The battered cargo skiff hummed with a sick, stuttering vibration as it drifted away from the dying Vort-Isle. Behind them, the great floating shard groaned as it tilted into the white abyss of the Shush, its lights flickering out like dying stars.
Kiron sat in the corner of the deck, his back against a crate of rusted gears. His body felt like it had been hollowed out with a hot iron. Exhaustion pulled at his eyelids, but he was terrified to close them.
"You need to sleep, Kiron," Nyra said from the helm, her eyes fixed on the shifting cloud-currents. "We have six hours before we reach the Shadow-Shelf. If you collapse there, I'm leaving you for the Ghouls."
"I can't," Kiron whispered, his voice cracking. "Every time I close my eyes... it's there."
Taz was already out, curled in a ball at the front of the skiff, his breathing heavy and uneven. Kiron envied him. Kiron leaned his head back, and despite his will, the darkness took him.
He wasn't in the skiff anymore.
The air was thick—so thick he could taste the iron. He was standing in the center of the Koda District, but the village was a slaughterhouse. The sky was a screaming red, torn open by the presence of Juro-Gai.
Kiron saw them. The thousand people. They weren't just singing; they were being unmade.
He saw a woman—her face pale, her eyes filled with a terrifying resolve—holding a shard of glass to her own throat. Beside her, a man was being pulled apart by a Mist-Ghoul, his ribs snapping like dry kindling, his blood spraying across the dirt. But the man didn't scream for help. He looked toward a small, wooden hut and used his final breath to shout a name that Kiron couldn't quite hear.
The gore was everywhere. The Ghouls weren't just killing; they were harvesting. He watched as a monster reached into the chest of a kneeling elder and pulled out a glowing, pulsing filament of light—the man's very soul—leaving behind a grey, shriveled husk that crumbled into ash.
The blood from the severed limbs and the slit throats didn't soak into the earth. It began to crawl. Thousands of streams of dark, viscous red slithered across the ground like snakes, coiling around the wooden cradle in the center of the carnage.
Kiron tried to move, to stop the blades, to catch the blood, but his feet were rooted to the spot. He felt every cut. He felt the cold steel on a thousand necks. He felt the moment a thousand hearts stopped beating at once.
Then, the God looked down.
A massive, golden eye, miles wide, pulsed in the heavens. A voice that wasn't a voice—more like the grinding of tectonic plates—vibrated through Kiron's skull.
"Found... you..."
Kiron bolted upright in the skiff, a strangled scream caught in his throat. He was drenched in sweat, his heart hammering so hard it felt like it would crack his ribs.
The suns of Aethelgard were low, casting long, bloody shadows across the deck. Nyra was standing over him, her hand on the hilt of a short-blade, her expression unreadable.
"Another one?" she asked quietly.
Kiron wiped his face, his hands trembling. He could still smell the copper. He could still hear the sound of the elder's ribs snapping.
"They... they all died," Kiron wheezed, clutching his stomach. "It wasn't just a ritual. It was a massacre. They let themselves be slaughtered just so... just so I could..."
"Don't finish that sentence," Nyra interrupted, her voice sharp. "The 'why' doesn't matter right now. What matters is that your Pulse reacted to the memory. Look."
Kiron looked at his lap. A small piece of scrap metal he had been holding in his sleep had been twisted into a knot. It wasn't just bent; it had been melted and reshaped by the heat of his grip.
"You're leaking power in your sleep," Nyra said, her eyes narrowing. "That's dangerous. It's like a beacon for the Taint. If you can't control the nightmares, you're going to get us all killed before we even find a teacher."
Kiron stared at the twisted metal. He didn't feel powerful. He felt like a vessel for a thousand ghosts, and every ghost was demanding a revenge he wasn't strong enough to give.
"I need to know what happened that day," Kiron said, his voice turning cold. "The full story. Not just the flashes."
"Then survive the next three days," Nyra replied, turning back to the helm. "Because the God who murdered your people is the same one who is currently descending on the Shadow-Shelf. And he's not looking for scrap this time."