The thin piece I had cobbled together from finality shattered in the dead of night.
It wasn't a sound. It was a presence, a sudden, violent warping of the air in my barren room, as if the darkness itself had grown a cold, intelligent hunger. I bolted upright on the rough mattress, my heart a frantic bird against my ribs. The star-iron charm at my throat flared with a sudden, icy burn—not a warning of ingested poison, but of a spiritual malignancy.
My senses instinctively stretched out, honed by a saint's lifetime of perceiving divine and demonic alike. In this body, the ability was fledgling, a blurred lens compared to Selene's clarity. But I didn't need clarity to recognize the signature.
It was the same. The exact, soul-chilling wrongness that had poured from Seraphina's eyes in the Grand Receiving Hall. The hollow, static-charged malice of Erebus. But now, it was unattached. It had no vessel. It was a stain on the world's fabric, a roaming, sentient shadow.
It probed.
