The forest path narrowed as thick roots climbed from the ground like grasping fingers. Revan walked a few paces ahead, but Cassie slowed, her fingers trailing against the bark of a tree rimmed with frost she hadn't meant to summon.
It was always there now—this chill that clung to her skin, wrapped itself around her bones. It used to only come when she called it. Now, sometimes, it came on its own.
Her thoughts drifted back—farther than she'd let herself remember in months.
The orphanage had always been cold. Not just from the cracked stone walls or drafty halls, but from the way no one there ever saw her. Revan was the only one who had. The older boys bullied her. The nuns whispered about her behind cupped hands. "That girl's not right," they'd say. "There's something in her."
They were half-right.
Cassie had discovered her gift—or curse—on a night when hunger and fear threatened to consume her. A boy had tried to take her last piece of bread. She didn't remember the details, just the way frost had bloomed across his arms when she screamed, the way his breath came out in clouds as he collapsed, shivering and blue-lipped.
She hadn't meant to hurt him.
But the magic didn't care.
Later, she would learn that the power wasn't natural. It was old—alien. The frost she wielded came from something buried far beneath the surface of their world. Something watching. Waiting. Heidi, the hedge witch who'd taken her in after they fled the orphanage, had warned her: "Cold like that doesn't belong here. It'll take if you give too freely."
And Cassie had. Again and again. To survive.
Now, as she stood in the shadowed wood, the past pressing in, Cassie whispered under her breath, "I'm still that girl, aren't I? Just with a sharper edge."
"Cass?" Revan's voice floated back, gentle. "You good?"
She blinked, swallowing hard. "Yeah. Just... thinking."
He nodded, not pushing. He never did. That was why she followed him through forests like this. Why she'd always follow.
She stepped forward again, the frost fading from the bark behind her—but not from her heart.
The deeper they went, the quieter Revan became.
He walked ahead of Cassie and Elara, boots crunching over dead leaves that muffled too much sound. His fingers rested near his dagger, not from fear—but from habit. The kind of habit you didn't unlearn, born from too many nights in alleys where you were either quick or dead.
Up ahead, the trees thinned slightly, and he paused near a half-fallen stone arch, overgrown and choked with vines. He didn't speak, just stared at it. Not because he recognized it.
But because it looked too much like home.
Not the orphanage—not that damned, sour-smelling place with cracked beds and joyless rules. That part of his past was bleak, but structured.
It was after that—the streets of Kallzara, the real beginning.
He remembered what it felt like to be ten years old and invisible. Cassie had been sick. Starving. Just a kid. And he was only a year older—but already stealing bread from taverns and filching apples from distracted market-goers.
They were shadows even then. Orphans with no names the world cared to remember. Survival was the only magic they knew.
He remembered the first man he stole from. A city guard. Bold move. Revan hadn't planned it—just saw the glint of coin and acted. It nearly got him killed. But the rush… it lit something inside him.
Later, that same instinct drove him into the Kallzaran sewers, chasing rumors of an old vault where merchants once stored contraband.
He found more than gold.
That was where he found the book.
It wasn't even hidden—just cradled in the arms of a long-dead body, robes rotted to lace, fingers still curled tight around a cover bound in black leather, warm to the touch despite the chill.
When he touched it, the mark burned into his skin.
He couldn't read the symbols at first. Could barely sleep. The dreams started almost immediately—shadows moving in ways they shouldn't. Whispers without mouths. Voices that called him by name before he even spoke them aloud.
He thought it was madness. It might still be.
But the shadows obeyed him. Eventually.
That power saved Cassie more than once. It stole food. It cloaked their escapes. It made them stronger.
But it always wanted. The mark always asked for more.
Now, years later, Revan glanced down at his forearm where the dark spiral pulsed faintly under his sleeve.
He wasn't sure where the boy who found that book ended and where he began.
Cassie caught up beside him, brushing her shoulder lightly against his.
"You drifted again," she said.
He gave a half-smile, no humor in it. "Just ghosts. The old kind."
She didn't ask more. Didn't have to. She'd lived it too.
They walked on in silence—but the shadows still listened.
The trees whispered of old things. Of blood and oaths and names no longer spoken.
