The name echoed down into nothing.
Cel stumbled toward the edge - he could jump, follow them down, there had to be—
Something closed around his throat and the world lurched.
His vision swam, legs dangling in empty air. Fingers clawed at a wrist round his throat—how had—?
When it cleared, she stood before him.
Esrin Tempvolt.
No wings now - vanished as if they'd never existed. Just dark armor, ash-white hair and ruby red eyes.
His gaze darted past her. The volcano stood in the distance, a broken silhouette against the crimson sky. The massive creature lay collapsed in its core, smoke rising from its shattered body.
His eyes snapped back to her. Not a scratch on her armor. Not a drop of sweat. Her breathing was steady, unhurried - like she'd taken a casual walk rather than fought something that could level mountains.
"Who are you?" Her voice was flat, emotionless - a demand, not a question.
Cel couldn't breathe. His vision tunneled as pressure built.
He forced words through the crushing grip. "Go... away."
Her expression didn't change.
His hands clawed at her wrist. He reached for Frostmark—
Pain.
The world became chaos. Stone. Burning ash. Crimson sky. All of it blurred as he flew through the air before slamming into a dune of ignited ash. The second impact drove him sideways. Third. Fourth. Each collision sent him careening in a new direction, his body ragdolling across the wasteland.
Everything went black.
When awareness returned, he couldn't breathe.
His chest seized. He tried to inhale - nothing. His body refused. Panic flooded through him as his lungs screamed for air that wouldn't come.
Blood surged up his throat.
He rolled onto his side, retching. Hot liquid poured from his mouth, choking him further. His throat worked uselessly, chest heaving in broken rhythm.
More blood came up. His vision grayed at the edges.
He clawed at the ash, fingers digging in as his body convulsed again. Another wave of blood. His chest locked tighter.
'Breathe—'
Nothing.
'BREATHE—'
His lungs finally obeyed.
Air rushed in - hot, full of ash. But real.
He sucked in desperate, ragged gasps between coughs that brought up more blood.
Footsteps crunched across burning ash.
Not hurrying. Just the slow, inevitable advance of something that knew its prey had nowhere to run.
"Use that power on me again and I'll break every bone in your body before you hit the ground."
He sucked in desperate breaths between coughs, blood still hot in his mouth.
Esrin was ten steps away. Nine.
Cel's mind raced. He couldn't fight her. Couldn't run. Couldn't use Frostmark without her killing him before he hit the ground.
But there was something else. Something that might—
Eight steps.
Cel slammed his fist into the burning ash.
Seven steps.
Again.
'Come on.'
Six steps.
Again. Harder.
'I know you're there!'
Five steps.
The ground beneath him vanished.
The Tremorborne erupted in an explosion of ash and stone, its circular maw opening wide as it surged upward with impossible speed.
Cel fell backward into that hungry darkness—
And as the maw began to close, as Esrin's expressionless face filled his vision one last time, his lips pulled back from bloodied teeth.
A smile. Savage and defiant.
Then the maw snapped shut and darkness swallowed him once more.
***
Esrin's eyes narrowed as the ground sealed itself.
'His divine energy... I can't sense it at all.'
The observation settled in her mind with uncomfortable weight. She'd encountered Chosen who masked their signatures before - but suppressing one's divine energy required absolute mastery. The kind of control that took decades to develop. But even then, it left traces. Ripples in the fabric of reality that marked where power had been suppressed.
This boy had nothing.
As if he simply... didn't exist in that regard.
'An artifact?'
White wings manifested from her back in a cascade of crackling lightning. She rose, ash swirling away from the displacement as she climbed toward the crimson sky.
Her glaive materialized in her grip.
Lightning crackled across the blade - not the white-black energy of before, but something brighter. Purer. The weapon blazed with contained violence that made the air itself hum.
She drew back and hurled it.
The glaive became a streak of blazing white, tearing through the air with a sound like ripping silk.
It struck where the Tremorborne had vanished.
***
Light.
Blinding, absolute light that turned the darkness into screaming white.
The shockwave hit first - a wall of pressure that compressed the worm's body inward. Then sound that wasn't sound but pure force translated into noise.
The Tremorborne's flesh detonated around him.
Chunks of obsidian armor flew outward in all directions. Tissue vaporized. The concentric rings of teeth shattered, fragments spinning away like shrapnel.
Cel's body tumbled through the expanding destruction, untouched by the devastation but thrown like a leaf in a storm. His vision was nothing but white. His ears rang with a tone so high it felt like silence.
He hit something solid.
The impact drove what little air remained from his lungs. His back slammed into stone, his head whipping back—
Then stillness.
The light faded by degrees. White to gray to the familiar crimson of the Ashlands sky.
Cel lay at the bottom of a crater.
The walls rose around him in a perfect circle, the stone still smoking from the heat. Ash drifted in the air like snow.
He couldn't move.
Not from injury - the blast had somehow missed him entirely. But from something deeper. Primal terror that locked every muscle tight, that made breathing feel like an act of will.
The glaive stood embedded in the ground beside his head.
So close he could see the intricate patterns etched into the blade, the way lightning still danced across its surface in fading arcs. Close enough that moving his head a fraction would bring his temple against its edge.
A shadow fell across him.
Esrin descended through the air, wings beating with slow, deliberate grace. Her boots touched down on the scorched stone with barely a whisper, one on either side of his torso.
The white wings dissolved in a cascade of fading lightning, crackling out of existence as if they'd never been.
She stood there for a moment, looking down at him with that same flat expression - as if killing a Defiled-rank creature and obliterating everything in a hundred-step radius was simply routine.
