The rhythm of Argent’s gait was a metronome counting out my misery. Left hoof, right hoof, a dull throb in my arm. Left hoof, right hoof, a flare of pain in my side. Argent, noble steed that he was, had been waiting patiently at the edge of the woods, his massive form a welcome silhouette against the hellish glow of Glenhaven. Now, with me sandwiched between Kaelen’s armored back and Barty perched precariously on the horse’s rump, we were the most pathetic-looking fellowship this side of the Misty Mountains.

  The silence was a thick, heavy blanket, woven from smoke, grief, and exhaustion. Kaelen sat ramrod straight, his posture belying the deep weariness etched into the lines around his eyes. He guided Argent with an economy of movement that spoke of long years in the saddle. Barty, for his part, was meticulously grooming a patch of fur on his shoulder, as if the world hadn’t just tried to incinerate him. Typical.

  My brain, in a stunning act of self-preservation, was trying to file the whole flaming-village-and-hell-cat incident under ‘Bad Day at the Office.’ It wasn’t working. The image of the Pyre-cat’s molten eyes was seared onto the back of my eyelids. And then there was the shard. Tucked into a leather pouch at my belt, it felt… wrong. The malevolent heat it had radiated was gone, replaced by a profound and unnerving coolness, like a stone pulled from the bottom of a deep well.I finally opened a stack of notifications in an effort to distract myself from the unsettling sensation of the shard.

  [You have killed a Pyre-cat] [Lesser Demon Lvl 8] [x8][Rewards]

  [Emberdust] [x5]

  [300 XP] [x8]

  [You have killed a Firebrand Ritualist Lvl 12] [x2][Rewards]

  [Blood cloak] [x2]

  [Embermark] [x2]

  [600XP] [x2]

  [You have killed an Ember Lion] [Lesser Summon Lvl 12][Rewards]

  [Lion’s Eye] [x2]

  [Potion of Burning] [x3]

  [1,250 XP]

  So much killing. If that’s what it takes to get stronger here, I’m not sure that I want to anymore. I thought to myself, But they did attack me first. Or someone else.

  [LEVEL UP!][You have reached Level 9] [All attributes increased!] [New Skill Available: Fireball][Fireball][Launch a controlled ball of magical fire that explodes on impact.]

  Fireball, baby! I’d heard of that one. I closed the notifications and returned my attention to our surroundings.

  The valley we rode through was offensively beautiful. Wildflowers in defiant shades of purple and yellow dotted the lush green landscape. A clear, babbling brook ran parallel to our path, its cheerful song a mockery of the funereal silence we carried with us. It was like stepping from a disaster movie directly into a nature documentary, and the cognitive dissonance was giving me a headache.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I loathed an unresolved silence.

  “So, what’s the plan, Galahad?” My voice was hoarse, cracking on the last word. “Are we just taking a scenic tour of post-apocalyptic Eldoria until we collectively bleed out? Because while the foliage is lovely, my arm is starting to feel like it’s full of angry hornets.”Kaelen’s shoulders tensed for a moment before he relaxed, a sigh ghosting from his lips.

  “Forgive me, Lady Paige. My thoughts were occupied elsewhere.” He shifted his weight, and I heard the faint scrape of his damaged armor. “We are not wandering aimlessly. There is a man, an old friend, who lives in these hills. His name is Silas.”

  “Silas,” I repeated. “Does this Silas have a medical degree? Or, you know, the Eldorian equivalent? Like, a really big stash of magical leaves and a reassuring bedside manner?”A ghost of a smile touched his lips, visible only in the slight crinkle at the corner of his eye.

  “Something like that. He is a healer, a warrior, and a scholar. He lives apart from others, by choice. He values his privacy. More importantly, he can be trusted. Silas owes the Order of the Silver Gryphon no loyalty, which means he owes my current… unofficial status no report.”

  “Ah, Silas of the Greenwood,” Barty interjected, pausing his grooming to look up with an air of supreme authority. “An eccentric, certainly, but his poultices are surprisingly effective. His knowledge of ancient corruptions is also notable. More to the point, his pantry is usually well-stocked with smoked fish.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Kaelen’s back.

  “The cat vouches for him. I guess that’s settled, then. How far to this fish-hoarding, hermit healer?”

  “Another hour’s ride, perhaps a little more,” Kaelen answered. His tone grew more serious. “Silas is… careful. His home is not easily found by those who are not welcome.”

  As if on cue, he guided Argent off the well-trodden path and into a dense thicket of aspen trees. The sunlight, once bright and open, became dappled and dim. The air grew cooler, smelling of moss and damp earth. The cheerful brook was gone, replaced by the hushed quiet of the deep woods.

  The silence returned, but this time it felt different. Less heavy, more contemplative. We had a destination. A fragile, flickering pinprick of hope in the suffocating darkness.

  “Why did you leave them?” I asked quietly, the question slipping out before I could stop it. “Your order. The Silver Gryphon.”

