Sinclair moved like a man accustomed to quiet—comfortable in it, even when the trees whispered otherwise. The forest around the Obsidian Order’s emptying camp wasn’t dense enough to offer true cover, but it was enough to vanish if you knew how. He walked with purpose, scanning the terrain, his bootfalls softened by moss and rot-slick bark. His left hand brushed the edge of a rolled map, the parchment too stiff to fold properly in the damp. Still, he held onto it. He always did better with the weight of paper in hand.

  The last stars still clung to the sky when he reached the overlook. Below, the sloped basin spread like a dim lantern village under the trees. Lanterns were hooded. Fires rationed. Even the faint blue glow of enchanted tents had been reduced to embers—just enough to keep the mist at bay. The camp moved like a sleeping beast, breathing in its sleep.

  Sinclair sat.

  It took effort. His knees weren’t what they used to be, and the wounds from Redvine still burned in the chill before dawn. But he lowered himself slowly, deliberately, laying the map across his lap. New markings were scrawled there: a triangle of possibility stretching from the ruins where the cube had awakened to the coordinates Raven had recovered from the fragments Ren had left behind.

  He’d once led a hundred men into a collapsing ruin during a Church skirmish—reckless, back then. Only sixteen had come out. That had been chaos: random, bloody, pointless. But this—this wasn’t chaos.

  It was design.

  And he hated it.

  From the hilltop, the camp’s quiet rhythm almost seemed peaceful. But he knew better. Tension brewed in silence. Fear festered in shadows. Half the younger operatives still didn’t understand why they’d lost Redvine. Why no reinforcements had come. Why half the region’s leyline lattice had gone dark.

  They would learn soon enough.

  Soraya had made the announcement the night before—clear, sharp, decisive: two teams. Hers would head east, then south, skirting the Lausen Empire’s border, rallying the outer Dragonkin tribes before reaching the Order’s base beyond the human capital. Diplomacy. Negotiation. Old favors. The kind of web he was happy to leave to her.

  His path, as always, was the dangerous one.

  Find the next seal. Study it. Guard it. Or destroy it.

  He didn’t need a title. Never had. His command didn’t come from rank—it came from being the one people followed when things got ugly.

  And things were well past ugly now.

  He rubbed his temples, fingers tracing the hardened lines left by old helmet seams. The ache returned—not the kind born of age or strain, but the one that came from knowing too much and too little all at once. That damn cube had passed through Raven’s hands, discarded like scrap. Even she hadn’t sensed anything. She’d claimed it was dormant.

  Or maybe, Sinclair thought grimly, it had simply been hiding.

  Ren had asked about it the day after Soraya’s briefing. His expression calm, but his eyes flickered—something not quite fear, not quite guilt. Curiosity, maybe.

  “She said she didn’t remember,” Sinclair had told him. “Raven doesn’t miss things. It’s possible the cube was dormant—awakened by your Threads.”

  Or hiding, he’d thought, but hadn’t said.

  Ren had nodded. Quiet, thoughtful. Just like Ethan used to do.

  Sinclair leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The resemblance still unsettled him—not in face or voice, but in gravity. The same quiet pull toward something larger. Ethan had been like that. And Ethan had died for it.

  The forest breathed around him.

  A shift in the watch below: faint metal, the creak of leather, a quiet whistle. No footsteps. He’d trained them well. Still, no amount of preparation could brace him for what he’d felt before the Divine—that crushing, instinctive dread. The certainty of futility. He wasn’t sure how they’d ever fight that.

  But they would. They had to.

  Leo would grumble, Raven would overthink, and Ren would carry too much of the weight. That was fine. Better to crack now than in the seal chamber. Better to know where the breaks were.

  He smoothed the edge of the map again, dragging a finger across the terrain. If they moved north by dawn, crossed the lesser ridge, they could reach the cliffs in three days—assuming no interference, no terrain warping, no spread of corruption.

  Too many assumptions.

  A twig snapped behind him.

  Sinclair didn’t turn.

  “You’re light on your feet,” he said quietly. “But not that light.”

  A figure stepped into view—Barel, one of his captains. Tall, tired-eyed, always chewing something that made his breath smell like pepperroot.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt,” Barel muttered. “Couldn’t sleep. The air’s wrong.”

  Sinclair grunted. “It is.”

  Barel sat beside him without asking. That was another thing Sinclair appreciated—no tiptoeing. Just presence.

  “You think it’ll be like the first?” Barel asked. “The seal, I mean.”

  “No,” Sinclair said. “It’ll be worse.”

  Barel chewed that over. Literally.

  “We’re not ready.”

  “No,” Sinclair said again. “But we’re going anyway.”

  A long silence stretched between them. The wind rose and fell. Down in the basin, a whistle marked a shift change. The camp stirred.

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  “Orders?”

  “Wake the scouts. I want a forward team ahead before midday. No mana flares. No contact unless necessary. If they see anything strange—symmetry, pulsing stone, unnatural structures—mark it and fall back.”