Cel's chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. His eyes were wide, unblinking. Every instinct screamed to run, to flee, to get away—
But his body refused.
Esrin reached down.
His eyes tracked her hand, his throat already tightening in anticipation—
She grasped the glaive's hilt.
The weapon came free with a soft whisper of steel against stone.
She held it loosely at her side, the blade still crackling with residual energy.
"You're wasting my time."
Cel's jaw worked. Blood coated his teeth, his tongue. When words finally came, they scraped like broken glass.
"Then... leave."
Silence answered him.
Esrin's gaze remained fixed on him, flat and emotionless. Seconds stretched.
"What's your name?"
The question came without warning, without context.
"Celvian."
"Your patron god?"
His throat tightened. "The Moon Goddess."
Her eyes tracked to his snow-white hair, to his glacial-blue eyes, then to the armor covering his battered form.
"How old are you?"
"Sixteen."
For a single heartbeat, the cold assessment in her eyes softened. Not to warmth - but to something that looked like she'd just confirmed a suspicion she'd hoped was wrong.
"How did a sixteen-year-old Moon Chosen end up in the Hollow Realms?"
Cel's fingers dug into scorched stone. The truth would reveal too much - his origin as a noble, his father's betrayal, his year of torture. All of it weakness she could exploit.
His jaw clenched as rage flared hot in his chest.
They were his to kill. His vengeance. His blood to spill when he grew strong enough to make them scream.
But if he could set a Hallowed on them first? Watch them scramble like rats as Esrin Tempvolt tore through their compound? See them taste fear before he came for what remained?
The thought settled in his chest like cold satisfaction.
"The Children of the Voidmother." His voice came raw. "They threw me through a rift. To seal it."
Esrin's expression hardened - the only real emotion he'd seen from her. Her jaw set in a way that suggested this information mattered.
"The cult." Not a question. A statement laced with something cold.
He nodded.
Silence stretched again. Esrin remained perfectly still, gaze fixed on him with that same calculating intensity. Weighing. Deciding.
Cel kept his mouth shut. Every instinct told him that speaking now - saying anything more - would be a mistake. One wrong word and she'd start asking questions he had no safe answers for.
He couldn't risk that.
So he stayed silent, even as his body screamed in pain, even as blood continued to drip from his mouth. Waiting for her verdict.
Finally, something in her posture shifted - subtle as a blade finding its sheath.
"You're not what I came here for." She dismissed her glaive, lightning crackling once before the weapon dissolved. "But leaving a Chosen to die in the Ashlands serves no purpose."
The clinical assessment in her tone made it clear this wasn't mercy. Just... efficiency. A waste of resources to let him rot here.
"I'm taking you out of here."
Cel's body went rigid. "I can leave on my own."
He braced his hands against the scorched stone. Every muscle screamed in protest as he forced himself up. His arms shook. His legs threatened to buckle. But he made it - swaying on unsteady feet, refusing to fall.
"Can you?" Her gaze swept across his bloodied form. "You can barely stand."
"And whose fault is that?"
The words came sharper than intended, edged with pain and defiance.
Esrin's expression didn't change. No flicker of guilt, no acknowledgment of what she'd done to him. Just that same flat assessment.
"Mine." The admission came without hesitation or apology - a simple statement of fact. "Which is why I'm not leaving you here to die from it."
Her hand moved to a pouch at her belt before he could respond. When she withdrew it, something rested in her palm - a flat stone perhaps the size of a coin, covered in symbols that writhed when looked at directly.
Her fingers closed around it.
The stone shattered.
Not cracked - pulverized. Fragments turned to dust that slipped between her fingers, dissolving before hitting the ground.
Violet light erupted from where the stone had been.
Cel's eyes widened.
A rift tore itself into existence - but wrong. All wrong.
The edges didn't shimmer. They crackled - sharp, violent bursts of energy that fought against their own existence. The violet light bleeding through wasn't steady. It pulsed, writhed, twisted back on itself in patterns that made his eyes water.
'That's not possible.'
Creating rifts was impossible. Even for the Hallowed. Rifts were tears in reality that formed naturally, that could only be found and sealed, never created.
Yet here it stood, crackling with violent energy, defying every law he'd been taught.
'She just... she just created a rift.' The thought repeated itself, unable to find purchase against the impossibility before him.
Raven's voice echoed in his memory: 'You can trust her. She will protect you.'
Esrin Tempvolt. The woman every noble child had been taught to admire - proof that strength and honor could coexist. The pinnacle of grace and power that young ladies aspired to emulate.
And Raven had been certain. Even knowing she hunted him, he'd told Cel to trust her.
Esrin stepped toward the impossible rift, then glanced back. "Stay close. The passage is disorienting."
Cel stared at her extended hand.
She'd nearly killed him. Had thrown him across the wasteland like garbage. Had threatened to break every bone in his body.
But everything Cel had ever learned said the Hallowed were humanity's greatest protectors. That Esrin Tempvolt was someone worth believing in.
His fingers closed around hers.
She pulled him forward without hesitation, her grip firm but not painful. They stepped through together.
The world inverted.
Violet light swallowed everything. Up became down became sideways became nothing. Cel's stomach lurched as gravity lost meaning. The only constant was Esrin's hand, anchoring him while reality twisted around them.
Then it stopped.
Solid ground materialized beneath his feet.
Cel's vision cleared by degrees.
They stood on an island of land suspended in—what exactly?
Violet void stretched in every direction - not empty, but crackling with that same violent energy. Lightning arced through the emptiness in branching patterns, illuminating depths that had no bottom.
And in the center of the floating land stood a manor.
'Huh?'