They broke camp early. The fire had burned down to blackened roots and half-melted stones, ash woven through the moss like a forgotten language.

  Lili lingered behind for a moment, crouching low. She placed a small twisted vine ring near the pit and whispered something too soft for the others to hear. A thank you. The earth didn’t answer, but it felt less brittle beneath their feet as they left.

  The mist still clung to the river’s edge like a second skin, cool and living, brushing their ankles as they walked.

  Aurora led the way, the shard tucked tightly into her cloak’s inner pocket. She didn’t look at it. She didn’t need to. It pulsed more steadily now, in sync with her heartbeat or the river’s. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

  Alora followed just behind, quiet as a shadow, her staff cradled but unreadied. Her eyes never stopped moving. Lili brought up the rear, occasionally poking suspicious trees with a stick or tossing breadcrumbs to ghost crows, which may or may not have existed.

  They didn’t speak much. But something had shifted; they moved in rhythm like instinct had begun to braid them into step.

  It started with the scent. It wasn’t rot or blood, something older, almost wrong, like scorched silver and crushed quartz- a metallic sharpness clinging to the air like a forgotten spell. It had no business being in a forest.

  Aurora stopped at the crest of a narrow bend. The river curved sharply below, slowed to a crawl between jagged stones. On the opposite bank, a hollow clearing opened, silent, circular, unnaturally smooth. Silent in a way that made her ears ring.

  “Do you see that?” she asked.

  Alora stepped beside her. “That’s not natural erosion.”

  She scanned the stones that were carved.

  “No.” Lili squinted toward the far bank, sniffing the air.

  “ That looks like someone scrubbed the land clean with intention and regret.

  She paused

  “Also, possibly fire. Definitely some fire.”

  They crossed the shallows cautiously, boots slipping against the river-slick stone. The water was cold and slow, like it had forgotten to flow. The moment Aurora’s boot touched the opposite bank, the shard flared once beneath her cloak, brief, hot, and warning. She froze mid-step, breath caught between her ribs.

  “Something’s here.”

  “I know,” Alora said, already unlinging gravebloom with quiet precision

  Lili didn’t respond. She’d already stepped ahead, kneeling at the edge of the clearing. Her fingers brushed the dirt, then paused.

  “It’s warm,” she said.

  Aurora blinked. “The ground?”

  Lili shook her head slightly.

  “No. The roots. They’re humming.”

  Alora dropped to one knee, pressing her palm to the soil. A moment passed. Then her eyes narrowed. A ripple, as distant thunder muffled beneath stone. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Not alive. Not quite dead. It’s residual Veil energy, trapped. Someone tried to bind a wound here.”

  “To what?” Aurora asked. Voice low, sharpening.

  Lili stood slowly. “To the Rift.”

  The clearing pulsed. A low vibration, too deep for sound, passed through them like a breath held too long. The trees lining the edge of the hollow bent slightly inward as though listening.

  Aurora reached for the shard. It burned faintly against her skin. And then she saw it, an impression.

  A figure kneeling in the center of the clearing. Cloak torn. Hand raised. Veins glowing black beneath the skin. A hollow in the air, like a name trying to remember itself. A silhouetter burned into the world by an absence so strong it left a scar.

  The vision flickered, a hand letting go. In the distance, a voice, a faint voice. Male. Familiar.

  “You saw it?”

  Aurora nodded slowly, her eyes still tracking the place where the air had forgotten how to be whole.

  “Someone tried to seal something here. Someone like us.”

  “But they failed,” Alora said. Her voice was steadier than her hands.

  Lili’s voice was quiet. “Or they became part of it.”

  A wind rose suddenly, coiling in from the west. Suddenly, sharp, curling in from the west like a spine uncoiling.

  With it came whispers, sounds that used to be names. The clearing darkened, the weight of memory trying to breathe again.

  Aurora gritted her teeth. Beside her, Alora planted Gravebloom into the earth, its thorns lighting faintly with protective magic. Lili reached for her vine whip. And something answered.

