed regardless of geography or intention.

Did anything matter anymore? Did any of it ever matter?

“What do you think?” he asked, turning the question back to her. “Does it matter to you?”

She didn’t answer immediately, but didn’t divert her eyes either. She maintained the steady attention, because some questions deserved careful consideration.

That’s when it slipped out, spoken half to himself and half to the flame that danced between them.

“Little Spark.”

She blinked, curiosity lighting her features. “What?”

Talon exhaled slowly. “That’s what you are. In all this ruin, all this darkness, you’re the Little Spark that’s going to light up the world again.”

She looked down, suddenly shy. She was unsure what to do with the weight of such expectation, such hope invested in someone so small.

He didn’t repeat it, didn’t elaborate or explain. Just leaned back against the wall, his face returning to its usual unreadable mask. But the name hung in the air between them, a prophecy that mattered whether the rest of the world acknowledged it or not.

Time passed in comfortable silence. Minutes, maybe an hour. The fire burned lower, casting longer shadows across walls that had sheltered other conversations, other hopes, other small moments of peace stolen from a hostile world.

Talon blinked slowly, then finally closed his eyes. Sleep took him gradually, the way it came to people who had learned to rest despite danger, despite uncertainty, despite the knowledge that tomorrow might bring more loss than they could bear.

Kaela didn’t move. She simply watched him in the firelight, silent and still, memorizing the moment when he looked almost peaceful.

His chest rose and fell with the steady rhythm of genuine rest, and in sleep his face lost some of its hardened edges. The lines carved by years of violence and disappointment didn’t disappear, but they softened, as if the battle he fought inside his own mind had finally agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

For a moment, she just watched him. Her guardian. Her strange, broken angel who carried more weight than anyone should have to bear.

And yes, he did snore. Not loudly, just the quiet rasp of lungs that had breathed too much ash, too much smoke from fires that had burned everything he had tried to protect. It wasn’t really a snore at all; it was fragile, the sound of someone who hadn’t felt safe in years finally surrendering just enough control to truly rest.

Kaela rose slowly, moving with the practiced quiet that came from a life spent hiding. Every step was deliberate, placed with the careful attention. She knew that a single sound might foil her plans.

At the doorway, she paused, one hand resting against the frame as she eased the door open just enough to slip through. The metal shifted with barely a whisper, the hinges cooperating with her need for stealth.

Outside, the Fold seemed even more dead than usual. Unlike other places that fell into a comfortable rhythm at night, there was no sense of peace here. No insects hummed their evening songs. No stars pierced the thick atmosphere that draped over the desert like a burial shroud. There was only the dense silence, heavy and watchful, as if the very air were holding its breath.

If Talon managed to get the radio working tomorrow, help would come. And with it, an end to this strange, precious time they had spent together. Her place in his life would become a memory, filed away with all the other losses he had accumulated over the years. The thought made her sad, and that emotion tugged at her chest anxiously.

She didn’t want to vanish from his life like morning mist. She wanted to leave something behind, something tangible that would remind him she had been real, that for a brief moment she had mattered to someone who mattered to her.

He had carried her when she couldn’t walk, fed her when she was hungry, protected her when the dangers seemed inescapable. When he didn’t have to, when it would have been easier to leave her behind. And he had already lost so much. His life was one solitary testament to grief, and it showed in the way he moved through the world.

She wanted to give him something. Something that wasn’t broken or borrowed or taken from someone else’s tragedy.

She knew exactly what it had to be. She just needed to find one.

Something rare enough to matter, resilient enough to survive, beautiful enough to remind him that not everything in the world was destined to die. Something that bloomed despite every reasonable expectation of failure, that found ways to thrive in places where life should have been impossible.

A skyblossom.

So she slipped into the darkness beyond the outpost’s crumbling walls, stepping carefully into the fields that stretched toward distant mountains. She had always been unusually talented at finding skyblossoms, as if she was a magnet attracted to their defiant beauty. She would be back before he woke, carrying a gift that would remind him there were still things worth protecting.

The landscape around her was open and desolate, just emptiness that stretched for miles. She moved through the overgrowth with quiet purpose, her feet finding steady ground among the dry grass and bent weeds. Her only light was the silvery glow of the gibbous moon overhead, but that was plenty. Skyblossom petals would soak up the moonlight and reflect back a soft luminescence.

Past the old perimeter markers, now nothing more than corroded poles and fragments of buried mesh fencing. Down a gradual slope where the ground dipped toward a gnarled tree that stood like a monument to persistence. Its base was twisted into shapes that suggested desperate grasping, roots sprawling in every direction as if trying to hold the very earth together through will alone.

And there, nestled between two thick roots, the bloom waited.

