Kara was waiting just outside the square.

  She didn’t rush to him. Didn’t speak. Just stood still, arms crossed, jaw tight.

  When Shay reached her, she pulled him into a hug.

  It wasn’t long, or dramatic. But it was fierce. Bone-deep. The kind of hug you give someone you thought you might never see again.

  She said nothing. Just held him for a moment.

  Then she let go.

  He stepped back, and their eyes met. Hers were red-rimmed, but dry.

  Shay didn’t say a word.He didn’t need to.She just nodded—once, sharply—then turned away.

  And he ran.

  He took the long way through Hollowrest, cutting through alleys slick with ash and dew. Past soot-streaked walls and shuttered shops. Past a collapsed aqueduct where someone had tried, long ago, to draw healing glyphs in soot. It hadn’t worked.

  No one stopped him. No one called his name. The city just watched—sagging rooftops, crooked chimneys, cracked lanterns and weathered gods.

  By the time Shay reached the edge of the ruins, his lungs burned.

  But he didn’t stop.

  He pushed deeper—through the tangle of fallen stone and creeping vines, down half-buried paths no one else bothered to tread—until he stood again before the statue.

  The one with no face. No name. Just a hollow, worn silhouette crowned in moss.

  He’d been here dozens of times before. But this time, something was different.

  Shay sat at its base.

  His fingers trembled, though the worst of the pain had dulled to a quiet throb. His body still ached. His head hurt from the altar’s backlash. His body had survived.

  But something deeper hadn’t.

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  And against his chest, the pendant. Warm.

  He looked down at it.

  He remembered the altar. The way something thick and ancient had tried to force its way inside him. How he’d screamed. How everything had nearly ended—until the pendant flared.

  It had saved him.

  Not Kara. Not the priests. The pendant.

  And that terrified him more than anything.

  He didn’t know what it was. Kara had called it luck. But luck didn’t burn like that.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t sleeping anymore.

  He wanted to scream.

  But the silence wasn’t empty. It was thick. Watching. Sacred in a way that had nothing to do with gods.

  He didn’t cry. But he came close.

  “Is this it?” he whispered. “Is that all I am?”

  He didn’t expect an answer.

  But the ground beneath him shifted.

  A breeze curled behind his neck—not air, exactly, but something colder.Older.

  He turned sharply, every muscle tensed.

  Nothing.

  Just wind. And stone.

  But something caught his eye—half-buried at the base of the statue, hidden beneath roots and dust.

  It hadn’t been there before. He was sure of it.

  With slow hands, he brushed the soil away.

  A carved stone—no larger than his palm—emerged from the dirt. It wasn’t part of the statue. He’d sat here a dozen times and never once seen it.

  On its surface, a symbol.

  A circle, split down the middle. One half etched in clean, perfect lines. The other, jagged and blackened like it had been scorched in a fire that didn’t belong to this world.

  He reached toward it.

  And the whisper came.

  Not a sound. A force.It slammed into his mind like a hammer wrapped in silk.

  "Not yet."

  The words weren’t spoken. They were injected into his thoughts—carved through them like red-hot wire. Pain bloomed behind his eyes. Blood spilled from his nose. His thoughts unraveled, logic collapsing into static.

  His body convulsed. His vision blurred. He tasted copper and fire.

  His mind began to fracture.

  He screamed—

  —and the amulet flared.

  A white-gold light burst from the pendant at his chest. A radiant wave surged through him, flooding his skull, pushing back against the voice. It wasn’t gentle. It was a shield made of will. Of memory. Of something older than language.

  The pressure recoiled.

  The whisper screeched—high and awful and silent—and shattered like glass inside his head.

  Shay collapsed.

  He lay in the dirt, twitching, breath ragged, staring up at the clouds that didn’t care if he lived or died.

  The symbol on the stone still sat before him.Untouched.Waiting.

  But the voice was gone.

  That night, he barely spoke to Kara.

  She noticed. Of course she did. But she didn’t press.

  She’d seen that look before—in people who returned from the edge of something vast. Something that whispered not promises, but terms.

  She slid a plate toward him. He picked at it in silence.

  “I’ll talk to a priest tomorrow,” she said gently. “See if maybe they’ll let you try again. Maybe something glitched.”

  “Maybe,” Shay said. But his voice sounded like it came from somewhere far away.

  Later, long after she’d drifted to sleep, he lay awake, the cracked ceiling above him a map of splintered thoughts.

  The amulet lay against his chest. Cool again. Still.But not forgotten.

  Because something down there had seen him. Had spoken to him.

  Not yet.

  And whatever it was—it would return.