Elara walked behind the two younger ones, staff in hand, but her thoughts wandered far from the forest floor. The rhythm of their steps was familiar now. Revan's cautious silence. Cassie's fire veiled in frost. Both of them carried raw, hungry magic—magic still shaping itself around who they were.
She remembered being that young once.
But her power hadn't come from hunger.
It had come from obedience.
She had been raised in the Monastery of the Crescent Veil, high in the pale mountains, where silence was law and knowledge was worshipped like a god. From the age of five, she was taught to listen—not just with her ears, but with her soul.
The Order had trained her to hear the Echoes in the world—the whispers of memory, the imprint of things long past. The stones beneath her feet, the wind curling through trees—everything spoke, if you knew how to listen.
By thirteen, she was one of the youngest ever granted a Seeker's staff.
By fifteen, she had seen her first death vision.
It had nearly broken her.
Echo magic wasn't meant to be pulled too deep. When you touch the past too closely, it can touch you back. That was the first time she heard the name Velkareth—the ancient thing buried in shadow. A god. A prison. A promise.
The monastery forbade further study.
She studied in secret.
And it cost her everything.
When the other Seekers found her standing in the Echo chamber—eyes black, speaking in a voice not her own—they banished her. Called her corrupted. A vessel for something that should have stayed lost.
She wandered for years after that. Alone. Magic fractured. Heart hardened.
She buried herself in old libraries, broken ruins, distant corners of forgotten kingdoms—anywhere the Order wouldn't dare go.
That's where she heard about the boy with the shadow mark.
The street thief. The orphan. The one the stars had whispered about in passing.
At first, she wanted to observe him. Learn from the thing inside him.
But then she saw Cassie.
And the way Revan watched her like she was the only tether he had to this world.
And Elara remembered what it meant to choose someone. Not because the Order said so. Not because the magic demanded it.
But because you saw yourself in them.
She didn't know if Revan would survive what was growing in him.
She only knew that if he had a chance, it would be with people who understood sacrifice.
And that was something she knew intimately.
They made camp beneath a twisted ironwood tree whose gnarled limbs clawed at the twilight sky. The forest had stilled for now, but that uneasy quiet hummed with tension—like the woods were holding their breath.
Cassie slept close to the fire, wrapped in her cloak, her breath slow and even. Revan sat across from her, sharpening his blade more for the sound than the edge. Shadows danced over his face—shadows that didn't always move the way they should.
Elara sat apart, cross-legged with her staff across her knees, eyes closed but not truly resting.
"You're watching me," she said softly, not opening her eyes.
Revan didn't deny it. "I've been watched by a lot of people. You're different."
Elara opened her eyes slowly and looked at him—not with suspicion, but with something far heavier.
"I know what it's like to be chosen by something ancient. Something that shouldn't choose anyone." She exhaled, and her voice was like wind passing over stone. "The world calls it a gift. But you and I both know better."
Revan hesitated. "Then why help me?"
She studied the fire for a long moment. "Because I see the same weight in your eyes that I once carried. And I remember what it nearly turned me into."
He looked down at the spiral mark, now faintly glowing in the low firelight. "You said you were part of an Order once. What happened?"
Elara's jaw tightened. The question hung in the air.
"When I was your age, I thought knowledge could save the world. That the deeper I dug into the past, the more answers I'd find." Her voice dropped lower. "Instead, I found Velkareth. Not in name at first, just... echoes. Whispers of a thing buried beneath all things."
Revan went still. He hadn't heard that name out loud since the librarian in the city.
Elara saw the recognition in his eyes.
"Yes," she said. "That's what lives inside your shadow, in part. A fraction. A splinter." Her eyes locked on his. "And it's waking."
Revan swallowed hard. "What did you do when you heard it?"
Elara looked away. "I listened too long."
The silence between them was raw. Honest.
Then Revan asked, almost against his own will, "Do you regret it?"
She didn't answer immediately. Her hand drifted to the silver chain around her neck—half-hidden beneath her robes. Her voice, when it came, was quieter than the wind.
"I regret surviving more than those who didn't."
Revan didn't know what to say to that.
But somehow, the space between them no longer felt as distant.
They sat in silence for a while longer—two people carrying impossible burdens—bound by shadow, memory, and the need to understand.