The sound was wrong.It wasn't the clean, sharp rhythm of footsteps, nor the steady advance of hooves or claws.It was a dragging, deliberate scrape stone on stone interrupted by moments of silence so complete that Kaelis's heartbeat seemed deafening in her own ears.
The fissure's light dimmed, as though even that alien glow recoiled.
Elyon's grip on his staff tightened until his knuckles whitened. "We need to move now."
"No," Aloysius or whatever he had become said with a faint smirk. "You run from the Hunter, and you'll find it waiting ahead. It doesn't chase prey. It chooses when you meet it."
Kaelis caught the shift in the air before the next sound a breath, so cold it condensed the moisture around them into tiny motes of frost. She didn't want to turn toward it, but her body obeyed the instinct.
From the black mouth of the corridor beyond the fissure, something leaned forward into the half-light. Its shape was humanoid only in the way a shadow can mimic a form long, angular limbs and a face that seemed carved from a single piece of pale stone, featureless except for two hollow grooves where eyes should be.
The grooves weren't empty. They were deep. Too deep, as if they reached through the creature into some other place entirely.
The Hunter didn't move closer, but the feeling of its presence pressed down on them like the weight of the sea.
Aloysius whispered, almost reverent, "It's older than the Fragments… older than the Crown. It hunts the ones who break the cycle."
"And we're… what?" Kaelis asked.
Elyon didn't answer. His eyes were locked on the Hunter's "gaze," and his lips moved soundlessly, shaping a warding spell too fragile to finish.
The Hunter's head tilted, slow as the swing of a pendulum. Then it stepped forward just one pace and every torch in the ruins extinguished at once.
Only the fissure's light remained, casting long, warping shadows over their faces.
And in the silence that followed, the Hunter spoke not aloud, but directly into their minds."One of you wears the seed of a false dawn. Give him to me… or none of you will leave this place with a name to call your own."