Aria’s POV
It began as a soft hum again.
That same lullaby, sweet and distant, curling around me like a serpent. I couldn’t escape it. It pulled me under, dragged me into something dark and endless. I floated in the void, weightless and numb, with no sense of time or space.
Until suddenly, I wasn’t.
I opened my eyes and found myself standing in the middle of a forest. It was wrong—twisted. The trees were warped, their trunks splitting open like yawning mouths, branches clawing toward the sky. Shadows bled from the ground, curling unnaturally in the dim light. There was no sun, no moon—just a sickly glow that seemed to come from nowhere.
I looked down. My feet were bare, caked in dirt and ash. My chest tightened, panic blooming in my veins, but my legs wouldn’t move. It was as if the e
