They had been walking for more than thirty-six hours.

  Not in one clean stretch, not with the mercy of a proper camp or the certainty of a route. They stopped only when exhaustion forced a brief, graceless pause: backs against trees, mouths filled with cold air, hands trembling as they tore at whatever food remained. Then they stood again, as if motion itself were the only thing keeping them from being swallowed by the world behind them.

  The forest did not welcome them. It tolerated them.

  Rain had passed through earlier, leaving the ground slick and dark. Wet leaves clung to boots. Roots rose like traps from the soil, catching ankles, stealing balance. Moss coated the trunks in thick, velvet layers that made even the trees seem muffled, as if they too had learned to keep their voices low. The canopy above filtered the sky into thin gray light, neither day nor night, an in-between that made time feel unreliable.

  They walked in a line without discussing it. Not a parade, not a formation, but the shape of a group that had learned that crowds were loud and loud meant death. Seren Dal moved near the front, spear in hand, scanning ahead with the rigid discipline of a man who believed control could substitute for hope. Digiera drifted from side to side like a blade searching for a throat, her eyes always shifting, her body always coiled, refusing stillness even when her knees shook from fatigue. Legs kept near the center, quieter than usual, his fingers no longer tapping their constant anxious rhythm. The absence of that sound felt like a missing heartbeat.

  Aros set the pace without meaning to.

  Gemma noticed that first.

  She walked near the center of the line, wrapped in a borrowed cloak that still smelled faintly of ash and iron, its fabric rough against her neck. Her fever had cooled into something stranger: a lingering heat beneath the skin that came and went in waves, as though her body couldn’t decide if it was healing or burning. Every breath felt a fraction too thin, every swallow like she was drinking through cloth.

  But it wasn’t pain that occupied her.

  It was emptiness.

  The Knights of Light were scattered.

  She could see it without seeing them. The order had not been defeated by one clean battle, not even by the purge in Preta. It had been shattered by dispersal, by fear turned into instinct. Men and women running in different directions, hiding under different roofs, clinging to different names. When an organization broke into fragments, it did not naturally become whole again. It became a set of stories.

  A rumor.

  A cautionary tale told to children in low voices.

  Gemma kept her eyes forward as she walked, watching branches sway and the dark spaces between the trees. She tried to imagine the Knights in those spaces. Trying to survive alone. Trying to decide whether the order still existed if no one could find it.

  It will be difficult to rebuild, she thought.

  And then, immediately after:

  We need Talon.

  Talon was not just a leader. Talon was a shape the Knights recognized. A spine. A flag. Without her, they would argue. Drift. Doubt. Each person would believe their own version of what the Knights should be now, and those versions would not match.

  Gemma had never been naive about faith. But she had seen what it did when it had a face.

  And Talon was a face that made people stand.

  Gemma’s gaze drifted forward and settled on Aros.

  He was different.

  Not dramatically. Not in the obvious ways people claimed to change. But Gemma had always been good at noticing what others missed. The way someone carried their shoulders when they stopped apologizing to the world. The way their eyes looked when they stopped bargaining with themselves.

  Aros’s posture had shifted. His pace was steady, not forced. Where once he seemed to weigh every step like a man walking across ice, now he moved like a man who had accepted that the ice would break anyway.

  There was less hesitation in him.

  Less retreat.

  It disturbed her, in a small quiet way, because part of her had depended on his reluctance. His reluctance made him predictable. It made him careful.

  But it also reassured her, because it meant something inside him had stopped bleeding in the open.

  She walked a little faster, closing the distance until she was beside him. Their boots found an unspoken rhythm on the wet ground.

  Aros didn’t look at her immediately. He only acknowledged her presence with the smallest shift of his shoulder, making space.

  “You look… well,” Gemma said softly.

  The word felt almost absurd in this forest, with their hunger and their torn clothes and the bruises still healing under their skin. But she meant it in the only way that mattered.

  Aros glanced at her, as if surprised she would say anything at all. “Well isn’t the word I’d choose.”

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  “I didn’t mean your body,” Gemma replied. “I meant you. You look different. More certain.”

  He exhaled through his nose, almost a laugh, but it lacked humor. “Something changed,” he admitted. “I don’t know when exactly. But it did.”

  Gemma watched his face. The lines at the edges of his eyes seemed deeper, but there was also something steadier behind them. A silence that wasn’t emptiness. A silence that was resolve.

  Aros studied her for a moment, then his expression softened in a way that felt careful, almost protective.

  “And you?” he asked. “Are you alright?”

  Gemma’s first instinct was to say yes.

  That was what everyone wanted to hear. That was what people said to keep moving.

  But she didn’t.

  “Not entirely,” she said. “But I’m awake.”

  Aros’s gaze sharpened. “Back in Preta… I saw you do things. You threw men like they weighed nothing. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  Gemma didn’t look away. “I didn’t know either.”

  He slowed, subtly, just enough that the others drifted farther ahead, giving them a pocket of forest silence. The sound of their footsteps faded into the soft hiss of wet leaves.

  Aros spoke quietly. “Is it… the Light?”

  Gemma nodded.

  “And why now?” he asked. “Why then?”

