By the second day, his thighs ached from the saddle, and his spine was permanently aware of every rock the horse stepped over.

  Wade handled it better — but mostly because he spent half the time humming some academy drinking song and pretending not to be miserable.

  They camped off-road, half a mile from the trade path, in the shadow of a collapsed orchard wall. The horses grazed quietly while Doran, already dozing under a tarp, muttered about "real warriors not needing blankets."

  They rotated watches and shared dry rations. The land turned marshy on the third day, the trees sagging with moss, the dirt going soft beneath their horses ’ hooves. The wind carried the smell of bog water, damp bark, and something sweeter — old decay.

  And then, sometime after dusk on the third day, the trees parted, and the road bent downward toward a small valley — and they finally could see Ashwick Hollow

  The town was squat and old, built from dark stone and timber, its rooftops smothered by moss and the creeping fingers of ivy. Faint light glowed along the outer wall, the main street was dimly lit by oil lanterns, and the soft violet glow of a cracked waystone mounted over the town's entrance gate.

  Kael tugged his cloak tighter against the rising chill.

  “Quiet,” he muttered.

  Wade nodded. “Weirdly quiet, let’s get to the inn.”

  The inn was called The Hollow Hearth, and it looked about as warm as a half-dead campfire. One floor, two windows, and a slanted roof that hadn ’t seen proper thatching since before Kael had been born.

  But the beds were dry, and the ale was passable. And the old woman behind the counter — the innkeeper — had enough salt in her to keep things moving.

  She squinted at the three of them when they entered, eyeing Kael and Wade and then grunting when she noticed Doran.

  She grunted. “Three rooms or one? And no snoring or you’re out the next night. Walls are thin.”

  Kael passed her a silver coin. “One. And if he snores, we’ll kill him before you can.”

  The old woman took the coin and jerked a thumb toward the stairs. “Last room on the left. Door that doesn’t shut right. Welcome to Ashwick.”

  The night passed quietly — a little too quiet. Even the drunk coughing in the other room stopped sometime around midnight. By morning, they were at the town hall — a squat, single-spire building with worn pillars and a cracked crest of the kingdom set above the door like it was ashamed to still be hanging.

  Mayor Tren was younger than expected. Barely forty, lean with black-lined eyes from too many sleepless nights. He had that dry, stretched look of a man who ’d had a perfectly ordinary life right up until the moment monsters started eating goats and no one in the capital answered his letters.

  He stood when they entered.

  “You’re the Guild team?”

  Kael nodded. “Virelyn. Lorrin. Velm.”

  The mayor shook each hand quickly, like trying to shake off guilt. “Thank you for coming. I know it’s… it’s a Silver job. But we don’t have many options. We only have 3 guards to man the wall and no mages. I can hold my own but these wolves aren’t normal.”

  “How many attacks?” Wade asked.

  “Eight confirmed. Three on livestock and five travelers. One was a courier from Kharan. Never made it through the pass. Last one was three days ago. A couple fangs ripped a merchant’s cart to pieces just outside the old watchtower.”

  Kael narrowed his eyes. “The tower — is it still active?”

  Tren shook his head. “Dead for decades. Mana rot in the foundation. No one touched it since I’ve been around.”

  “But now something’s woken up,” Kael muttered.

  “Wolves changed after a storm rolled through last month,” Tren said. “First, they just grew bolder. Then… something shifted, they got bigger and smarter. The last man who saw them said one of them was trailing a faint glow.”

  “Any spell signs?” Wade asked.

  Tren hesitated. “Not that we’ve seen. But a couple bodies we pulled had burns.”

  Kael ’s jaw tightened slightly. “Show us where the last attack happened.”

  The mayor nodded. “I’ll mark the path. But I won’t send anyone with you. No one here wants to go near that place again.”

  Kael glanced at Wade. “Even better.”

  They left town an hour later, following a bent trail through thinning woods and frost-licked brush. The trees grew crooked the closer they got, their branches curling like they were trying to crawl away from something.

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  Kael ’s breath fogged slower than normal.

  “You feel that?” Wade asked.

  “Yeah,” Kael said. “The mana’s thin here. Whatever happened at the tower scarred the ground. The mana’s still bleeding out.”