  The earth cracked at the clearing's center. From the split rose a shape, just left behind, smoke and sinew, tall and hollow-eyed. Flickering between human and void. It didn’t scream or move; it just watched.

  The shard flared, bright, painful. It burned against her ribs like fire. Shape convulsed, buckling, its edges blurring like ink in water.

  Then vanished. The silence after was deafening. Aurora dropped to her knees, her breath came in uneven gasps, the air too thick, her limbs too loose. Alora stood frozen, face pale, still gripping her staff. Lili knelt beside Aurora, her hand steady on her back.

  “Rift memory,” Alora said softly. “What was left behind when a Guardian’s seal collapsed.”

  “It knew me,” Aurora whispered.

  “No,” Alora replied. “It knew the shard.”

  They didn’t stay long. The trees had straightened. The air seemed still. As they left the clearing, Aurora looked back once. But something still watched from the space between wind and shadow.

  The trees thinned as they moved south.

  The river still whispered beside them, the river still whispered, and the tone had changed, softer now, almost hesitant, as if unsure it wanted to follow. The air grew dry, then thick, then light again, each step a strange pull between too real and not real enough. The dirt became streaked with gray, like ash had been mixed into the soil. Even Lili stopped humming.

  Aurora walked faster than she meant to. Her boots crunched through patches of brittle moss, her jaw locked tight, every movement taut with forward momentum.

  She didn’t say it aloud, but she could feel the shard vibrating again. It had found its reflection in something ahead.

  They entered a grove without realizing it. The trees here grew in perfect concentric circles. Bark pale as bone. The canopy above swirled unnaturally, as wind chased itself in loops. Lili slowed first.

  “Wait,” she said, brows furrowed. “Something’s wrong.”

  Alora halted immediately; staff already angled into a warding position. Aurora didn’t stop. Not until the air shimmered ahead of her, and the trees changed. One moment, she stood on broken soil.

  The infirmary. From the Academy. White linens, soft rune-glow beneath the floor. The sharp scent of antiseptic herbs. Aurora's breath hitched. She turned slowly and, unsure, found the room empty. Except..The bed in the corner. His bed.

  The one Ymir had used after his first Rift exposure. She stepped toward it. Then another.

  “Did you really think you could save me?” his voice asked behind her.

  She spun, fast. No one was there. Only her own face, reflected in the glass of a cabinet. Eyes wide, lost.

  “You always tried to control everything,” the voice said again. “But you never once let yourself feel it.”

  She clenched her jaw, shaking her head.

  “This isn’t real.”

  The walls pulsed once, then began to melt.

  Alora stood in a different memory, a field. Red poppies stretch to the horizon. She knew this place. The wind was warm, smelled of honey and earth…And absence. The headstone stood exactly where it always had in memory- but now it was too tall. The name on it, her father’s, was blurred. Just slightly wrong. Unwritten, unreadable. She stepped toward it.

  “You never mourned us,” it said softly. “You wrote sigilsin your skin instead.”

  “I preserved you,” she replied.

  “No,” the voice whispered. “You buried us twice.”

  Lili blinked. The grove was around her suddenly…Full of flowers and lit lanterns. Thousands of them. Tied to trees, floating low, tethered with vines and ribbons.

  “Okay,” She muttered, “Either I’ve cracked…or someone in this grove has a flair for dramatic party trauma.”

  In front of her was a table, laid out for a feast. Mushroom pastries, thistle cakes, honeywine in floating goblets. In the middle sat a note:

  “Come home, child. We forgive you.”

  Her throat tightened. The voice that followed was a familiar one.

  “You always made light of everything. But you never stayed long enough to know why we were heavy.”

  Lili backed up, breath coming fast, eyes wide. She tripped over roots that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Not real, but they hurt anyway.

  “Stop it,” she muttered.