  She hesitated, then said the names anyway, because holding them inside her felt like holding a live coal.

  “It has to do with Jori,” she said. “And Anxio.”

  Aros’s jaw tightened at the second name. Not in anger. In recognition of danger. In the instinctive way people reacted to things they couldn’t place but knew they should fear.

  “If you want to tell me,” he said.

  “I do,” Gemma replied, surprising herself with how quickly the answer came.

  She took a breath, feeling the cold air scrape her throat.

  “The hunt lasted two more days,” she began. “After we met Anxio.”

  Aros didn’t interrupt. He walked beside her, attentive in a way that felt unfamiliar. Aros used to listen like a man tolerating a storm. Now he listened like a man gathering information for something he intended to do.

  “After Anxio spoke to me,” Gemma continued, “Jori barely said a word. Not because he was angry, exactly. It was like… someone had shifted him out of place. Like he was standing half a step behind himself.”

  She swallowed. “I tried to ask him about it. About what Anxio showed me. And he just said no.”

  Aros frowned. “Just… no?”

  Gemma nodded. “Not cruelly. Not defensively. Like the word was a door and he was holding it shut with his whole body.”

  She paused, then continued.

  “The second day after Anxio, Jori began to move differently. Faster. More precise. He stopped hunting like a man following tracks and started hunting like a man remembering them.”

  She felt a shiver crawl across her skin as she spoke, because saying it out loud made it real again.

  “When we reached the cliffs, he stopped without warning and pointed,” she said. “There.”

  Gemma’s eyes flicked to Aros. “It was strange, because the man he pointed at didn’t look like the stories. He didn’t look like a monster. He looked like… a man who had lived outdoors too long.”

  Aros waited, patient.

  “He had strange clothes,” Gemma said. “Not foreign exactly. Just wrong for the region. His hair was long, tangled. His beard grown out. He stood near the edge of a rise, looking down at the valley like he was deciding whether to descend or disappear. He didn’t look like an assassin.”

  Gemma’s voice tightened. “But Jori was certain. He said we would circle him. That I would go left, he would go right.”

  Aros asked, “Were you afraid?”

  Gemma considered it. “I was confused,” she said. “And I was afraid of Jori more than the hunter.”

  Aros’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t ask why. He understood enough not to pry too quickly.

  Gemma continued, letting the memory unfold.

  “I did what he said. I moved through the brush, trying to keep my steps light. The wind smelled like stone and old pine. Every sound felt too loud. My cloak caught on branches. I could hear my own breathing like a betrayal.”

  She could almost feel it again: the thrum under her skin, the Light stirring without permission.

  “And as we got closer,” she said, “Jori raised his hand.”

  She lifted her own hand instinctively, mirroring the gesture.

  “That was the signal,” she told Aros. “We were supposed to close in. Quietly. Like a net.”

  Her voice lowered, more fragile now.

  “And then… the hunter spoke.”

  Aros’s head turned slightly. “Spoke?”

  Gemma nodded. “Not loudly. But clearly. Like he knew we were there before we did.”

  She hesitated, as if the next part required permission from the world to exist.

  “He said Jori’s name,” she whispered.

  Aros didn’t react, but she saw his fingers flex once near his belt.

  “He said it like a warning,” Gemma continued. “And Jori froze. Not for long. Just long enough that I understood something was wrong.”

  She exhaled.

  “And that’s when the Light first… surged.”

  Gemma’s voice was quieter. “Not like fire. Like pressure. Like the world was tightening around me.”

  Aros looked at her, his expression intent. “And Anxio?”

  Gemma nodded. “It felt connected. Like Anxio had left something inside me. A seed. And when fear hit me hard enough, it—”

  A shout tore through the forest.

  “HOLLOWS!”

  The word snapped the present back into place like a rope pulled taut.

  Gemma’s head jerked up. Ahead of them, Seren Dal had turned sharply, spear raised. Digiera moved without thinking, stepping to the side like a dancer who had done this a hundred times. Legs stumbled back half a step, eyes wide again, fingers finally starting to tap in frantic rhythm as if his body remembered how to be afraid.

  Between the trees, shapes moved.

  Too thin. Too fast.

  Hollows.

  They came through the undergrowth in a broken line, bodies stretched and wrong, limbs too long in places and too stiff in others. Their mouths hung open as if breathing hurt. Their eyes caught the dim light with a dull, hungry sheen.

  Gemma felt her pulse steady. Not because she wasn’t afraid. Because she recognized the moment.

  The interruption. The violence arriving to replace conversation. The world refusing to let them speak too long about what mattered.

  She stepped forward instinctively, placing herself just behind Seren Dal’s shoulder.

  The Light stirred under her skin, faint at first, then rising like a tide.

  Aros’s voice cut low beside her. “Gemma.”

  She didn’t look at him.

  Her hands lifted slightly, fingers spreading.

  She could feel the forest watching.

  The line of the group tightening, becoming something closer to a unit again, if only for the length of a fight.

  Gemma drew a breath, and the air tasted like wet earth and iron.

  “We need to keep moving,” she said quietly, more to herself than to anyone else. “But first we survive.”

  The Hollows closed in.

  And Gemma prepared to meet them awake.