Snow broke beneath their steps like brittle glass.
The forest had changed.
Not visibly — not in the pattern of its branches or the hue of its frost — but in the silence it wore. Before, the trees had groaned with the wind, creaked with age, breathed with the hush of drifting snow.
Now, they held their breath.
Kaia moved ahead, blades unsheathed, posture low and poised like a wolf tracking something older than prey. Rei followed, slower, still shaken from the dream, the memory, the whisper that had not left his mind since the mushroom-laced vision. Each step away from the fire felt colder than the last — not from the weather, but from the weight that followed them like a second shadow.
They didn't speak.
Words would have shattered the stillness like glass.
Even the Riftmark beneath Rei's shirt had gone still — not dead, but watchful. A pulse that throbbed beneath his ribs, in time with footsteps he could not hear, yet felt in his marrow.
After an hour, they stopped.
Kaia raised a hand — not out of caution, but finality.
They stood at the edge of a clearing. The moon split the clouds above, pale and trembling, casting a wide net of silver across the snow-blanketed glade. In the center stood a stone arch, long crumbled, its frame half-buried by ivy and hoarfrost. Runes lined the base — older than Grove script, older than even Riftsteel.
Kaia sniffed the air.
Rei waited.
Then—
Crows.
A single caw broke the silence. It echoed too long, like a drop in a chasm that had no bottom. Rei turned toward the treeline, breath catching. More caws followed — harsh, arrhythmic. They came from the trees behind them… and above.
One.
Two.
Three.
Seven.
They circled high above the canopy, black shapes blotting out slivers of moonlight. No wings beat. No feathers stirred.
The crows did not move.
Then Kaia said, quiet as falling snow, "We're being watched."
Rei turned to her. "I thought you said—"
"I know what I said," she snapped — not harsh, but strained. Her gaze was fixed on something across the clearing.
Rei followed her stare.
At the far edge of the glade — where the forest swallowed the light — something stood.
A figure.
Not close. Not clear. Wrapped in a white cloak that drank in shadow rather than reflecting it. Gold thread traced across its hem like vines caught in moonlight. A mask glinted — mirrored, cracked at the edge, blank as a dead sky.
And it did not move.
Rei's breath misted. The mark on his chest throbbed once — a single jolt of heat, like a warning.
The crows above shifted.
Kaia stepped back, instinctively placing herself between Rei and the figure. Her grip on her knives tightened.
But still—
The figure did not move.
Not a blink.
Not a breath.
The trees around it whispered of frost. Of stillness that was not slumber, but attention.
Then the wind turned.
And the crows scattered, not in chaos — but in formation. Circling wider. Screeching low.
By the time Rei blinked—
The figure was gone.
No step.
No sound.
Only snow, unbroken.
Kaia exhaled.
"We keep moving," she said. "Don't look back."
And so they ran — not like prey, but like people who'd once hunted things that never bled.
Behind them, the trees closed again. The clearing sealed itself in silence.
Above, one crow remained.
Watching.
Waiting.
A whisper, faint as breath on steel, seemed to ride the wind:
"I smell you… Riftborn."
The trees gave way to ruin.
High on a frost-bitten hill, they found it — what once had been a watchtower, now half-swallowed by time and silence. The upper levels were broken, collapsed by age or siege, but the base stood firm — a ring of dark stone lashed with ice, half-buried in snowdrifts, shrouded by thorn and pine.
Kaia stepped through the arch first, blades still drawn. The shadows didn't stir. No beasts. No bones. Only the hush of a place the world had forgotten.
She gave a short nod. "We rest here."
Rei followed, breath shallow. He was still reeling — not from the journey, but from the presence that had stalked them since the grove. He hadn't seen the face. Not clearly. But something in the stillness of that figure had clung to him like old smoke.
A silence that watched.
He dropped beside a crumbled wall, pulling the cloak tighter around himself. The cold had numbed his fingers. But not the mark. It throbbed faintly, like a second heartbeat. Not painful. Just… alert.
Kaia sat across from him. She lit no fire. There was no need. Whatever followed them would smell smoke miles before the warmth reached their skin.
They sat for a while, still as snowdrifts.
Then Rei spoke, softly. "Do you think… it's him?"
Kaia didn't look up. "The one who watched us?"
Rei nodded. "He didn't move. Not once."
Kaia was quiet for a moment. "He didn't need to."
Silence again. And above them, through the shattered ceiling, the sky spilled with stars — cold and burning, unmoved by the world's wounds.
Rei leaned his head back, breathing slow.
"I felt something in him," he whispered. "Not hatred. Not hunger."
"…Recognition," Kaia said.
He turned to her.
She nodded. "I felt it too."
Far beyond the fireless ruin, across ridgelines veiled in white, stood a figure at the forest's edge.
He did not move.
Not even as the crows circled above him in a slow spiral, wings never flapping, their shadows crawling like ink across the snow.
His cloak — white, unmarred — hung like still water in a frozen basin. Gold thread coiled at its edges, tracing runes in a tongue older than scripture, older than the Order itself.
The mask he wore was mirrored, cracked from temple to chin. It reflected the stars. Nothing else.
He had no need for breath. Only silence.
For he had been watching.
The Riftborn had awakened. And not just a Riftborn. That presence. That weight.
He had felt it once before — long ago, in the ruin of another forest, across a field choked by Riftspawn, where he had stood blade to blade with the First.
And failed.
Not from weakness. From conviction.
He had tried to kill him. Not once. Not twice. Many times. But each duel ended the same — not in victory, nor in defeat, but in pause. In draw. As though the world itself refused to let either of them fall.
The First Riftborn had carried light.
Not the blinding radiance of gods or suns — but the sharp, aching clarity of truth. The kind that burns lies away and leaves only what must be seen.
He had not been a monster. He had not devoured.
He had stood before the Rift… and turned it back.
Valek Sereth remembered it all.
And now, after all these years, he felt the same echo stirring again.
But something was wrong.
This one did not shine.
He bled shadow.
He moved like a man, but the mark he bore was deeper — not branded, but rooted. Not light that heals, but void that erases.
A power that did not protect… but devoured.
Valek raised a hand.
The crows stopped mid-circle.
No cry. No flutter.
He closed his fingers into a fist.
The wind shifted.
And in the distance — beyond thorn, frost, and stone — the watchtower stood.
He whispered a single word, one only the dead would know.
"…Riftborn."
But his voice held no hatred.
Only sorrow.
And the ache of prophecy unfulfilled.
Back in the tower, Rei stirred awake. Not from a nightmare — but from the cold absence that had settled into the pit of his chest.
He felt it again.
The void.
Kaia stood at the archway, staring east.
Snow drifted around her shoulders like ash.
"We move at dawn," she said.
Rei rose slowly. "He's still following?"
Kaia didn't nod. Didn't speak.
But he understood.
And far, far away, the crows flew again — not in fear. Not in hunger.
But in memory.
For they knew the shape of things to come.