  Kaelen’s back remained a rigid wall of steel and leather. For a long moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer. “Because they are blind,” he finally said, his voice low and laced with a bitterness that startled me. “The King and his council see the Shadow Lord’s work as mere border incursions. Orc raids. Banditry. They polish their armor for parades in the capital while the edges of the kingdom blacken and burn. They call it maintaining morale. I call it willful ignorance.” He steered Argent around a moss-covered boulder. “I spend my time on the edges of the world. I saw what was happening. I saw the rituals, the strange beasts… like the Pyre-cat. This is not a war for territory. It is a war for the soul of this world. I begged them to remove the blinders from their eyes, to fight it. But the Order refused and forbade me from doing anything either. I had to be free of their gilded chains and their pointless bureaucracy.”

  I thought of my part-time serving wench gig at Medieval Times and the sleazy manager who always complained that I didn’t show enough cleavage. Not that I had a ton to work with in that department anyway. I guess some things were universal.

  “So you went rogue,” I summarized. “To fight the real war.”

  “I go where I am needed, as is my oath,” he corrected, a subtle but important distinction.

  As we rode deeper into the woods, a faint, rhythmic thrumming started against my hip. It wasn’t a sound; it was a feeling, a low-frequency vibration that seemed to resonate with my own aching bones. I pressed my hand against the leather pouch. The shard was cold, but it was anything but inert. It was pulsing, a slow, steady beat like a sleeping heart.

  It remembers, a voice whispered in the back of my mind. It wasn’t my voice. It was sibilant and ancient, the same voice from the ritual. The voice of the shard. It remembers the fire. It remembers the power.

  My breath hitched. I glanced at Kaelen, but he was focused on the path ahead. I looked back at Barty, who was now observing me with an unnervingly intelligent glint in his emerald eyes. He knew. Of course, he knew. He probably knew the moment I’d touched the damn thing.

  “Miss,” Barty said, his tone carefully neutral, “you appear distressed. Perhaps the jolting of the horse is aggravating your injuries.”

  It was a warning. An offer to keep my secret, for now.

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  “Yeah,” I managed to choke out, my throat suddenly dry. “Something like that.”

  The woods were growing darker, the trees—tall, ancient-looking pines and oaks—crowding closer, their branches interlocking overhead to form a dense canopy. The path was almost invisible now, but Kaelen navigated it with an unerring certainty. A thin wisp of smoke curled into the air ahead, carrying the scent of woodfire and drying herbs.

  We were close. Close to Silas, to healing, and, hopefully, to some answers.

  But as I felt the steady, cold pulse of the shard against my skin, a new fear took root. Kaelen was fighting the Shadow Lord’s war on the outside. I was beginning to think I might have just accidentally brought a piece of it inside. We were trading one unknown for another, and I could only hope this one didn’t come with fangs and a penchant for arson.

  The clearing wasn’t exactly a postcard from a fairytale, but after Glenhaven, it felt like a five-star resort. A small, sturdy cabin built of dark, weathered logs sat nestled against a mossy rock face, smoke puffing from its stone chimney like lazy sighs. A meticulously tended garden, bursting with herbs and strange, luminous flowers, was sectioned off by a low fence. It was a pocket of order in a world of chaos.

  As Kaelen dismounted, the thrumming in the pouch at my hip intensified, a frantic, angry buzzing like a trapped hornet. It hated this place. The clean air, the scent of healing herbs, the palpable sense of tranquility—it was all anathema to whatever dark energy resided in the obsidian sliver.

  The cabin door opened before Kaelen could knock. The man who filled the frame was not the frail, bearded wizard I’d been half-expecting. He was built like the ancient oaks surrounding his home, broad-shouldered and solid, with a wild mane of silver-streaked dark hair and a beard that looked like it had wrestled a badger and won. His face was a roadmap of old battles and long nights, but his eyes were startlingly clear and sharp. He looked less like a retired hermit and more like a bear who’d learned how to read.

  “Kaelen,” the man rumbled, his voice like stones grinding together. He didn’t sound surprised, just weary. He took in the knight’s haggard appearance, the grime, the dried blood. “You look like hell run through a sieve.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Silas,” Kaelen said, a rare hint of warmth in his voice. He gestured back towards me and Barty. “We need your help.”

  Silas’s piercing gaze swept over me, lingering on the makeshift splint on my arm and the exhaustion I was sure was painted all over my face. Then his eyes fell to Barty, who was primly grooming a paw on the back of the horse. Silas’s eyebrow, a formidable entity in its own right, climbed his forehead.

  “A Warden,” he stated, not asked. “You’ve been digging in places you shouldn’t, boy.” He looked back at me. “And you’ve brought back a stray.”

  “Hey,” I protested, my voice raspy. “I’m not a stray. I’m… an interdimensional refugee with a history of poor life choices. There’s a difference.”Silas’s lips twitched. It might have been a smile.

  “Is she always like this?” he asked Kaelen.

  “I find her commentary to be a unique form of motivational discourse,” Barty interjected smoothly, leaping from the horse to the ground with a soft thud. “We require your skills, Master Silas. Our journey has been fraught with setbacks.”

  “Come inside,” Silas grunted, stepping aside. “You’re letting the stench of the forest in.”