Small and still, five petals arranged in perfect symmetry. Its color was a quiet collision of violet and blue, soft as twilight and stubborn as hope itself. It shouldn’t have existed here, not in soil so damaged, not in air that carried the metallic taste of distant machinery. But it did exist, luminous and defiant, proof that beauty could take root in the most unlikely places.

Kaela crouched in the sand, her knees pressing into the earth. She brought her hands around the flower without quite touching it. Not ready to pluck it yet, just wanting to feel its presence, to confirm that something so perfect could be real in a world that specialized in breaking beautiful things.

He’ll like this, she thought. Not because it was rare, though it was. Not because it carried symbolic weight, though it did. But because it was simply, undeniably beautiful. And because she had chosen it specifically for him, had gone looking for a gift worthy of the man who had saved her life and asked for nothing in return.

Her lips curved into a soft, private smile as she imagined his reaction.

“Something that isn’t broken,” she whispered to the night air.

That’s when she heard it. A sound behind her that might have been wind rustling through dead grass, except there was no breeze against her cheek. Might have been some small animal moving through the underbrush, except the ground showed no signs of recent life.

No, this was something else entirely. A presence that raised the fine hairs on the back of her neck. She turned halfway, a frown beginning to form on her lips as her mind tried to process what her instincts already feared.

Then a hand, fast and hard, clamped over her mouth. Another arm wrapped around her waist, yanking her backward into darkness with irresistible force. She fought instinctively, kicking and clawing and trying to scream through the fingers that pressed against her lips. But the hands didn’t move, didn’t loosen, didn’t show any signs of yielding to her desperate struggle.

They were iron wrapped in flesh, coarse and heavy and utterly unyielding. She clawed at fingers slick with sweat and grease. The earth spun past her in a dizzying spiral and her body no longer seemed willing to obey her commands.

Then darkness closed over her and the world disappeared.

The light from the gibbous moon continued to fall on empty ground, illuminating nothing more significant than disturbed sand and a few drops of blood that would be gone by morning.

And behind her, in the roots of the twisted tree, a single skyblossom lay crushed beneath the weight of someone’s careless boot, its light fading like a star burning out.

Talon woke to stillness, but not the peaceful kind that came after storms had blown themselves out. This was different, wrong in ways that set his teeth on edge before his mind had fully processed what was missing.

He sat up slowly, instincts sparking to life before conscious thought could form. The fire had burned down to its final coals, red and dim, pulsing with stubborn unwillingness to die. Embers that should have provided warmth now seemed to mock him with their fading light.

He had fallen asleep. Dropped his guard. Let tragedy happen while he dreamed of better times and safer places. He didn’t know what yet, but the certainty felt like ice water in his veins.

His eyes swept the shelter once, then again, each pass carrying him deeper into a dread that felt familiar and terrible. It was an understanding that the worst thing he could imagine was probably exactly what had happened.

“Kaela?”

His voice hit the silence like a stone thrown into still water, creating ripples of sound that died quickly in the stale air.

No answer came back.

He was on his feet before the echo faded, wings flaring wide and scattering ash from the firepit across the stone floor. His body moved with the sharp efficiency of someone whose survival had always depended on quick transitions from rest to action, from peace to war.

He scanned the shelter again, slower this time, more methodical. Every muscle coiled and ready for movement, for threat, for whatever violence might be required to fix what had gone wrong. But there was nothing to fight, no enemy to engage.

Just emptiness where she should have been.

Just the bitter scent of smoldering cinders and the metallic taste of his own fear.

And then he saw it, lying on the bedroll where she had been sleeping. Her charm, the bronze teardrop with its green stone center, still warm from contact with her skin. He reached for it with fingers that trembled despite his efforts at control, lifting it as if it might vanish like everything else good in his life. The cord slipped between his fingers like a promise broken, like hope bleeding out through wounds he couldn’t close.

Talon’s jaw locked as his breathing became shallow and rapid. He turned in a slow, complete circle, his eyes burning with the intensity of someone trying to see through walls, through time, through the cruel mathematics of cause and effect that had brought him to this moment.

His wings spread wider, catching the fading light from the coals. His heart hammered against his ribs with enough force to make the stones vibrate in sympathy.

He whispered her name again, just once, a prayer offered to gods who had already demonstrated their indifference to his suffering.

“Kaela.”

The sound died in the air, swallowed by a silence that felt hungry. And far beneath the hills, where the Fold narrowed into passages that light couldn’t touch, a girl’s scream never found the sky.

Miles away, in a camp that smelled of must and diesel fuel, Rulv Dask bent over his ledger. His carbon stylus scratched across the page, adding another entry to an inventory that measured value through suffering.

No name recorded. No history preserved. No acknowledgment that what he had just acquired had ever been anything more than merchandise.

Just a number.