The forest held its breath. Every footfall sounded loud and solitary beneath the low canopy, as if the trees themselves were listening. Damp earth clung to their boots, the scent of cold smoke hanging in the air—the faint, stubborn aftertaste of Shadow Flame that would not quite die. Elira walked ahead, the dragon amulet clenched in one hand and Darius's pocket watch in the other. Each tick from inside the watch felt personal, a small metronome counting down memory and guilt.
The Locator throbbed against her palm, a timid light between her fingers, showing them the way along a narrow path half-swallowed by weeds. Roots sprawled like broken ribs, and mist knifed through the branches in thin, pale ribbons. For a long time none of them spoke; words seemed too loud for the hush, too brittle for what sat in Elira's chest.
Mira broke the silence at last, her voice small and careful. "We should rest soon," she said. "You haven't slept since—" She stopped, fingers fidgeting with the hem of her sleeve, as if names were too sharp to speak aloud.
Elira's shoulders tightened but she didn't answer. She kept walking, each step uneven, as though she were trying to hold herself together by force alone. The wind tugged at her hair; Lumeveil's faint glow pulsed across her wrist like a heartbeat. Kael matched her pace and fell into step at her side.
"You can't keep this up," Kael said, voice steady and low, a rope thrown to steady a drowning thing. "We'll find Dust Ruin. Darius left that for a reason."
Elira turned on him, anger flashing hot and brittle. "He left because he's gone," she snapped. "He's gone, and I didn't—" Her voice broke, thin as dried parchment. "I couldn't save him. Or Selene." The confession came out in a whisper that seemed to vanish into the trees, and for a moment she looked smaller than the amulet in her fist.
Mira stepped closer instinctively, but Elira stepped back and shook her head. "Don't," she said. "Just don't." The single word was a shield; behind it lay a thousand useless apologies.
They made a camp beneath the crooked ribs of a fallen oak. The fire they lit was a cautious thing, small and banked with stones so that its light would not draw the wrong kind of attention. Sparks drifted up like tiny restless stars and died on the mist. Elira sat apart from the others, the pocket watch open in her palm. The metal was warm, as if someone's hand had lingered on it only moments before.
Mira sat across, carefully mending a torn glove with hands that trembled only slightly. "He saved you before, didn't he?" she asked, voice low. "Back at the Third Order base? When they—when they found you?"
Elira's face turned like a wound. The memory came jagged: the cold of the stone floor, the sharp laughter, hands closing around her throat, and then the flash of dark flame, and a quiet girl's frost resting on a palm. Darius and Selene had appeared like a riven promise. They had carried her out of that ruin, places where the world had been too heavy for her to stand.
"I never thanked them," Elira said, the words soft and raw. "When they needed me… I couldn't do anything."
Kael met the fire with his gaze, jaw working. "Then live," he said simply. "That's how you thank them. Live for what they could not."
Lumeveil hummed at the edge of her awareness—an echo of steel and moonlight. The blade's spirit was never loud. Its counsel came like wind through reeds: Keep walking, child of wind. The truth waits where dust remembers names. The line was a promise and a command. Elira pressed the watch against her chest, feeling the pulse of metal against bone.
They kept watch in turns. The night stretched thin and long, sewn through with small sounds: the rustle of fur in the underbrush, the distant cry of a night bird, the occasional drip of water from leaf to leaf. Conversation came in fragments—plans, inventory checks, half-formed strategies that dissolved as soon as they were spoken. When exhaustion finally claimed them, it did so without ceremony. Sleep fell in short, fitful pieces, dreams crowded with smoke and the echo of a laugh that might once have been Darius's.
When dawn bled pale through the branches, the Locator glowed steady and bright, an honest blade of light. Elira rose before the others, eyes reddened but burning with purpose. She closed the watch and slid it into the inner pocket of her cloak, as if tucking a small, fragile memory into her heart.
"Let's move," she said. Her voice no longer trembled. It had the thin armor of someone carrying too much and refusing to drop it. "He left this for us to find."
They traveled on, the path climbing to a ridge that opened like a fault in the forest. The trees parted and the air felt different—thinner, colder, as if it had been waiting to be breathed. Far below, half-swallowed in the morning mist, ruins gleamed like the bones of an old world. Cracked pillars jutted out of the ground; collapsed archways framed wind that carried with it the taste of old dust and older grief.