The ash hadn't even cooled.
Liora stood alone where Anya's bones had crumbled beneath the pyre, the wind curling through the narrow pass like whispers dragging nails across a coffin lid. The highlands around Olvenmoor were unforgiving—sharp cliffs, jagged rock veins, and an unsettling stillness that made even ghosts hesitate.
But Liora didn't hesitate.
She knelt and reached into the dirt again, tracing Anya's blood into a circle that pulsed with quiet power.
"No rites. No silence. No rest."
She poured her magic into the glyph, not the delicate kind taught in the academy, not even the soulbound chants Syreena had gifted her in dreams. This was something else.
A raw wound of need and vengeance, carved into the world with nothing but grief.
The dirt darkened.
The circle drank her intent.
Then the ground trembled—softly at first, like a heartbeat under stone—and a single tendril of silver smoke rose from the center.
Anya's voice whispered from it.
Not in words. Not in sorrow.
But in warning.
"It watches you now."
Liora staggered back as the glyph dimmed, the last wisp of Anya's lingering soul fading into the Veil. Her stomach turned. Her vision blurred. It felt like her body was breaking into pieces that didn't belong to her anymore—her muscles flexing without command, her fingertips twitching like they were remembering spells she hadn't learned yet.
She collapsed.
Callux found her minutes later.
She could barely speak. He carried her to camp without asking questions, even though his eyes burned with them. And when he laid her down and saw the veins under her skin glowing like gold-threaded tattoos, he didn't curse or panic.
He just whispered, "What are you becoming?"
She didn't answer.
Because part of her wasn't sure anymore.
Later that night, when she could finally sit up, Callux sat beside her in silence, the fire between them low and flickering like it was scared of what they'd become.
"I know you tried to bring her back," he said. "I felt it."
"I didn't try," Liora muttered. "I called her. Just enough to say goodbye."
Callux shook his head. "The Veil doesn't let go that easily. You called something else too."
She nodded slowly.
Then she looked up, eyes dull with exhaustion.
"There's a place… Syreena spoke of it. A sanctuary carved before the Necromancer War. It was sealed when the first soul-weavers betrayed their kind. It's hidden beneath the ruins of Virellos."
"Virellos?" His voice tightened. "That's a cursed city. The dead rule there."
"And I speak their tongue now," Liora said quietly. "If we're going to strike back, I need what's buried there. Alric left something behind."
They reached Virellos in three days.
The city was wrong.
Its towers were half-crumbled, like teeth in the jaw of a corpse, and its streets moved. Literally moved. Every time Liora blinked, the path would twist, reshape, twist again. The dead here didn't sleep.
They watched.
From broken windows, from beneath cracked cobblestones, from shadowed balconies above.
"Don't speak unless I do," Liora said, her voice steel. "This place respects strength. Fear is blood in the water."
Callux stayed close, his weapons drawn but sheathed. He wasn't here to fight. He was here to witness.
They reached the center of the city, where a crumbled statue of a woman holding a crown of bone overlooked a sunken temple. It was there—under the cracked obsidian dome—that Liora found the Sanctum of Wounds.
Inside, time bled.
Literally.
Rivers of red light flowed across the walls, glowing veins in the stone, pulsing in time with the beat of her heart. Dozens of ancient relics lined the walls: bone-wrapped tomes, soul cages, a mirror that blinked.
And in the center—
A pool.
Still. Silver. Quiet.
Not water.
Memory.
Liora stepped in.
Her body froze instantly, breath leaving her lungs like she'd drowned. And then her vision ripped apart.
She saw her mother.
Not the dream version. The real one.
Holding a blade wrapped in white silk. Standing before the High Circle. Spitting at their feet. Defying them.
"You will not chain my daughter."
She saw her father.
Not Kharon.
A man with green eyes and a bleeding sigil across his chest, weeping as he handed a baby wrapped in fire-sigil cloth to Kharon in the dead of night.
"Hide her. Or they'll use her like they used me."
Then—Liora saw Alric.
Younger. Handsome. Laughing.
Until he wasn't.
Until he stood over a dying god and carved power from its chest with bare hands, screaming her name before she was even born.
"Liora… forgive me…"
She stumbled out of the pool, gasping, cold to the core. Her fingers shook. Her mind was a storm.
Callux caught her before she fell.
"What did you see?" he asked.
"My family," she rasped. "The truth. It's all a lie. Kharon's no guardian. The Circle—they planned this from the start."
Callux didn't question it.
He just stood, sword in hand, and nodded.
"Then we burn them all."
That night, the dead began to sing.
A low chant, not hostile. Not yet.
They were waiting.
Because something darker than even Liora had entered Virellos behind them.
A man in a cloak of shadows.
Skin carved in runes.
Eyes full of quiet, ancient hate.
Mavrek had arrived.
And the ground itself held its breath.