By the time they emerged from the corrupted clearing, the forest felt different—not less hostile, but watchful. Every birdcall sounded wrong, clipped in the middle like something had interrupted it.
Lior kept glancing at his interface, hoping the glitching messages would settle, but the text now crawled unnaturally slow across the screen.
[Adaptive Core Signature detected]
[Behavioural Influence: Rising]
He shut it off before anyone noticed. If they knew how far the Core's reach extended, they might turn on him.
The path twisted downward into a ravine where the canopy thinned and the ground was coated in a fine layer of black ash. Ayla crouched, touching it. Her fingers came away stained, and the smell of burnt resin clung stubbornly to her skin.
"This wasn't here last time," she said.
"It wasn't anything last time," Kaelen muttered. "We're walking into someone else's memory."
They pushed forward, the air thickening until breathing felt like drinking smoke. Shapes moved above them in the skeletal branches—too slender to be birds, too silent to be beasts.
Then came the voice.
It wasn't loud, but it spoke inside their heads, a whisper without breath:
One of you belongs to me.
The group froze.
Kaelen's hand went to his dagger. Ayla stepped back, eyes darting to Lior as if the words had already chosen a target.
Lior's pulse slammed in his ears. He didn't remember moving his hand toward the small bone fragment at his belt—but there it was, warm, vibrating faintly as if answering the voice.
Above them, the shapes began to descend.