  The inside of the cabin was a chaotic symphony of books, herbs, and strange alchemical contraptions. Every surface was cluttered. Stacks of leather-bound tomes threatened to collapse, bundles of dried plants hung from the rafters, releasing a complex, earthy perfume, and glass beakers bubbled with liquids of unsettling colors. Yet, there was a clear space around a hearth with a crackling fire and two comfortable-looking armchairs. It was the den of a man who had left the world behind, but brought a good chunk of its knowledge with him.

  What followed was a blur of surprisingly efficient care. Silas moved with a brusque, no-nonsense grace, cleaning and stitching a deep gash on Kaelen’s leg that I hadn’t even realized was so bad. He grumbled about reckless knights and the foolishness of youth, but his hands were impossibly gentle.

  Then, it was my turn.

  “Sit,” he commanded, pointing to a stool by the fire. I obeyed, wincing as I lowered myself. The shard pulsed a frantic warning against my hip. Danger. Light. Foe. The sibilant voice was louder now, more insistent in the back of my mind.

  Silas ignored my flinch, his focus on the ugly, purpled mess on my forearm where the bone sat at an off angle. He gently prodded the bone, then yanked on it savagely. I screamed as my vision blurred and the bone slid back into place.

  “Broken. You’re lucky it’s clean. It will heal with time.” He retrieved a clay pot from a shelf, the contents a pungent, green-flecked salve. As he approached me with it, the shard went from a thrum to a violent throb, sending a jolt of pure ice through my body.

  I gasped, my muscles seizing.

  Silas froze, his hand hovering over my arm. His sharp eyes narrowed, not on my injury, but on the leather pouch at my waist. He didn’t need to see it. He could feel it. The warmth of the fire, the ambient scent of herbs—it all seemed to recede, leaving only the chilling presence emanating from my hip.

  “What,” Silas said, his voice dropping to a dangerous low, “is that?”

  Kaelen, who had been watching from his chair, pushed himself to his feet.

  “Paige? What’s wrong?”But Silas’s attention was locked on me.

  “You brought a shadow into my home, Kaelen,” he hissed, his healer’s demeanor vanishing completely, replaced by the hardened steel of the knight he used to be. “After all I taught you.”

  “It’s… complicated,” I stammered, my hand instinctively closing over the pouch. The shard pulsed again, a note of triumph in its rhythm. It sees me. It fears me.

  “Complication is a synonym for foolishness in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,” Silas shot back. He straightened up, his large frame suddenly seeming to fill the entire cabin. “Show me. Now.”

  My heart hammered against my ribs. I looked at Kaelen, whose face was a storm of confusion and dawning suspicion. I looked at Barty, whose emerald eyes were wide and serious, giving me a minuscule nod. There’s no hiding it now.

  With trembling fingers, I loosened the drawstring of the pouch. The moment the leather fell away, the air in the cabin grew heavy and cold. The cheerful fire in the hearth seemed to shrink, its flames sputtering and turning a sickly blue-green. I tipped the pouch, and the shard of obsidian fell onto the wooden arm of the chair.

  It was no longer just a cold stone. In the dimming firelight, faint, crimson veins pulsed with a malevolent inner light. It wasn’t reflecting the fire; it was consuming the light, drinking it in, leaving nothing but a small vortex of darkness.

  Kaelen let out a choked gasp.

  “By the Gryphon’s grace…”

  Silas stared at the shard, his face pale, all the gruffness drained away and replaced by a profound, horrified recognition.

  “You absolute, unmitigated fool,” he breathed, looking at me but speaking to the world at large. “You found one. You actually found one.”

  “Found what?” I asked, my own voice a whisper.

  “Where did you get this?” Silas said, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and terror.

  “In Glenhaven. It was all that was left after we stopped the ritual.” I stammered. “I didn’t think…”

  “No, you didn’t,” Silas snapped. “That is not a simple sorcerer’s trinket. It is a Heart Shard. A sliver of the Shadow Lord’s original power, cast off during the Great Sundering.”Barty stepped forward, his tail held high.

  “It is as he says. A fragment of the Umbral Heart, imbued with a sliver of its master’s will and an insatiable hunger for magic.”

  Silas ran a hand through his wild hair, his eyes darting between the shard and my face.

  “He’s not just waging a war on our borders anymore, Kaelen. He’s looking for these. He’s trying to remake himself, to become whole again. And you,” he jabbed a finger at me, “have just delivered a piece of him right to our doorstep.”

  The shard pulsed warmly now, a sickeningly intimate beat that matched my own. It felt… pleased. It had been seen, been named. It was no longer a secret.

  It remembers the breaking, the voice whispered, coiling around my thoughts like smoke. It remembers what it once was. And it will be again.

  My stomach plummeted. I hadn’t just brought a piece of the war into Silas’s home. I was a walking, talking, sarcastic homing beacon for the biggest and baddest evil this world had ever known.

  “H-how do we destroy it? What do we do?” I asked, horrified at the object that was somehow in my head.

  “It cannot be unmade,” Silas muttered. “The best hope you have is to carry it with you and keep moving. But most importantly, never touch it.”