The woods beyond Blackwater Creek were quiet, save for the breath of wind threading through the high pines and the distant trickle of water winding down the banks. Sunlight filtered through the canopy in fractured beams, dust and pollen swirling in golden shafts. It should have been peaceful.

  But for Declan Harper, it felt like standing in the lungs of a beast preparing to exhale.

  He knelt at the edge of the water, bare feet sunk ankle-deep in the silted shallows. The cold didn’t just bite — it crept, seeping through muscle and marrow until even his breath came in fogged bursts. His heart felt uneven, thudding in strange rhythms, as if something inside him were trying to set a different pace, a different pattern.

  Willow was far enough back in the woods to give him privacy, though he knew she was listening. He could feel her attention like a thread between them, faint and taut, vibrating with unspoken worry.

  He took a breath — deep, steady, purposeful.

  And let it go.

  Pain pulsed beneath his skin.

  At first it was subtle: a warmth at the base of his spine, a tightening behind his eyes, like the first stirrings of a migraine. But then it bloomed outward — like fire catching dry grass. The runes began to awaken.

  They moved beneath the surface of his skin, glowing faintly through the tissue like embers glimpsed through frosted glass. Curved shapes, spirals, slashes of arcane script no human language had ever mapped. His veins lit like circuitry, crawling up his arms and neck in patterns both alien and deeply familiar, as though his body had always known how to hold them.

  Declan bit down on a groan as heat lanced through his spine. His vision fractured. The world peeled back — not entirely, but enough to bleed in the other. The Hollow whispered through the trees, not in words, but in impressions: rot-slick bark, the smell of burning bone, a distant heartbeat that didn’t belong to any living thing.

  The water turned black in his sight — not physically, but through some deeper perception. He saw threads beneath it, silvery ley lines twisting and knotting like tangled nerves. One ran directly beneath him, pulsing irregularly, as though ill.

  He tried to reach for it.

  The sigils flared brighter — and he screamed.

  It wasn’t just light. It was force. Like trying to hold a storm barehanded. His body convulsed, the glow intensifying, runes clawing their way along his ribs, across his sternum, down his spine.

  He collapsed sideways into the creek, water exploding around him.

  Cold rushed into his mouth. He gagged, choked, clawed his way up the bank on trembling elbows.

  His vision shimmered.

  Not above him — within him.

  He saw Witch’s Hollow again. The cracked altar. The rift. The thing behind the veil.

  And beneath it all — the Kings Horn’s influence, like grease smeared over a windowpane, coating everything with intention and hunger.

  He came back to himself gasping, soaked to the bone, shivering violently. Steam hissed off his skin where the runes still glowed.

  Willow was at his side before he could speak. She knelt beside him, pressing her hand to his forehead.

  "You're burning."

  "I opened something," he rasped. “Just for a second. I didn’t mean to.”

  "I know," she said softly, brushing damp hair from his face. "Your body’s not rejecting the power — it’s learning how to carry it. Like scar tissue around a foreign object."

  "I feel like I’m carrying a bonfire made of teeth," he muttered, half-delirious.

  "You are," she said. "But you're also surviving it. That's more than most would."

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  She helped him sit upright. The glowing sigils along his arms had faded to faint bruises of light, still visible beneath the skin but no longer scorching.

  Declan steadied his breath, staring at the ground. “I saw them. East of here. A clearing—like a tumor in the ley. That’s where they’re gathering.”

  Willow turned sharply toward the woods. “The cult?”

  He nodded. “The energy there is… wrong. It’s ripe. Like they’ve been tilling the ground for something big. Final.”

  He looked down at his hands — still trembling, still dusted with ash from whatever hollow energy had surged through him. He clenched them into fists.

  “I need to control this,” he said. “If I can find them, if I can open and close rifts—turn their own tools against them—we can stop the next summoning.”

  Willow studied him a moment. “But it’s not just their tools, Declan. It’s yours now. That power didn’t come with a leash.”

  He met her eyes. “Then I learn to hold it by the throat.”

  That night, as the others watched from a cautious distance, Declan demonstrated what he could now do.

  He extended a hand toward the blackened stump in the center of their makeshift camp. His eyes rolled back slightly, lips parting as breath slowed. The runes ignited — slow, shimmering — across his palms, his forearms, his chest. A pulse echoed from the earth upward.

  The air in front of him split.

  A tear no wider than a man’s torso appeared midair, a jagged crack of shadowed light — not into a place, but into possibility. Fragments of the Hollow flickered inside it: bone trees growing upside down, skies filled with spiraling script, a river of fire flowing backward.

  Then, just as calmly, Declan closed his fingers.

  The rift folded in on itself like paper burning in reverse.

  The silence afterward was deafening.

  Willow approached slowly. “It listens to you.”

  “No,” he said. “It knows me. It watches.”

