The woods should have been loud.
Birdsong, rustling leaves, the crunch of boots and breath and laughter—missions always hummed with life. But not this one.
Sylara knew it the moment her boots hit the moss-laden floor. The air hung strange. Still. Not silent, no—but wrong, like sound was echoing off something invisible, folding back on itself.
The instructors had announced a special trial: a mission-based exercise in the outskirts of the Whispergrove—a mystical forest north of the Keep, filled with bioluminescent growth, strange runes, and stories of people who went in and never came back.
Nyx stirred the moment they passed the old rune-marker tree, its bark inscribed with flickering, near-invisible sigils. Her voice rasped in her mind, uncharacteristically sharp:
"Something's been marked here."
Sylara turned her head, feigning interest in a moss bloom, but her fingers traced her own hidden runes beneath the sleeve.
She had been assigned to the edgeward scouting team—three students to a sector, to retrieve an artifact planted deep within the Whispergrove. But now, as her teammates moved ahead, joking about who'd claim credit, Sylara lingered behind.
It was too easy.
No traps. No resistance. No strange beasts. Just a trail and a goal, too conveniently clear.
She should have seen it coming.
She retrieved the artifact first—an emberstone shard nestled in a hollow tree—just as Nyx's warning came and then all sound cut.
Then came the pain.
Ropes? No. Cords of binding-iron, cold and spiked with rune-burn, slammed around her from nowhere. Sylara was flung to the earth, back arching as magic seared into her wrists, neck, and chest. She cried out—not in fear, but fury—as her connection to her inner flame, to her soul-bond, to Nyx, began to dim.
"Nyx!"
But even her mental voice sounded far away.
Figures moved through the trees. Not fellow students. Cloaked. Unmarked. Faces covered with thin glass masks. Their mouths moved in unison, chanting in a tongue so old it made her ears bleed. The air cracked.
She understood it now.
They hadn't come to kill her.
They had come to take Nyx.
---
She couldn't move. The iron cords held her body, and the rune-laced artifact near her throat pulsed with every heartbeat. A nullstone, she realized. Magic dampener.
The masked figures encircled her. Their leader—robed in dull crimson—stepped forward, raising a crystalline shard.
"The soul-wolf shall be born this day. Sever her. Bind the beast. Take the unbroken."
The shard sparked with violet flame. They were trying to force Nyx's emergence, dragging him into full physical form even though he was not ready. Not fully manifested. Not whole.
And worse—
They were trying to sever the bond during the transition.
Tears welled in Sylara's eyes—not from fear, but from sheer, soul-deep rage. Her hands burned against the ropes. She tried to reach for her runes—Kel'tar, Veran, even Shyren—but the nullstone killed every flicker of flame.
Nyx screamed.
Not aloud.
In her mind.
Like a hundred iron bells cracking at once, the sound of a god-wolf's agony tearing across the soul-thread. She saw her for a heartbeat—formless, caught in the veil between realms. Silver eyes wild with pain.
"They're unmaking me—! Run—"
But she couldn't.
They pinned her down. The chanting grew louder, and the shard pressed to her throat.
Then came the rupture.
Nyx's voice went silent.
The bond—the golden cord that had pulsed since her birthday, that had sung through her dreams, that had made her more than human—snapped.
And in the instant of that severing, time broke.
The earth shook.
Not from gods. Not from runes.
From Nyx.
With the last of her power, she chose her.
She shattered the artifact's hold with a burst of soulfire, poured every drop of strength into tearing the bindings off Sylara's body. She could not see her clearly—but a massive shape formed from smoke and light crashed through the ritual ring, howling once, violently, before it burst into glowing embers.
She burned herself away—to free her.
And then she was gone.
Not dead.
But unreachable.
The bond muted. Turned cold. Turned empty.
And in that emptiness—Sylara unraveled.
---
The world returned in pieces.
The pain first—raw rope-burns, a throat torn from screaming. Then the blood—one of the masked figures lay beneath her, neck snapped. She hadn't remembered doing it. She didn't care.
Nyx was gone.
Gone—not just in body.
And with her, so was half her soul.
The thread inside her chest snapped like a breaking string. Sylara screamed, a raw sound no training had ever prepared her to release.
She didn't remember how she reached the assassin. Only that when it was over, she stood over a mangled corpse, blood on her hands, fire licking her arms, and a silence so vast it roared.
The others tried to flee. She didn't let them.
Runes or not, she moved like flame reborn. No precision, only fury. Only Nyx's silence.
She killed without memory.
One fell to a sharpened branch. One burned, clawing at his face as the emberstone detonated in her hand. The last she held down, whispering her wolf's name again and again, as the man begged—
"Please—I was ordered—I didn't—"
She crushed his throat.
The forest smelled of blood and ash.
And then there was only wind.
She stood alone.
No howls. No warm voice in her mind. No flicker of silver across her soul.
Gone.
She dropped to her knees in the ashes.
Rain began to fall.
Not crying.
Just breathing. Empty.
And for the first time in her life, Sylara did not rise.
She thought of nights by the fire, Nyx curled against her ribs.
Of laughing alone, and hearing her chuckle in her head.
Of how she once said, "You are my howl in the dark, little flame."
Now there was no flame.
Only cold.
Only silence.
The Hollow had not killed her.
But it had taken everything that made her human.
She rose—slow, trembling.
Somewhere far away, someone would come looking for the missing scouting team. Someone might even care.
But Sylara was already gone.
The only thing that remained…
…was the wolf-shaped hole inside her chest.
---