The ride to Hollowfang Glen was swift and silent.
Warriors flanked them on either side, their armour silvered and moon-inscribed, blades drawn and eyes sharpened. The deeper they rode into the cursed woods, the more the trees changed. The air grew colder, brittle like old bone. The mist no longer hugged the ground — it curled upward, reaching for them like pale fingers.
Eila sat behind Leonard on his stallion, her heartbeat matching the rhythm of hoofbeats. The vial of icefire Luna had given her was tucked close to her chest. She could feel the pulse of something wrong ahead — like the forest had been gouged open and left to bleed darkness.
They finally arrived at the Glen. A massive clearing spread before them, and in the center, hovering just inches above the ground, was a thin, silvery slit in the air — like someone had torn a gash in the fabric of the world.
The rupture.
It shimmered unnaturally, threads of blue and red light twisting at its edges. Every few seconds, a whisper seemed to leak from it — voices from no world she knew.
Magnus raised his fist, signalling the warriors to halt.
Luna stepped forward with Nina. Eila followed.
The earth felt wrong beneath her feet, like she was stepping on memories that didn't belong to her.
Sera, her wolf, growled in her head.
"This place is poisonous. A scar. It remembers death."
Leonard, Lukas, and Zois flanked her tightly, all three tensed for combat.
Then suddenly—
The tear pulsed.
A sound like weeping — soft, childlike—spilt out from it. But it wasn't a child.
The air shimmered… and out stepped something not of this world.
It wore no skin — just bones wrapped in shadow, a mouth where no mouth should be. Its body looked stitched from pieces of wolves and men. It smiled at them with burning white eyes.
A Varium Warden.
And then more followed, crawling from the rip like insects from a nest, forming a semicircle around the rupture.
Luna's voice was like a whip of ice.
"Defensive circle! Don't let them touch the girl!"
The battle exploded.
Magic flew. Blades clashed. Zois and Lukas shifted mid-air, Joro and Jace ripping into the first of the enemy. Leonard's claws glowed with black flame — the mark of his secret power — as he tore through two at once.
Eila stood back, trying to assess — until one of them broke the circle and lunged at her throat.
She screamed — and the vial shattered against her chest.
A burst of blue-white fire roared outward, incinerating the beast mid-air.
Everyone froze.
And the rupture shrieked.
The Veil itself had felt it.
Nina's voice rose above the sound.
"She hurt it. The girl can seal the tear — but it's not ready to close yet!"
Eila staggered backwards.
"Then what do we do?"
The answer came in a whisper from Leonard, his eyes still glowing with rage.
"We survive. For now."
Jeremy Soren a far away, in a place where the moonlight dared not enter, Jeremy Soren stood within a circle of blood and ash.
He hovered above the floor, limbs loose like a broken puppet, but his mind — oh, his mind—was sharpened like the edge of death.
Before him floated a dark mirror made of obsidian and bone. Through it, he watched the battle unfold at Hollowfang Glen.
He saw her.
His red-rimmed eyes locked on Eila as she burned his Warden with the icefire vial.
"Little witch," he whispered. "You've tasted what you can do… But you have no idea what it will cost."
Behind him, the Varium Prime — a robed horror with silver chains through its spine — whispered in a language older than the moon.
Jeremy raised a single, skeletal hand.
"Begin the next phase. Let the second rupture form."
He grinned.
"And summon the dead from the battlefield of Hollowfang. Let Eila Johnson learn the true meaning of what it is to be cursed by fate."
The mirror cracked.
The second tear was opening — and this time, it wouldn't just bleed.
It would consume.