  The bells kept screaming-those invisible, memory-bound chimes from a moment she couldn’t name. She closed her eyes. And screamed back. A scream pulled from somewhere deep, deeper than language and grief. It tore through the grove like a thread yanked loose from a tapestry.

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  Aurora dropped to her knees. The infirmary dissolved, peeling away like ash on the wind. Alora gasped, her grip on her staff tightening, knuckles white. Then it was gone.

  Lili stumbled back into the clearing, eyes wide and damp with tears she hadn’t noticed. She didn’t look brave. None of them did. They stood there. Three girls. Shaken by the truth.

  “What was that?” Aurora asked, voice hoarse.

  Alora knelt, pressing a hand to the soil as it might still hold answers

  “It wasn’t an attack. It was an echo.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of us.”

  Lili wiped her eyes and sniffed. “Well, I hated it.”

  Alora stood slowly. “The Rift doesn’t just break the world. It remembers where the world already broke.”

  Aurora nodded slowly, fingers tightening around the shard.

  “Then we remember, too.”

  None of them spoke for a while. But when they walked again, they walked closer. Not touching, but together.

  They made camp as night deepened. They didn’t say a word until the fire was lit, not even Lili.

  They found a safe curve in the river where the mist had thinned, and the trees grew straight again. No strange echoes. No groves that bent wrong. Just wet grass, old roots, and the breathless silence of a place that hadn’t been touched by Riftlight yet.

  Aurora built the fire this time, slowly and carefully. Her hands still trembled slightly. Alora reinforced the circle with a triple-knot ward drawn from silver rootdust and vein chalk. Her rituals firm again, her breath steady. Lili lay flat on her back, arms flung wide, staring up at the stars, as they owed her an answer. Or a fight.

  The flames crackled quietly. Aurora sat nearest the heat, legs drawn in, cloak draped across her knees. She’d set the shard on the flat stone beside her. It pulsed with soft light as if dreaming.

  Alora remained across from her, sharp and unreadable, though her posture had softened.

  Lili rolled onto her side, propping her head up with one hand, squinting across the flickering glow.“So,” she said. “That sucked.”

  Neither of the others responded.

  “I mean, I’ve had worse,” she added. “There was that time the marsh-fungus gave me a hallucination of marrying a talking flower. But this was still high on the list. Vows in interpretive dance, you had to be there.

  Still no laughter. Just the fire, popping in the cold.

  Then Aurora said, very quietly, “It was my fault.”

  Alora looked up. “The echo?”

  Aurora shook her head.

  “No. Ymir.”

  Her voice didn’t crack. It just frayed at the edges. Edges unspooling in firelight.

  “I should’ve stopped him. I should’ve told someone. I should’ve gone with him.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Alora said.

  “I did know,” Aurora whispered. “I felt it. Something was wrong. I let him go because… because he believed in something bigger. And I let him go because I didn’t want to be the one to take that away.”

  Silence fell.

  “Now I’m the only one left.”

  After a moment, Alora reached into her pack and pulled out a small silver pendant, tarnished around the chain. She held it for a breath, then passed it across the fire. Aurora took it gently, as if it might break.

  “I kept this from my mother’s ashes,” Alora said. “It doesn’t do anything. Not anymore. But it reminds me that I lived through it.”

  Aurora looked at the pendant, which was warm from Alora’s hand. Simple, circular, inscribed with something too faded to read. “How did she die?” Arora asked.

  Alora stared into the fire. “Veil sickness. Before we knew what to call it. Before anyone admitted the Rift’s reach had started leaking. She heard voices in her sleep. Spoke names we couldn't trace. Then one day, she walked out past the citadel wall. We found her body, not her soul. Or that's what they tell me, I was too young to remember.”

  Lili sat up. She didn’t make a joke this time. She just watched them.

  “You're not the only one with ghosts, you know,” she said.

  The others turned.

  “I thought I could control a summoning,” Lili continued.

