Darkness.
Not like night.
Not even like death.
This was the kind of dark that lived before light, before time, before names.
Rowan fell through it.
Not screaming. Not struggling.
He was still. Small.
A boy at the edge of the void, cradled in nothing.
And then—a voice.
Not Kaelen.
Not Papa.
Not even his own.
"You carry what they feared. You carry what they broke."
Rowan opened his eyes.
But it wasn’t his world he woke to.
It was a memory.
A world before his.
The Trial of the Hollow Grove – Past and Present
He stood in the middle of a battlefield. But no blood stained the ground.
Only broken bonds—glowing silver threads, torn and tangled across the trees like spiderwebs.
Above him, the moon bled.
Below him, the earth pulsed.
Figures walked among the ruins.
Not wolves.