  Doran laughed behind them. “I’m grateful I can’t feel anything. Feel like if I knew what I was walking towards I’d be a lot less likely to continue.”

  They spotted the tower just before midday.

  It rose from the treeline like a broken tooth — three stories of shattered blackstone, vines curling through the cracks, one half of the top floor collapsed into itself. Faint glyphwork still shimmered along the outer walls, buried under years of grime. What was once an arcane watchtower now looked like a ruin that had been left to fester.

  Kael held up a hand, signaling the others to stop.

  “Give me a few minutes,” he said, dismounting. “If there’s anything ahead, I’ll see it first.”

  Wade gave a nod and unslung his wand from his belt loop. “Don’t get eaten before we get paid.”

  Kael didn ’t reply. He stepped off the road and into the shadows. Kael pressed two fingers to the inside of his wrist and cast a spell matrix.

  A pulse of mana shimmered just beneath his skin, and light around him bent, refracted — not fully invisible, but blurred. Lightskin distorted outlines and shadows, shifting visual focus away from him. To the eye, he was a trick of the light — a shape the brain chose not to see. The expendature was more than it had been the last time he cast the spell but his increased mana pool made it manageable.

  He tapped the base of his neck, drawing a small matrix across his collarbone. The mana at the tips of his fingers dimmed instantly, curling inward — his aura folded , shrank into a thin coil around his spine.

  Hollow Trace suppressed the ambient magical signature. Combined with Lightskin, most people wouldn ’t even know he was there. In the distance, he could see two shapes, low to the ground.

  Kael crouched, slid across the last few meters of foliage, and peered through a split in the underbrush. The wolves barely even looked like wolves anymore.

  Misshapen things — fur matted in blotches, spines twisted into unnatural ridges. One had too many teeth, its lower jaw hanging with a split tongue like melted leather. The other ’s eyes glowed red-yellow, flickering with unstable currents of raw mana. Its paws dragged slightly when it walked, as if one leg wasn’t quite formed right.

  But it wasn ’t just physical. Kael could feel it. Their mana was wrong. It had the structure of natural flow — pulse, cycle, return — but the resonance was fractured. Kael had never seen the beasts, but they resembled Pyrehounds, a tier I monster quite common in the eastern parts of the country, however, these wolves ’ mana felt unnatural.

  And the tower, it bled the same kind of energy. He felt it humming from the stone, from beneath the ground, like the whole place had been infected and never healed.

  Kael slid back into the trees, spells still active. When he returned to the others, they straightened immediately.

  “Well?” Wade asked.

  “Two wolves, seriously deformed. But there’s mana inside them — the kind that doesn’t belong in animals or anything living, for that matter.”

  “How close?” Doran said, cracking his knuckles.

  “Maybe a hundred twenty yards. Not alert.”

  Wade adjusted his belt. “Plan?”

  “We go quick and quiet,” Kael said. “Doran goes loud if needed. Wade, you take the left one. I’ll disable them both with Sunflare.”

  Doran ’s eyes lit up. “Finally.”

  The wolves were sniffing around a collapsed tree, jaws twitching. Kael moved first, using both hand to release a bright light which caused the wovles who had jsut noticed them to whimper. Wade followed up as he moved both his hands in one smooth motion, and a near-invisible gust of wind slashed it through the air.

  “Wind’s edge — Airblade ! ”

  ? A compressed, razor-thin arc of air launched forward with a high-pitched whistle.

  It struck the first wolf square across the front legs.

  Both limbs snapped clean off with a wet crunch and a sudden scream. The second wolf turned, snarling, but Doran was already in the air.

  He leapt , axe raised over his head with both hands, and came down on the second beast as steel met meat.

  The impact cracked the soil, and after a few more gruesome swings, both wolves corpses leak a strange colored blood into the ground.

  Kael held back — watching for counterspells, mana surges, any flare from the tower.

  The wolves twitched as they died — spasming like something was trying to get out . Kael knelt beside one of them, brushing fingers near the mana-glowing core embedded just below the ribcage.

  Wade hovered nearby, eyes narrowed. “These things shouldn’t even be alive with this kind of instability. It’s like… casting raw spellwork through an open wound.”

  Kael said nothing. The core pulsed once, faintly, like a dying breath.

  Then, without warning —A howl.

  Then another, and another.

  Five.

  Six.

  Eight.