It was good to be with Sirius again. The last month had been both the most enjoyable and the most demanding of my life. At times, it felt as though Captain Rhael’s entire purpose was to break us, to prove we weren’t worthy to stand beside Sirius in whatever future waited for him.

  So far, we had refused to bend.

  Sirius explained that there were other candidates for his team, but he wanted to begin with a four-man unit. Since I had brought Milo and Malorn with me, he wanted to see how the three of us functioned together under Bastion pressure. He also mentioned that he might eventually form two parties: one focused on stealth and exploration, and another built for stronger frontline defense.

  During our first couple days at the Bastion, he caught us up on everything. That was when he told me about the Talons.

  Each royal family member was expected to choose one person to serve as their personal infiltrator. These operatives were called Talons. Together they formed what was known as the Claw of the King. Talons took on solo missions for the royal they represented, and sometimes joint missions at the King’s command. They also had the authority to choose and train the units that would operate under them.

  Sirius told me he wanted me to be his Talon.

  I would be his right hand and answer only to him and the King. I would be trained in everything required of an infiltrator: assassination, espionage, information gathering. Sirius believed my tremor sense, my regeneration, and the abilities awakened through my bond with Dusk made me uniquely suited for the role, especially with a companion like her for silent travel and solo assignments.

  I had not accepted, yet.

  Part of my hesitation came from Captain Rhael’s warning. If we failed the Bastion’s tests, we would not be allowed to stay or support Sirius in the way he hoped.

  Really though, I wasn’t afraid of failing the tests, at least not for myself or my team. What unsettled me was the role itself. Assassination was not something I had ever imagined choosing, and training for it felt strangely...wrong? Hunting and killing monsters were one thing, but hunting people?

  Yet the pull was unmistakable.

  Becoming Sirius’s Talon would bind our futures together and keep us close, even if missions occasionally separated us. It was not only the best opportunity I had ever been given. It was also the clearest way to stay beside the person who meant the most to me and ensure he would never face danger alone.

  And that was what made the decision so difficult.

  “Now!” Sirius shouted from above me.

  I burst from the earth like an arrow, aiming straight beneath the Corgath. My knives carved through the tendons of its back leg, and the beast collapsed in a violent shudder. I hit the ground in a roll, shaking loose the thoughts that had drifted through me while submerged. My mind tended to wander when I traveled through the earth. It felt so much like home.

  Malorn fired arrows as fast as the eye could follow. Milo worked his wristboard, shifting traps and anchors around the battlefield to keep the Corgaths off balance controlling the field.

  And Sirius moved like something entirely new. Vines snapped at his command. Conjured spears flickered into being, whistling through the air or stabbing forward with brutal precision. I barely recognized him. The boy who once trained beside me at the orphanage was gone. In his place stood a weapon so sharp that even being near him felt dangerous.

  He far outmatched me solo combat. I was not prepared for that.

  The last Corgath crashed into the dirt, and the world finally stilled. Only the harsh rhythm of our breathing broke the silence.

  We had been sent to investigate a nearby rift. These creatures had slipped through it and stripped the land of anything alive. They looked somewhat like rhinos, but they preferred meat, and their limbs were closer to a tiger’s. They attacked the moment they caught our scent. This group made seven dead, the largest yet, and the fifth group we had taken down today.

  “That went better than the last few, even if there were more of them,” Sirius said at last. “Good work.”

  Milo perched on a corpse and struck a flame to his pipe. “This is a cakewalk compared to some of the things the Academy threw at us. Professor Roark made us fight for hours against monsters like this.”

  “It really did prepare us for this part of the mission,” Malorn replied. “Our biggest gap is in one-on-one combat. We trained as a team and mostly fought monsters when together only a few tournaments were verse other teams. Facing intelligent opponents would be much harder, especially fighting alone for Milo and me.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “We had good solo drills, but we rotated against the same people for years. Most of our improvement came from learning each other’s habits and weaknesses. We can control a battlefield against monsters. Fighting unknown enemies with unfamiliar power sets is a different challenge altogether.”

  “It is a good thing dungeon breaks, and rift tears are still the main threat across the continent,” Sirius said. “We still don’t know what is happening among the nobles or why deaths and disappearances keep rising, but being confident against monsters is a solid place to start. That is the main place we can find ways to grow our strength with shards and other valuables. The problem comes when rifts release something we have never seen before. There is always an unknown waiting inside them.”

  “Dusk told me the rift is just ahead,” I said. “Let’s get eyes on it and head back with what we found.”

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  Fern poked his head out of one of the Corgath corpses with an amber shard clenched proudly between his teeth. It was the third one he had located today. Over the years we had learned that Fern possessed a rare instinct for finding valuable items and detecting aetheric objects.

  He could nose out shards faster than any of us, which made clearing battlefields and moving on far easier. For now, everything we collected was turned in to the fort. Once we completed our Bastion trial, we would be allowed to keep the majority our own loot as Sirius team.

  Most shards were used for crafting or enchanting. They were nowhere near the level of dwarven work, but much of the world relied on aetheric power. Tools, lanterns, storage boxes, heating stones, and all manner of devices ran on it. Any shard could technically fuel them, yet items performed far better when the shard’s affinity matched the tool’s purpose. A cold-storage box empowered by an ice-aspected shard could preserve food for weeks with minimal drain.

  The rift entered my tremor sense long before anyone could see it. My awareness had grown steadily over the years, and now anything within a hundred feet appeared in my mind with more clarity than sight itself could offer. Every fiber of the world sang in its own way, each vibration weaving itself into a tapestry no human had ever been meant to perceive.