  “I thought I could handle it. But I was laughing too much, and I wasn’t listening, and the roots caught fire and half the forest screamed at me for weeks. A young boy died from burns that no one could heal.”

  “Is that why they still talk to you?” Alora asked.

  Lili nodded. “They forgave me. Eventually. But I still hear it in the soil.”

  Silence again. The shared weight settled in a way that wasn't crushing. Three girls with cracked pieces, sitting around a fire neither of them had built alone.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Aurora admitted again.

  “None of us do,” Lili replied. “But you’re the only one the shard listens to, apparently.”

  “I didn’t ask it to.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It picked you.” Lili said.

  Alora stood, shaking the dirt from her gloves. “And we chose to follow.”

  Lili stretched, arms overhead, spine cracking like kindling.

  “So now we’re a team. A very damaged, underfed team.”

  “We’re not a team,” Aurora said automatically.

  “Right,” Lili smirked. “We’re a trio of dangerously magical misfits on an emotionally doomed road trip to who-knows-where. To bring back the one perfect guy.” She mocked in a deep voice.

  By morning, the tension mainly had drained out of the camp, helped in large part by the fact that Lili had spent a solid ten minutes attempting to braid her hair using only wind and spite.

  “You’re going to rip it all out,” Aurora muttered, not looking up from where she was rewrapping her rations.

  “It’s not ripping,” Lili huffed. “It’s aggressive styling. And besides, the vines help.”

  “They’re alive?”

  “Exactly! Fashion and companionship.”

  Alora muttered something under her breath in ancient Veilscript. Possibly a curse. Possibly just a plea to be turned into a tree. They had barely finished packing when the rustling began.

  Lili froze. “Did anyone else hear that?”

  Aurora tensed. “Where?”

  “There.” Lili pointed dramatically. “In the brambles. About one raccoon-sized rustle’s worth of rustling.”

  “Very specific,” Alora deadpanned. Her staff angled low but was ready.

  The rustle got louder. Then paused. Repeated in the exact rhythm.

  “Okay, nope,” Lili whispered, “That's not a raccoon, that's something trying to sound like a raccoon.”

  Aurora narrowed her eyes, just a faint, dry click behind he leaves, like brittle bone tapping bark.

  “On three?” She whispered

  Alora nodded, and Lili raised her hand.

  “Wait- what if it’s just a cursed opossum? I don't want to accidentally explode another one.”

  “Another one?” Aurora asked flatly.

  “It was ONE time-”

  Then a small, slightly glowing raccoon waddled confidently into their clearing wearing what could only be described as a crown made of beetle shells and twigs. It stared at Lili.

  She gasped.

  “JIBS!”

  The raccoon gave her a long, tired look. Then spoke.

  “You were supposed to wait for me three days ago.”

  Alora blinked. “It talks.”

  Lili beamed. “Only when possessed.”

  Jibs ignored her and marched up to the fire pit, poked the ashes, and sneezed.

  “You left me no offerings. Rude.”

  “We didn’t know you were coming!” Lili said. “You’re usually summoned by questionable mushrooms or wild druid parties!”

  “I’m here,” Jibs said dramatically, “on official Guardian business.”

  He produced a scroll from his back (don’t ask how) and dropped it at Aurora’s feet. She picked it up slowly, unrolling it. The script was thin and root-etched, pulsing faintly. Old magic.

  The Shardbearer walks blind. The Veil blooms crooked. The path bends westward, where silence sings through bone.

  There lies the Pool of Reflection. Step there before the Rift pulls tighter.

  This is the will of the old trees.

  Aurora looked up. Jibs was cleaning his tail. Alora took the scroll, scanning it.

  “It’s signed by three Guardian glyphs,” she murmured. “Earth-rooted. Treeborn.”

  “The old Grove sent me,” Jibs confirmed, licking his paw. “They say if you don’t get moving, something far less friendly will find you first.”

  “What’s at this pool of reflection?” Lili asked. Sitting upright like a child at storytime. Jibs paused mid-tail cleaning and blinked at her.

