Morning settled over AstraVana like ash.

  The smoke from the previous night had thinned, but its memory lingered in the air. Students moved through corridors in lowered voices. The terraces felt wider, emptier, as if the stone itself had noticed how many riders had vanished into the horizon these past months and never fully returned.

  The wyvern lay in the lower containment vault now.Layered ward-circles hummed around its enormous body, light threading through light in complex geometries.

  Devika had not left its side. Niro stood near the inner ring, sleeves rolled, expression stripped of humor.

  The creature breathed.

  That, more than anything, unsettled them.

  Its ribcage still bore the spiraled fractures — blackened seams radiating from the sternum like something had burned outward from within. The damage pulsed faintly with unstable residue, a reminder that the attack had been interrupted rather than completed.

  Information had been sealed immediately.

  Only leaders. Only those required.

  The rest of AstraVana was told that a “flight accident” had occurred near the Veil boundary.

  The lie sat poorly in the air.

  Swarit returned just after sunrise.

  He came through the upper transit ring alongside Aadyan and the rest of the eastern expedition team — dust-caked, armor scored, faces drawn. They had been recalled abruptly in the night, long before they could finish their work near the East.

  Swarit looked harder than when he’d left.

  The months had stripped something from him.Aadyan walked at his side in silence, eyes scanning the grounds with instinctive alertness. Neither had yet been informed of the wyvern in detail. That would come in Iravati’s chamber.

  Dhama had not gone with them east.

  She had been ordered to remain in AstraVana for safety.

  She had argued about it.

  Swarit had teased her the night before departure — called her cautious, told her she would be bored reinforcing wards while they chased answers beyond the Veil lines.

  He had promised to return quickly.

  He had not imagined returning to this.

  Iravati summoned Aadyan and Swarit immediately upon arrival.

  The chamber doors sealed behind them.

  Outside, Lira waited in the corridor, Aresh a few steps away. Neither spoke.

  The atmosphere felt stretched thin, like skin pulled too tight over bone.

  The scream tore through the Vana before noon.It came from near the temple ridge.

  Raw. Human. Splintering.

  Every ward-sigil along the upper terraces flickered in response.

  Swarit was already moving when the second cry broke.

  Aadyan ran beside him.

  Lira and Aresh followed, branches whipping against sleeves as they cut through the forest path that led toward the temple clearing — that narrow stretch of earth where AstraVana’s carved stone met the living breath of the Vana and the Bluefire Bridge arced outward in controlled celestial flame.

  The smell reached them first.

  Blood and scorched air.

  A warden staggered out from between the trees.His armor had been torn open along the ribs. Deep gouges crossed his chest and shoulder, flesh split by something that had struck without hesitation. One leg dragged uselessly behind him.

  He fell forward onto the path.

  “Traitor,” he rasped.

  His eyes were unfocused, rolling, shock hollowing his voice.

  Swarit dropped to one knee beside him.

  “Who?” he demanded. “What happened?”

  The warden’s gaze shifted past him toward the temple arch.

  “The bridge…” he gasped. “We are compromised…”

  Then his voice broke into a raw, animal sob.

  Behind him, beyond the marker stone at the edge of the clearing, a body lay crumpled near the border where temple stone met forest soil.

  Swarit turned.

  Time did not slow.

  It stopped.

  Dhama lay on her side, dark hair fanned against the earth.Her throat had been torn open. The wound was jagged, brutal — not a precise kill but an eruption of violence. Blood had soaked deep into the soil beneath her.

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  Her hands were extended forward, fingers curved inward as though frozen mid-cast.

  Both palms were blackened to char.

  The skin had cracked and split all the way to the bone, as if something had ignited through her from within or she had tried to channel more power than flesh could bear.

  Her eyes remained open.

  There was no hollowing in her.

  No siphoned emptiness.

  Only shock.

  Only horror.

  Swarit did not breathe.

  He had left her here because AstraVana was safe.He had told her she would be safer behind reinforced ward-lines than riding east into unstable territories.

  He reached for her hands.

  Stopped.

  His fingers hovered inches from the charred skin.Aadyan stood behind him, face draining of color.

  “Who did this?” Swarit whispered.

  The warden’s breathing hitched violently.

  “There is someone inside,” he forced out. “Someone opened it—”

  His hand lifted weakly toward the temple.

  “The Bluefire…”

  Iravati arrived then, Amar Bhisht close behind her.The warden looked at her as though she could still undo what had been done.

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  Iravati turned.No one had noticed till then but

  the Bluefire Bridge had always burned steady — a controlled arc of luminous flame spanning the narrow divide between AstraVana and the deeper forest. It was both pathway and ward-anchor, a living structure tied to the Veil matrix.

  Now it was dark.

  The span remained.

  The structure held.

  But no flame coursed through it.

  No current.

  No light.

  The bridge had been extinguished.

  Devika knelt beside Dhama.

  Her fingers hovered briefly over the ruined throat, then moved to the warden’s pulse.

  Silence stretched.

  “They’re gone,” she said quietly.

  Swarit’s shoulders folded inward.

  A sound left him — not a cry, not a shout — something lower, torn from the center of his chest.

  He had fought in the East for months.

  He had seen hollowed villages.

  He had stood against mana-siphoning entities that left bodies intact and souls erased.

  This was different.

  This was personal.

  Amar’s voice cut clean through the clearing.

  “Seal the outer perimeter. Full lockdown.”

  Senior warders began moving immediately.

  “Evacuate the village below. Children under sixteen and elders out of this Veil at once. Mortal world transfer protocols.”

  Shock rippled outward.

  “What?” someone breathed.

  “Now,” Amar repeated.

  The Veil had been breached from within.

  The Bluefire did not extinguish on its own.

  It required access to its core sigils — knowledge held by leaders and designated ward-architects.

  Dhama had reinforced that bridge countless times.Her hands were burned as if she had tried to hold something in place.

  Iravati stepped toward the temple arch, palm lifting instinctively toward the dormant span.

  The ward-matrix reacted to her presence.

  A backlash surged.

  She staggered.

  Amar caught her before she struck stone.

  The shock that passed through her was not weakness — it was recoil.

  Someone had severed a sacred ward-thread and redirected its collapse.

  The violation ran deeper than flame.

  Swarit rose slowly from Dhama’s side.

  His grief hardened into something sharper.

  “Find them,” he said.

  No one needed clarification.

  Aadyan’s gaze moved across every face in the clearing.

  Inside AstraVana.

  Among them.

  The warden’s final word echoed still in the air.

  Traitor.

  Above the temple, the sky remained clear.

  Below it, the bridge that had burned for decades lay silent and dark.

  And for the first time since the Hollow began stirring beyond the Veils, AstraVana understood something far worse than invasion:

  Someone had opened the door.