  Kaelen scribbled furiously into his journal. “This is a turning point. The Hollow-born’s energy is being… personalized. His will is overriding its hunger. That shouldn’t be possible.”

  Declan shook his head. “It isn’t.”

  He turned toward the east, where the corrupted glade pulsed faintly behind the hills.

  “It’s not submission. It’s a deal,” he murmured.

  And as the campfire hissed low, the runes beneath his skin glimmered again — not with fury.

  But with purpose.

  They broke camp under a pale, ash-colored dawn, the world shrouded in a fog that felt less like weather and more like the earth itself exhaling. Each breath of it tasted faintly of soot and sap, as though the forest were slowly decomposing in place.

  Declan led them east, guided not by compass or map, but by the pull in his blood.

  The runes beneath his skin were quiet for now — not dormant, but waiting. He could feel them slumbering in his bones like coiled serpents, their hunger patient. Every few steps, a faint heat would gather beneath his ribs, not painful but sharp, like a name whispered through his flesh. A reminder: You are a gate now. A hinge. A scar that breathes.

  The others followed in silence.

  Willow moved at his right, her usual confidence tempered by caution. Her satchel was heavier than usual — filled with counter-charms, raw quartz, mirrored wards, and a bone-handled dagger etched with memory glyphs. On her back, she carried a small lacquered box that housed the last of their anchoring stones, harvested from the ley-split chapel they’d left behind.

  Kaelen walked with a hunting spear strapped to his back, his left hand never far from the protective sigils tattooed into his wrist. Tobias clutched a twisted wooden staff, carved from the same dead tree that had once crowned Marrow Hollow — a relic of the Hollow’s edge, one that pulsed faintly in his hand. And Nadine — ever the skeptic-turned-soldier — carried a shotgun loaded with salt-packed shells and a notebook she’d refused to burn, even after it had begun writing in its own margins.

  They were mismatched, half-trained, and more than half-afraid.

  But they were not alone anymore.

  The glade loomed ahead.

  Emberroot, it was called on the oldest maps — a name pulled from settler folklore and half-whispered in the town’s earliest founding myths. A place where fire once grew in the ground like roots. A place that burned without smoke.

  Now it burned again — but from within.

  The trees grew thin and tall here, stripped of bark, their trunks bleached white and papery, as if fire had touched them and left only skin. Strange black vines coiled up their length, pulsing like arteries. The soil gave slightly beneath their boots, spongey and warm — not rot, but living heat. A heartbeat in the dirt.

  Declan paused at the edge.

  He could see it now.

  At the center of the glade, the trees bent inward, forming a natural dome around a wide clearing. At its heart stood a stone obelisk, half-submerged in the earth, covered in sigils that weren’t just carved but grown — raised glyphs of bone-colored coral that throbbed faintly in rhythm with the ley beneath.

  Around the obelisk, figures in ashen robes moved silently, their faces hidden behind smooth, expressionless masks. They carried no torches, yet the space around them pulsed with amber light. The ritual had not yet begun — but the glade was primed. Saturated with preparatory magic.

  “They’re building a resonance field,” Kaelen whispered. “Trying to draw the Hollow through the obelisk like a straw.”

  “We have maybe an hour,” Willow added. “Two, if we’re lucky. Once the binding glyphs lock in, the rift won’t need a sacrifice — the land itself will serve as the vessel.”

  Declan nodded, expression grim.

  “Then we break their lattice before it sets.”

  He knelt in the dirt, and the others circled around. With a trembling breath, he reached into himself.

  The runes beneath his skin stirred, glowing like embers kissed with breath. Willow opened the lacquered box and withdrew a silver spike bound with hair and copper wire — the last of their rupture keys. Tobias pressed his staff into the ground and murmured an invocation, the air around them thickening in response.

  Kaelen unrolled a scroll across a flat stone — the blueprint for the counter-surge: a triangulated blast of anti-ley pressure, designed to unravel the cult’s sigil web from the inside. He pointed to three marked locations along the glade’s edge.

  “These are their anchor points. If we sever all three at once, we can collapse the ritual lattice before it completes.”

  Declan’s eyes shimmered with faint, inhuman light. “And if we miss even one?”

  Willow answered. “Then the Hollow comes through. Not as shadow. Not as voice. As form.”

  Declan looked from face to face, locking eyes with each of them. “We move in ten minutes. Quiet. Coordinated. If anything happens—if the rift opens—I’ll try to contain it. But if I lose control…”

  He didn’t finish.

  They all understood.

  Willow touched his arm. “We trust you.”

  The runes along his jaw flared faintly at her touch — a shimmer, like breath on glass.

  Declan nodded once, then rose.

  The glade awaited — pulsing, breathing, watching.

  And this time, they would not wait for the Kings Horn to finish the summoning.

  This time, they would cut the root before the fire reached the tree.