The forest closed its jaws around them.
Branches clawed at Elyra's face and arms as she sprinted through the mist-choked woods, Kael's iron grip dragging her forward like a tether to the living world. Ashryn howled high above — a sound Elyra felt vibrate in her teeth — but the dragon couldn't dive low enough here. Not without snapping wings on twisted trees or getting skewered on blackthorn spires.
Behind them, the hunters were coming.
Boots slammed against rotting wood. War cries ripped the night. Magic flared — wild, unchecked, the way it always did in the Withered Forest.The way it liked to do here.
"Left!" Kael barked.
Elyra trusted him for exactly zero seconds but followed anyway, veering off the animal trail into thicker undergrowth. She ducked under a collapsed tree, vaulted a jagged rock, bit down hard on a scream as a thorn raked her leg open.
The mist here wasn't natural. It moved. It listened. It wrapped itself around her ankles, whispering promises of rest, of surrender.
She gritted her teeth and spat into the mist.
"You're slowing down, Starflame," Kael called over his shoulder, sounding obnoxiously pleased with himself.
"I'm bleeding out, you bastard," she snapped back. "There's a difference."
"You'll live."
"You better hope so, Nightshade. Otherwise my dragon will pick his teeth with your ribs."
He laughed — a short, rough sound. The kind of laugh men made when they stopped believing in anything good but still found humor in their own survival.
Maybe, Elyra thought grimly, they weren't so different after all.
They ran until the shouts faded into echoes.Ran until Elyra's lungs burned and her vision tunneled.Ran until the ground itself began to hum beneath their feet.
Kael yanked her to a stop beside a crooked arch of stone, half-swallowed by vines and the skeletal remains of ancient gods.
"Here," he said, voice low.
Elyra squinted at the stones.
The old sigils — the ones forbidden even in the deepest libraries of Aeltharion — still burned faintly beneath the grime. Language too old for memory, older than kings, older than the First Flame itself.
"You're insane," Elyra whispered. "You're taking us through a Nightgate?"
Kael's golden eyes gleamed.
"Not taking you," he said. "Inviting you."
"And if I refuse?"
He smirked.
"Then you can go back and explain to your lovely cousins why you decided to join the fertilizer party early."
She scowled.
Behind her, faint on the wind, came the baying of the hounds.
Decision made.
Elyra stepped forward.
The mist thickened as she crossed the threshold — tasting of grave dirt and broken promises. The runes pulsed once, twice — and then the world peeled apart.
They stumbled out into a clearing bathed in wrong light.The sky here was neither night nor day but a bruised smear of both. The trees twisted away from them like they feared contamination. The grass was white, the rivers ran black, and nothing dared make a sound.
"This," Elyra rasped, "is blasphemy."
Kael merely shrugged.
"Better blasphemy than burial," he said. "Now keep up, princess. We're not alone in here."
He was right.
Shadows shifted at the edges of the clearing. Thin, starving shapes. Watchers.The kind of things that didn't need teeth to devour you — just your fear.
"Explain," Elyra demanded, knife still drawn, magic licking her fingertips.
Kael didn't even glance at her. He started walking, confident as a man who'd danced with death and learned the steps.
"This is where the last true resistance hides," he said. "The ones not bought. Not broken. Not blind."
"Resistance?" Elyra scoffed. "Against what? My people?"
Kael rounded on her so fast she almost stumbled back.
"Against the Rot, Starflame. Against the lie your golden palace fed you."
There was fire under his voice now — something that hadn't been there before.
Elyra bristled.
"My people fought to protect—"
"Your people," Kael interrupted sharply, "bent the knee to something older and uglier than any mortal king. They made a pact. And they've been bleeding this world dry ever since."
His words hit harder than a slap.
"You're lying," she said, but her voice cracked in the middle, and gods, he heard it.
Kael smiled — not cruelly this time. Sadly.
"You want to believe that," he said. "You need to. I get it."
He turned away, walking toward the heart of the clearing where a crumbling stone well stood, half-choked with vines.
"But it's time to grow up, Starflame. Fairy tales won't save you."
Elyra stood there, heart hammering, dagger trembling in her hand.
Behind her, the howls were growing louder.Ahead of her, Kael disappeared down the steps of the ancient well — into the dark, into the truth.
For one searing heartbeat, Elyra saw her entire future.
Stay here: Die in a noble blaze. Become a martyr to a kingdom rotting from the inside.
Follow Kael: Lose everything she believed in. Become something... else.
Neither option was what the bards would call a happy ending.
But she wasn't a bard's heroine anymore.
She was Elyra Starflame, last heir of the broken line.
She was not going to die for a lie.
With a muttered prayer to gods who stopped listening centuries ago, she sheathed her dagger and plunged after Kael into the black.
And somewhere, far above them, the last light of the real world flickered... and went out.