elene stands in the wreckage, still breathing, though her lungs scrape at the air like broken bellows.

  The silence presses down—not peace. Never peace. It lingers like a predator, silent and watching, its presence felt more than heard. Brittle. Listening. A quiet with teeth.

  Her ears twitch once. Reflex. An old habit she never unlearned. Her grimoire shifts against her palm. She doesn’t remember moving it closer. Still, she tightens her grip, fingers steady despite the tremor pulsing beneath her fur.

  The thought loops, wide-winged and slow, circling a narrowing sky in her mind. She remembers the battle’s crescendo—mercenaries roaring, scholars clutching relics with ink-stained fingers, the automatons, the wyverns, a victory declared before it was earned. Relief had bloomed sharp and fleeting in her chest.

  But now?

  Now there’s only this fraying stillness. This moment suspended, stretched thin across a blank interval.

  No memory of the gap. Only the after.

  Her gaze jerks skyward. She does not mean to look—but the rupture demands to be seen.

  A fracture slices the firmament, bleeding silent light—violet and venomous. Reality convulses. The sky recoils as if struck from within. Her breath catches. Her pulse stutters, fast and wrong. Not panic. Calculation, maybe. Or awe dressed in dread.

  Then it steps through.

  The Elder Lich.

  It emerges not like a creature, but a sentence carried from an older language, something too ancient to mean only one thing. Bones cinched in shadow. A shape bound together by curse rather than sinew. Its crown pulses with a rhythm that isn’t time, each flare a spike driven deep into the spine of the world.

  Selene feels it before she names it.

  The magic—wrong. Violent. Not cast, but exhumed.

  The mist spills out first. Wisps of rot and whisper, reaching, tasting. It drapes the battlefield, curls around the dead, and caresses the living like it remembers them.

  Her fur rises. A full-body alarm.

  Her instincts scream to flee.

  But the scholar in her watches—catalogues.

  This isn’t combat.

  It’s trespass.

  A metaphysical transgression. An ancient will dragging itself through a tear in the weave, warping the laws that should have kept it sealed. Her lips part. Not in awe. In understanding.

  The wind turns, foul and dry, thick with rot and powdered bone. She feels it settle in her throat, in the creases of her robes, in the corners of her thoughts.

  She adjusts her stance, heels grinding into the churned earth. Her jaw locks. The staff glows faintly at her touch, but the light seems smaller than usual.

  Selene’s breath falters. Something ancient and visceral, threaded through her bones like wire. She feels it before her mind names it. The stillness before ruin. The hush that comes not from peace, but from the world itself pulling back in dread.

  Older than her, older than the scrolls she once read. Deeper than instinct.

  Older than the foxfire tales the elders warned her never to speak aloud.

  It coils tight inside her chest, pressing against ribs, lungs, thought.

  The air thins. Sharp. Tense.

  Like the atmosphere has turned against them—against her—cutting at the edges of every breath.

  The Lich is not a husk. Not the fumbling dead.Not Mindless.

  Selene’s tail flicks, a single twitch—unbidden, betraying the storm she refuses to show. Her thoughts fracture, catch, skip like pebbles across black water. She was running once, wasn’t she? Running. Screaming. Holding the line while bones rose from wet soil. How long ago?

  Hours? Days?

  The memory stretches like glass. Warped and fragile.

  Now she stands here. The Lich in front of her. The battlefield around her.

  And the weight of the dead pressing in from all sides.

  It floats. It doesn’t walk. It glides as though gravity repels it—no contact, no strain, only presence. The movement makes her jaw tighten. Too smooth. Too intentional.

  Its robes drag behind, worn lace and ruined velvet inscribed with sigils that slither beneath the eye. Glyphs not merely written but grown—a language that predates ink. Her scholar’s mind claws for names, for root words, but finds only hollow space.

  The runes pulse. Not bright. Not even visible in the light. But they echo. She feels them pressing against the inside of her skull like whispered rules in a language her blood understands even when her mind recoils.

  The air thickens, coiled with necrotic pressure. Her fur rises along her arms. The magic stains the wind—oil-slick and cloying, crawling down her throat like smoke.

  Then—motion.

  The Lich lifts its staff. A spine of something long extinct. Curved. Carved. Alive with cold.

  The ground cracks.

  A tremor rolls beneath her boots, low and guttural. The earth groans, a wounded thing forced to serve. Fissures open. Soil peels back. Hands—skeletal, splintered, wet with the stink of centuries—scrape free.

  They rise.

  The Undead. Not past memories. Not forgotten ghosts.

  These are Reborn from ruin.

  Their eyes snap toward her—

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  The cold sharpens.

  It starts in her lungs—thin, needle-edged air that slices with each breath. As if the atmosphere itself has turned hostile.

  Mist spills from the rift now—slow and deliberate, crawling across the earth like it knows where it’s going. It coils around her boots, pale and wet and wrong. There’s rot in it. Not the fresh decay of battlefield wounds, but something older—steeped in death and necromancy.

  The world begins to smear at the edges. Shapes blur. Colors mute.

  The battlefield softens, like a memory being erased even as she stands inside it.

  A dream, maybe. Or a nightmare too vivid to wake from.

  Her ears flick back—a reflex she doesn’t bother to mask anymore. No point. Everyone feels it.

  Even the mercenaries—hardened blades-for-hire who once jeered at curses and spit in death’s eye—stand frozen now.

  Glass-eyed.

  Tense.

  She watches one—Nick?—white-knuckled around his sword. The edge trembles. His breath rattles through his helm like a man half-drowned.

  The scholars aren’t better off. Their chants gutter mid-word, voices devoured by the silence pressing down around them.

  No sound, except for the pulse of her own blood and the low rasp of something ancient stirring awake.

  The unease spreads like frost. Skin to skin. Thought to thought.

