Smoke drifted skyward in slow, lazy spirals.
The world had shifted, and it took time for the mind to catch up.
Sora opened his eyes to a canopy not of their world. Deep violet leaves rustled against an orange sky, and the branches above curled unnaturally, as though reacting to his breath. The air tasted of copper and ozone. No birds. No wind. Just the crackling of distant flames licking through a ruined grove behind them.
A groan stirred beside him. Shiro, blood matting her hair, struggled upright, blinking as if the very act of seeing pained her.
"We're alive," she whispered.
He helped her sit, against the base of a tree. The bark felt like dry hide, not wood. "Barely."
They sat in silence, the enormity of their exile settling in like ash on their skin. They were no longer in the world they knew. No time-keeping devices. No spells. No sun. Just this distorted wilderness, and a sense of having been violently removed from everything.
"Where are we?" she asked after a time.
Sora scanned the horizon. Craggy cliffs in the distance. A waterfall of light in the east—liquid magic pouring from some unseen floating mass above the clouds. "Somewhere we're not meant to be."
She coughed again. Her voice trembled.
"I can't feel anything... no flow, no pull... Nothing."
He frowned. He couldn't either.
The curse was intact.
Their souls were still bound—sealed from the world's leylines. In a realm where even children shaped wind and flame, they were anomalies. Broken. Useless. Prey.
He looked down at his hands—calloused, burned, bloodied. His muscles ached with the weight of survival, not heroism.
"We need shelter," he said.
They moved cautiously, avoiding trails of scorched earth and the drifting haze of battle spells long faded. Charred corpses littered their path—beast and man alike. This forest had been a battleground, and the victors had long since vanished.
Every step further into Arcanis felt like trespass.
Eventually, they came upon a small basin—perhaps once a scrying pool, now dry and cracked, surrounded by moss-covered stones. The magic that once fuelled it had fled.
Sora settled Shiro against a broken statue—its face worn away by time. She slumped into a restless doze, muttering half-formed words. He checked her head wound. It was no longer bleeding, but her fevered skin worried him.
"Rest," he said, brushing a lock of hair from her brow.
As the shadows deepened, he gathered what dry wood he could. No flint. No magic. Just effort and grit. After what felt like hours, a small flame caught—and with it, warmth.
He sat beside her in the orange glow. Watching. Listening.
His thoughts drifted—to their home, now lost; to the being that cursed them; to the deafening silence in his soul where magic should have been. And to the prophecy that had been whispered before they were torn from their world:
"One shall rise. One shall fall. Both shall burn..."
He didn't believe in destiny. But even denial was a luxury now.
They were in Arcanis.
Magicless. Alone. Hunted.
And something was already watching them from the trees.