Jace stumbled forward, knees weak, heart thundering like war drums in his ears. The ruins were dead silent, but the silence wasn't empty. It listened.
He wasn't alone.
"Show yourself," he muttered, eyes scanning the crumbling chamber. The torchlight flickered—longer than it should. Shadows stretched.
Then something moved.
From the far corner, a figure stepped out. Not a demon. Not a monster. A girl.
Barefoot, wearing a cloak stitched from raven feathers. Her eyes glowed—not with magic, but with memory. Ancient, untamed memory.
"You survived the trial," she said, voice a calm whisper in a sea of ghosts. "That's rare."
Jace didn't answer. His fingers twitched toward where his glaive had been. Gone. Just the mark remained—still warm, pulsing against his wrist.
She tilted her head. "Relax. If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead."
"Who are you?"
"Name's Kael." She crouched and touched one of the faded glyphs on the floor. "Veinborn. Like you."
He frowned. "Veinborn?"
"You've seen glimpses—fragments of yourself across time. Felt the mark burn when truth brushed too close." She looked up. "You felt him, didn't you? Aurelios."
Jace didn't answer. He didn't need to.
Kael stood. "He's coming back. Not as a god. Not as a man. As something worse."
He clenched his jaw. "Then we stop him."
She actually laughed—dry and bitter. "You think this is that kind of story?"
"What do you mean?"
Kael walked past him, trailing a hand across the stone wall. Glyphs re-lit under her touch.
"You think this is about good versus evil. That there's a clean side, a right side. But the Vein isn't a river. It's a knot. Of time. Of fate. Of guilt. And to untangle it—" she turned to face him—"you'll have to die more than once."
Something about her words scratched at the edge of Jace's mind. Visions. Flashbacks not his own. A girl with eyes like Kael's. A battlefield soaked in silver blood. Her, dying in his arms. Again. Again. Again.
"…We've met before," he said.
"Not yet," she replied softly.
Before he could respond, the ruins trembled. Dust fell from the ceiling. Somewhere above, a horn blew—a sound thick with warning, not triumph.
Kael tensed. "They're here."
"Who?"
She drew a short blade from within her cloak—curved, engraved with sigils that shimmered in and out of view.
"The Hollowed. Aurelios' broken army. They smell when a timeline tilts."
Jace didn't understand it all, but he understood a fight. He clenched his fists. "How do we stop them?"
Kael looked at him like someone who had tried too many times.
"We don't."
She raised her blade. "We run."
And the wall behind her exploded.
Figures poured through the dust—dozens of them, all wrong. Twisted silhouettes of what once might've been people, now hollow-eyed and grinning with mouths that split to the ears. Flesh fused with metal. Bone laced with rot.
The Hollowed.
Kael grabbed his wrist. "Come on!"
They bolted down a tunnel Jace hadn't seen before—narrow, winding, pulsing faintly with runes. He ran on instinct, barely keeping pace, the echo of Aurelios' eyes still carved in the back of his skull.
As they ran, he shouted, "Where are we going?!"
"To the Cradle!" Kael yelled back. "Where time was born!"
And behind them, in the dark, something laughed.