The Night That ListenedThe world did not settle.Though dawn crept over the ruins, coloring the shattered stones with pale light, the air stayed restless, tinged with the resonance of something that shouldn't have been said.The words of the chronicler had shattered the thin silence Ethan had held onto, fracturing something within him that was never whole to start with.Asha watched him, still.He had not budged since those words had escaped the Chronicler's lips."You were never supposed to leave that throne.""You were the last."Ethan had just stood there, his shadow reaching in directions that did not exist, his shoulders rigid, his fists at his sides. He did not flinch, did not question.He only listened.As if he had known this truth all along.The Chronicler had withdrawn back into the ruins, its shape breaking down into parchment and ink, but its words remained.Cain, usually the most vocal of them, sat in uncharacteristic silence.Raven moved restlessly, eyes flicking betwee

The world broke.Not in a blast, not in a brutal collapse, but in unwinding as if reality itself was being remade, ripped apart at the seams of existence. The light that had burst forth in the Rift wasn't redemption. It was transformation.And Asha was trapped in between.The pressure of the explosion hurled her across the floor, her body floating in midair, her ears ringing with something that was not sound but memory: thousands of voices talking all at once.Ethan!She struggled to get up, struggled to reach for him, but she couldn't see only glimpses of things that had already occurred, things that ought not to have occurred.The Hollow Crown.The battlefield that wasn't a battlefield. The throne, waiting and empty.And Ethan.Ethan, standing before it.Not now. Not in the present.Before.Before he had ever left.Before he had ever been Ethan.Asha gasped, pushing forward, pushing herself back to the now.And suddenly, she was falling.The ground reformed beneath her feet, hard an

The battlefield fell silent.For one suspended, fleeting moment, the world seemed to hold its breath, like reality itself stopped spinning, waiting to find out what he’d done.Then.The thing shattered.Not in the way a body breaks. Not with bone, not with blood.It unmade itself.The air quaked, the place it had occupied folding in on itself, and for one dreadful instant Asha glimpsed something beneath.A snapshot of what used to be, ripped from your grasp.Then it was gone.The wind shifted.Not as a storm builds, not the taste of rain, not the faraway rumble of thunder, but something much deeper.Something unnatural.When she had seen it, Asha had felt it in a marrow-level way.She gazed out to the horizon, to the dimming sky, at the lack of clouds, a massive shadow pulsating across the heavens, traveling fast.Her heart raced in her chest like a trapped bird.Ethan saw it too.His back went stiff, and his shadow twisted howling under him as if it recognized the encroachment of the

The ground of battle had been soaked in red.Asha gasped each breath, the sword dripping thick, blackened blood from the creature she had just slain. The dead that were never supposed to be there lay splayed about them, with bodies so fresh it was as if they’d just dropped.But it wasn’t over.The first seal had broken.And something bigger was coming.Ethan was beside her, his blood streaming down his chest as the black strands from his injury shot out of his body once more. Its shadow curled oddly below, reacting to something below it no one else could feel.Then.The ground trembled.Asha snapped her head up.The darkened sky split open once more.A second figure crossed over.Another Hunter Enters the FieldThe air grew cold.Not the kind of cold that came with winter but the kind that came with death.But the figure who stepped out of the shade was nothing like Veyne.This one stood taller and broader, its segmented skin wrapped in sheets of black armor that seemed hammered out o

The battlefield had darkened again, but not in the right way.The kind that felt temporary.The sort that meant something was getting ready to happen.Asha continued to grip Ethan’s wrist, her pulse pounding.The flavor of the dark that had nearly swiped him from her was still clinging to her skin, the long whisper of what shadows had desired to be him but what he’d never become, what he’d never been, what he had never wanted.Ethan was breathing hard.The sludge in his veins had ceased to grow darker, the occasional speck of black that had graced his skin fading, but he had not so much as stirred since the King had vanished.His hands were still shaking.His shadow wasn’t.Asha turned to Kastiel. “Tell me what just happened.”Kastiel exhaled and gave a stretch, but achingly, and his golden eyes were fierce.He said, “The second seal breaking, it means his past is waking. “And the third seal?” His smirk widened.“Ones going to be a hell of a lot more impatient.”The wind shifted.Asha