  “Understood.”

  Barel left. Sinclair remained seated a moment longer before pushing to his feet. His knees creaked. Pain grounded him. Better that than numbness.

  He looked once more at the camp below. Soraya would be coordinating supplies, arguing logistics. Raven might be pacing. Soraya would be rewriting plans for the hundredth time. And Ren—Ren would be watching. Always watching.

  He folded the map beneath his cloak.

  The world had shifted. The Divine was not what they’d believed. The seals were not dormant. Atreus. This Divine didn’t just corrupt—it created.

  Twisted purpose.

  That made it worse.

  Sinclair turned from the overlook and walked back toward camp, boots soundless on the damp earth.

  He didn’t know if they’d survive the weeks to come.

  But he would make sure someone did.

  Even if it wasn’t him.The valley was wrong.

  Even from a distance, it pressed on the senses—too quiet, too still. Not the silence of emptiness, but something deeper, like a breath held too long beneath black water. The trees ringing its edges didn’t sway. Their limbs twisted upward, bare and slick, as if in silent devotion to something unseen. Faint spores drifted through the air like dust motes, glittering in the gloom. They did not fall.

  Once, this place might’ve had a name. A glacial stream had once carved a gentle curve between ridges now warped with fungal creep. Now there was only the hollow. And at its heart, buried beneath veined soil and writhing root, something pulsed.

  They had followed the signs for months:

  The fracture in the Divine’s lattice.

  The hymns that no longer burned sin away.

  The starlight over the capital dimming for three nights straight.

  The dreams.

  They came from ruined temples and abandoned cellars, from towers where bells no longer rang. Not exiles—not yet. Not heretics either, not by their own words. Preservers. Keepers. Inheritors of truths unspoken by the Church. They wore the tattered remnants of the Inquisition like half-shed skin, golden trim gleaming faintly beneath moss and rot.

  Thirty of them stood in a circle, heads bowed, robes slick with dew and blood. Before them, the clearing throbbed—earth rising and falling in slow undulations, as if the land itself breathed through a hidden lung. Bones marked the boundary: a crude ring of ribcages and femurs, threaded with vine and tendon.

  At the center squatted an altar, carved from something far too smooth to be stone. Shell? Flesh turned mineral? They didn’t know. Only that it had grown there. And continued to grow.

  The leader—a woman with white eyes and three braids woven with teeth—raised her arms.

  “She stirs beneath us.”

  A ripple passed through the gathered.

  “She remembers.”

  They echoed: “She remembers.”

  “She sees without eyes. She feels without flesh. She knows the hollow path, the spiral birth, the womb that never closed.”

  Their voices were ragged with awe. None dared ask who “she” was. They’d seen the glyphs, traced the veins etched into collapsed sanctuary walls, followed them even into dreams. What had begun as metaphor now stirred beneath them as something real.

  “The veil thins,” said the leader. “We must feed her dream.”

  A dozen acolytes stepped forward. Knives. Bones. Jars filled with slick, blinking things. One placed a deer’s head, its eyes still wet. Another spilled a mound of teeth, each one filed flat.

  The ground drank.

  They didn’t see it move, not clearly—but they felt it. The earth accepted. Not with hunger. With memory.

  Roots shifted, gently. Like fingers in sleep.

  “She is almost ready,” the leader whispered.

  The ground pulsed again. A hum buzzed in their skulls—too deep to hear, too steady to ignore. The air grew warm. Not fire’s warmth, but the kind that clings after blood has been spilled in worship.

  And still, no one spoke her name.

  Attempts had been made. Words carved in spirals, phrases spoken in reverse or written in mirror. But the dreams always burned them away. They were not allowed to name what watched them.

  The first anomaly arrived as a scent.

  Not rot. Not decay. Gestation. The rich, wet stench of something being born too large for its shell. The kind of smell that made every living thing either flinch or flee.

  Then came the animals.

  Not in a rush. Not panicked. Just present.

  From trees, hollows, and soil they emerged—

  An elk with obsidian antlers.

  A fox with no eyes and six legs.

  A crow the size of a child, wings crusted in fungus.

  Dozens. Hundreds.

  They did not howl. Did not screech. They stood. Watched. Listened.

  The cultists turned, one by one. Some knelt. Some wept.

  “She sends her kin!” one cried.

  “The blood is accepted,” the leader answered.

  “We are known,” the crowd moaned.

  And then the beasts moved.

  Loping shadows, angular and witless, violence given form.

  The leader fell to her knees, arms wide.

  “Let us be the first to be rewritten—”

  She never finished.

  Where thirty had stood, now there was blood.

  Not just blood—limbs, torn and flayed, butchered clean by claw and antler. Beak and tooth tore meat from bone; flesh peeled like parchment.

  One cultist—half a man—was dragged into a burrow that hadn’t existed moments before.

  Another tried to run. The circle opened for him, only to close again.

  The ground ran red, drowning the offerings beneath it.

  The beasts fed in silence.

  And those who lived did not dare make a sound.