The tunnel breathed.It wasn't wind Kaelis realized that far too late it was inhalation. Each step forward seemed to feed something in the dark, some vast thing waiting beyond the walls.
The glow from their marks painted the path in jagged orange, casting thin shadows that twitched unnaturally. Elyon slowed, blade raised, his gaze darting to the walls.
"Something's pacing us," he murmured.
A sound followed like bone scraping over stone. Slow. Deliberate.Then the wall to Kaelis's right rippled. Out of it slid a figure tall enough to brush the tunnel's ceiling, its body little more than stretched hide over an empty frame. No eyes just a hollow where the face should be, a hole that seemed to drink their light.
The Stalker.
Kaelis's mark seared as the creature turned toward her. The pull in her chest intensified magnet, hook, chain. It didn't lunge. It only stood, as if waiting for something to tip the balance.
Aloysius whispered, "It's not moving because it doesn't have to. It's bound to us."
The Stalker's head tilted, the hollow widening into a void that seemed deeper than the tunnel itself. From within, Kaelis thought she saw… memories. Fractured images her own shredded into impossible pieces.
"Don't look!" Elyon barked. But it was too late.
Kaelis felt a piece of herself slide loose. A name she once knew. A face she once loved. Gone.
The Stalker stepped forward.