  Even the Knight Constructs—those iron sentinels carved from spellwork and steel—quake.

  Selene narrows her eyes.

  That shouldn’t be possible.

  Their cores flicker, blue light faltering into a sickly pallor. Like stars suffocating behind stormclouds.

  Constructs don’t feel. They aren’t designed to hesitate.

  But they shudder.

  And in that moment, she wonders—not if they’re breaking—but if something older has reached inside and reminded them how.

  Her tail twitches once, sharp and unreadable.

  Where did they come from, these Knights?

  When did they join the line?

  She doesn’t remember calling them. No summons. No orders from the others.

  They were just... there. Fighting alongside. Silent. Tireless. Watching.

  Enemy of my enemy.

  Is that the rule now?

  Or are they something drawn by the rift—creatures compelled not by loyalty, but by law.

  Old law. Broken law. The kind necromancy bleeds into the bones of the world.

  Then the Lich speaks.

  Not speech, exactly—sound.

  A guttural hiss, sandpaper and syllables that scrape against the inside of her skull. Words too old to live, yet too heavy to die.

  The rift widens.

  It doesn’t open. It tears.

  Reality screams in the stretch of it.

  Something else is coming.

  Figures emerge. Twisted, wrong-limbed, smeared in ash and bone.

  Undead—but not the kind that rot. These are older. Hardened. Bound in pact and plague. Their movements are fluid, predatory, deliberate.

  The lich's staff rises. Its presence leaks in like gas, thin and caustic.

  A malice that moves, not in language but in intent—slick and coiling, weaving through her mind like smoke slipping under a sealed door.

  Selene's pulse stumbles. Just once.

  The instinct to run prickles beneath her skin, electric and primal.

  But she traps it—clamps it tight behind her ribs. Breath short. Controlled. Shallow.

  Around her, the others begin to fracture.

  Nia’s bow falls, clattering against stone—her fingers frozen mid-grip, eyes unfocused.

  Elara mutters a prayer—low, stammered, not elegant at all. Her voice cracks.

  Even Rin, stubborn as fire, presses a hand to her temple. Her teeth flash, not in defiance, but in pain.

  The scholars crumble faster.

  Several drop to their knees as though gravity thickens beneath them. As if that unseen force crushes down with deliberate, scholarly malice.

  Selene’s ears twitch again—reflexive. Tense.

  The dread inside her ribs coils tighter. Breath becomes a labor—each inhale scraped and heavy, like swallowing stones.

  Then—

  Silence.

  Thick. Awkward. Unnatural. Selene’s gaze narrows.

  The Lich raises something—a sphere. Small. Dark.

  Its surface swirls, ink and shadow folding over one another, alive and watching. Her heart stutters.

  A focus crystal.

  No, more than that. A scrying orb—but corrupted. Warped. Its form bent by something older than the enchantment that shaped it.

  She catalogues this instinctively—part scholar, part scribe. But her thoughts scatter as the creature speaks.

  No... it scrapes.

  Its throat rasps out a language too ancient for full comprehension. She doesn’t need to know the words to feel them. Each syllable drags like claws across the back of her teeth.

  Sound given weight. A syntax that hurts.

  The air fractures.

  Not visually, not exactly. But the sensation is unmistakable—like reality itself begins to fray. Threads pull apart in her peripheral vision, flickering with light that bleeds.

  Soldiers collapse around her.

  One clutches his head and screams.

  Another drops to his knees, eyes wide and unblinking, whispering nonsense.

  Their minds—rupturing.

  The spell isn’t aimed at her, not directly, but magic this strong doesn’t need permission. It floods everything.

  Then the orb clears.

  Her breath catches.

  The man. He's Alive.

  Real.

  In focus, as if through a pane of perfectly still water.

  Her stomach flips. Thought crashes against emotion—relief, disbelief, suspicion. It could be a trick. But she knows him.

  Before her mind catches up, the Lich roars.

  The name detonates, torn from a place of hatred so deep it feels personal.

  The orb explodes—glass shards whirling outward in a burst of kinetic force. Selene flinches. One piece slices past her cheek, hot and fast, but she doesn’t move.

  She’s too busy thinking.

  This isn’t conquest.

  Not dominion.

  This is grief twisted into rage.

  A wound dressed in vengeance.

  Selene understood that. Sound with substance. Malice given form.

  A surge of bone and decay. Shapes that were once men—or beasts, or something older—now forged into a wave of rot and ruin. Grotesque. Ceaseless. Their limbs jerk in half-rhythms, their mouths open in silent screams.

  A tide of the damned.

  The Knight Constructs respond first. Their enchanted limbs strain and groan, gears shrieking under sudden tension. They form a line—mechanical bulwarks, enchantments flaring faint blue. Artifice and invocation woven into humanoid steel. But even their heavy frames falter beneath the crashing tide.

  The adventurers.

  Ill-prepared.

  Unready.

  But still standing. Fear paints their faces pale; fingers tighten around hilts with white-knuckled desperation. Some tremble, some shout, but none run.

  The Lich’s presence expands. Not simply seen—felt. A will so vast it spills from its body in waves. It claws toward her thoughts—insidious and patient.

  Like a scholar thumbing through loose pages.

  She grips her grimoire. The glyph etched along its spine pulses, once, soft and warm against her palm.

  Then—

  A horn.

  One note, clear and pure. It cuts through the chaos like sunlight slashing through cloud. A simple call, but undeniable.

  Everything stills. The undead stutter in their charge. The Knight Constructs pause mid-strike. Even the shadows recoil.

  The Lich’s head turns, slow and sharp. Its skull-face contorts—not in fear, but disbelief.

  Then—rage. Blinding. Hot. Alive.

  Selene’s thoughts lurch—panic warring with calculation.