  Jibs gave her a wide-eyed, entirely too mischievous look. “Secrets. Screaming. Probably a mirror. The vision gets fuzzy past the moss.”

  “Helpful,” Alora muttered.

  “I’m not here to be helpful, I’m here to deliver prophetic paperwork and glare dramatically.”

  Alora studied the scroll again.

  “Westward. Past the hollow spine trees, the pool lies where the land forgets its name.”

  “How far?”

  “Two days,” He said, “ One if you don't sleep. Half a day if the wind guides you. Or forever, if the Rift finds you first.”

  Without ceremony, Jibs turned and waddled back to the forest.

  “Wait,” Aurora said. “You’re not coming with us?”

  “I’m a messenger,” Jibs called over his shoulder. “Not a babysitter.”

  “Wait!” Aurora said, looking around, “You said Guardian business, which Guardian sent you?”

  “Does it matter?” Jib twitched his nose.

  “Yes,” Aurora said.

  “Then it was…all of them. Or none of them. The trees argue a lot.”

  The girls stood in silence for a moment. Then Lili exhaled dramatically.

  “Well. Guess we’re going to the water of self-loathing.”

  Alora nodded. “Westward.”

  Aurora tucked the shard close to her heart. “Let’s go.”

  And together, they stepped back onto the path, laughter trailing faintly behind them like a ward against the dark. The path westward wound through lands that maps had stopped naming.

  What had once been waystones were now moss-covered stumps. Roads became deer trails. Trails became memory. And still they walked. Aurora led, the shard pulsing steadily beneath her cloak, though she never touched it again.

  Lili kept pace easily, often a few steps ahead, singing softly to the trees. Once, a vine-creature followed her for nearly half an hour, coiling around her boot like it didn’t want to say goodbye.

  Alora walked behind them both, silent, vigilant, her staff ever ready. And though they did not always speak, their pace began to match.

  They crossed the old iron bridge by noon, its cables half-snapped, the planks creaking with every step. Lili refused to look down. Aurora didn’t need to. She could feel the pull of the water far below, dark and deep and filled with voices that weren’t quite sound.

  “Does it always hum like that?” she asked as they stepped off the last board.

  Alora nodded. “Old Guardian territory. This river is bound to something older than death.”

  “Cool,” Lili said. “Love that for us.”

  As the sun reached its golden arc, the landscape transformed once more. The trees in this area grew taller but appeared more unusual. Some of them emitted a faint glow, while others had roots that curled in spirals. A few of the trees whispered names as the girls walked by, but none were familiar to them.

  The shard burned warmer now, not urgently. Not painfully. Just enough to remind Aurora it was awake.

  As dusk neared, they came to a path through a patch of trees.

  Aurora stopped.

  “That’s it,” she whispered.

  “The Pool of Reflection,” Alora confirmed. “Said to be where the Guardians watched their last sunrise.”

  Lili shaded her eyes. “It’s prettier than I expected. Kind of creepy-pretty. Like you, Alora.”

  Alora didn’t answer. But her silence softened. They descended the path slowly. The air thickened, not with fog, but with meaning. Every step felt wrapped in breath.

  Aurora stepped to the side and turned.

  “I’d like to do this myself. I need to know,”

  “We are here to walk beside you, not behind you,” Alora said steadily.

  Aurora crossed her arms across her chest. A stubborn stance.

  “I’m not telling you to leave and go back home, wherever that is. I'm simply saying, “ She sighed heavily, running her hand through her hair. “I want to go first in case it shows me something I'm not ready to share with the world.”

  Lili walked up to Aurora and grabbed her hand,

  “Alright, you can go first. We are right behind you. Everyone has secrets they don’t share. Normally, it's a fungus of the toes, but I can forgive you if we aren’t sharing a bedroll.”

  Aurora smiled and turned away. Walking further down the path towards the pool, the gods only knew what else.