  Lately, the details had grown even sharper. I was beginning to pick up things I had never noticed before: a person’s approximate age, how long it had been since they slept or bathed, the age of an injury and whether it had healed naturally or through magic. Nothing in the world seemed willing to hide from me. The more time I spent submerged in the earth, the more I understood this sense was still evolving.

  Being underground made it gentler. The stone filtered everything, carried only what mattered, and dulled what had once overwhelmed me. It made sense why Wyrms lived their lives deep within bedrock. The world was quieter there.

  I had adapted to life above the surface, but my senses would always feel truest when I moved through the earth.

  The rift ahead glowed with an amber hue, which matched the color of the shards found on the Corgaths. Several bodies lay scattered around the portal’s base. Dusk crouched beside one and tore steadily through a limb, her appetite increasing by the day. She had grown massive.

  From snout to tail she stretched nearly nine feet, and she had to weigh over three hundred pounds now. Once she had been an owl, then panther-sized, and now something closer to a young pony. And she was only a little over three years old. She still had an enormous amount of growing left.

  I stepped closer to the rift and let my awareness sink into the shimmering pulse. Over the past year I had noticed a pattern in rifts, almost like reading the tempo of a heartbeat. Each one carried a signature that hinted at its stability, its age, and the pressure building behind it.

  “Give me a moment,” I said, kneeling and pressing my palm to the ground.

  The vibrations came slowly at first, then layered themselves with more detail. The amber rifts had a consistent cadence, a sharper clean edge to their pulses. This one throbbed with life. Its edges flickered not from something pushing through, but from internal instability.

  “It’s not going to tear soon,” I said, eyes still closed. “Not for a while unless something forces it too. But the stress is rising. If it keeps widening at this rate, it will fracture within a month, maybe two.”

  “A month gives the Bastion time to prepare,” Sirius said. “But Captain Rhael will want exact numbers.”

  I nodded. “I can’t give him that. The pressure behind the threshold is steady but not escalating quickly. Nothing is actively forcing its way through. The crack we saw was the rift adjusting to the instability.”

  “So no new surprises,” Milo said with a relieved exhale. “I’ll take that.”

  “Not yet,” I replied. “But this tear wants to grow. The land around it is thinning. I can feel lit.”

  Malorn crouched beside me and brushed his fingers over the soil. “I can’t feel anything.”

  “You won’t,” I said. “Not the way I do. The vibrations are too fine. It’s like catching the heartbeat of a mouse under a mountain of stone.”

  Malorn gave a low whistle. “Your senses have definitely grown stronger.”

  “Useful, though,” Sirius added. “This will help the Bastion immensely. If we can predict which rifts will destabilize first, we can allocate forces where they’re needed instead of gambling every time.”

  I stood and dusted dirt from my hands. Dusk nudged my shoulder, her mind brushing against mine with a ripple of approval. She had felt the same conclusion.

  “We have everything we came for,” I said. “Nothing else in the area is moving toward us.”

  “Then we head back,” Sirius said. “Rhael will want our report by nightfall.”

  Milo flicked the ash from his pipe, Malorn slung his bow over his shoulder, and Dusk swallowed the last of her meal with a satisfied grunt.

  We turned from the rift as the amber light hummed behind us, steady but inhaling like a breathe that would soon need to be released.

  —

  A year of training had passed, and we had finally completed the Bastion Trials. Our team had been approved. Sirius officially decided he wanted two or three teams under his command, each built for different purposes.

  He saw our group’s skills as best suited for exploration, reconnaissance, and adventuring-based missions. There was a freedom in that, a kind of wandering he knew we would thrive in.

  Milo had proven himself so talented with traps and alchemy that the fortress masters began pulling him aside for specialized lessons. He’d even been allowed to assist in the workshop, something usually reserved for long-term Bastion trainees. His grin had barely left his face since.

  Malorn found similar favor. Some of the master archers and ranger units stationed at the Bastion took him under their wing. They recognized his potential quickly, and it wasn’t long before they were drilling him in advanced techniques even seasoned scouts struggled to learn. It was becoming clear that our team might rise far above the level we had once imagined.

  As for me, I had accepted the position as Sirius’s Talon.

  The decision felt like stepping onto the final landing of a staircase I had been climbing for the last decade. My training for that would begin soon, with missions interwoven throughout. Because of that, our team would remain situational rather than permanent, while still being in service to the prince. Sirius would form another core group for consistent deployment, while we would be available for operations requiring a very specific skill set.

  Captain Rhael assured us this arrangement was normal. Royal family members were not required to choose special unit members beyond choosing their Talon, but many did. Milo and Malorn might eventually be placed into one of the other royal special forces, which would only strengthen Sirius’s position. None of us had any objections. We wanted him surrounded by the best people possible.

  Thorn had arrived two months earlier to help train our team, and seeing him again brought back years of memories from the orphanage. Those memories shattered quickly once we sparred. I learned within minutes how little effort he had ever used when training me back then. Here, he fought without restraint. Here, he was a monster.

  And yet, it was good to see him.

  The Bastion had tested us, reshaped us, and prepared us for lives we could not have imagined when we first walked through its gates after graduation.

  Now, I was about to head out into my final direct training course before being in an assigned role for the future. Sirius told me that after I completed this he would be allowed to share with me potential methods to assessing my growth moving forward.

  It was killing me never knowing how to or what I could go in and up to this point I was to scared to try integrating with another shard or gaining another bonded companion. Hopefully this would give me the answers I had been looking for the last few years.