The Silence Between Them
The Grin collapsed without a sound.
Its body didn't bleed. It unraveled—veins of shadow pulling back into the dirt like it had only been a rumor dressed in bone.
The figure didn't move.
Not until Kaelen took one step forward.
"Wait—"
The masked boy turned. Briefly.
Long enough for Kaelen to catch it:
That cloak. That stance.
The way he carried silence like it belonged to him.
Yolti exhaled. "Did he just…?"
He was already moving—vanishing between trees, black fabric folding into dusk.
Kaelen and Yolti didn't speak. They ran.
The forest swallowed them in lightless blur. Branches whipped past. Pulse still half-broken. Glyphs still dim.
But something in the air shifted.
Not just because he'd returned.
But because the world felt it.
Like something that had been buried too deep had started to surface—
and now the ground couldn't keep it down.
Yolti saw it first: two pulse bikes leaned near the edge of the ridge.
Kaelen pulled up beside them, panting.
"These are ours," Yolti said.
"We didn't bring them," Kaelen muttered.
They looked down the trail.
A flicker of cloak in the trees.
A memory rising like breath caught in the chest.
They rode.