Kael’s sword lowered slowly, the edge still gleaming with energy as he stared at Aria.

  “The Key?” she asked, still breathless. Her palms, now dim, tingled with aftershock. The image of the shadowhound vanishing in a burst of light replayed in her mind over and over.

  “What does that mean?” she pressed. “You said I was the Seeker—now the Key?”

  Kael sheathed his sword with a quiet click and turned toward the ancient monolith. His jaw tightened. “In the older versions of the prophecy, the Seeker doesn’t just find the truth. She unlocks it. The veil between worlds, the seal on the last magic of Eloria, the barrier that keeps the lost gods sleeping... it’s all bound to one thing: the Key.”

  “And now I’m that?” Aria asked, her voice rising. “I’m a person, not a prophecy!”

  Kael didn’t argue. He simply pressed his hand to the stone, whispering something in a language Aria didn’t understand. The standing stones around them pulsed once, dimly. A ward. A temporary sanctuary.

  “You're right,” he said finally. “You’re a person. But destiny doesn’t care. It never does.”

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  Aria sat heavily on a mossy stone, hands in her lap. “What happens now?”

  Kael crouched beside her. “Now, we make for the Ruins of Velhira. The scrolls there hold answers to your power. Maybe even how to control it. But we’ll need to travel through the Wyrmspine Hills—and that land hasn’t been safe in generations.”

  Aria glanced around the clearing, unease crawling up her spine. “And the hounds?”

  “They’ll regroup. They always do.” Kael’s voice was grim. “But they’re just the beginning.”

  “What else is coming?”

  Kael looked at her then—really looked. Not with suspicion, or awe, or wariness.

  But with the kind of solemn respect reserved for those who stand at the edge of legends.

  “There are worse things than hounds,” he said. “There are those who remember the last Seeker. And they remember what she chose.”

  Aria blinked. “There was another?”

  He nodded. “Hundreds of years ago. Before the Great Sundering. She failed.”

  Aria’s stomach twisted. “How?”

  Kael stood and turned to the path ahead. “She tried to open the veil... without understanding what was locked behind it.”

  A sudden gust of wind blew through the clearing, rustling the leaves, and for just a second, Aria thought she heard something riding on it. A whisper. A name.

  “Aria...”

  She shivered.

  Kael drew his cloak tighter and offered her a hand. “We need to move before the night deepens. Magic grows unstable after moonrise.”

  She took his hand, rising slowly. “Will I ever be normal again?”

  “No,” he said simply. “But you may become something greater.”

  They set off into the woods again, the trees closing around them like guardians of secrets too old for daylight. As they disappeared into the shadows, the stones behind them pulsed once more—marking the passage of a Key, and the beginning of an ancient awakening.

  And far away, across a black sea beneath a blood-colored moon, a cloaked figure stirred in a tower of ash and bone. Eyes like oil opened slowly. The whisper reached him.

  “She lives.”

  He smiled.

  “At last.”