Elias’s hammer answered before he swung it. The strike echoed back not as metal, but as something older—a sound that hummed through the water, vibrating in the marrow of her bones. The temple loomed ahead, its columns split like dried leaves, their stone faces carved with the same

"I didn’t mean to—" "*You* meant to," the walls corrected. A chorus of whispers—laughter, screams, the low, rhythmic *thrum* of a heartbeat—coalesced into a single, wet sigh. *We are hungry. And you feed us.* Lira’s blood turned to ice. She’d been

Elias barely heard her voice anymore. The whispers coiled around his ribs, sharp as thorns. *He knew. He always knew.* Lysander’s ghost—no, *his* voice, now split and raw—rose from the water’s edge, his bones still damp, his breath ragged. Elias’s fingers curled into the stones

The rain fell like knives through the city’s veins. Neon signboards flickered weakly, their ghostly reflections glitching against the glass as they clung to life for one last breath. Elias Voss wiped the damp streaks from his face, the breath in his lungs already sour with the stench of

The room was a mirror of his thoughts before the nightmares even began. His name scrawled across the wall in ink that hadn’t dried for years. Photos hung in jagged rows—faces from the newspaper clipping he clutched in his fist: a journalist, a man who had been young

Outside, the river murmurs its usual lullaby—but tonight, it sounds wrong. Too deep. Too knowing. Lydia steps through the threshold, knife gleaming in the sickly green light of the chamber. The Hollow doesn’t see her yet—it’s still bound to Elias’s skin, its fingers threading through

Liora Veyra had always loved the trunk in her grandmother’s attic—though she never told anyone why. It was the kind of place that held secrets, and she was learning to listen for them. Tonight, the air smelled of old ink and something faintly metallic, like the aftertaste of

The air smelled of damp stone and something older, something that hadn’t been here since the war ended. Her boots sank into earth so soft it held the weight of decades. Rook’s voice crackled in her ear like a faulty transmission: *"Wrong path. Wrong path."* Then

The Drifter clutched the broken bell, his fingers trembling as if the bell itself were pleading. *'Play me the song you never played,'* he repeated, his hollow voice catching on the last syllable. Elias looked away—because no song could be played if it had never been sung.