The creatures didn’t attack.
They knelt.
Hundreds of them, skeletal frames draped in moss and old armor, foreheads pressed to the black stone floor. The air hummed with a sound like a heartbeat that hadn’t beat in a thousand years.
Aria’s hands were still shaking from the fall. Blood trickled from her palm where she’d caught herself on a shard of bone—bone too large to be human. Above her, the ceiling of the lower ruins had sealed itself shut. No going back.
“Blood of the First,” one of them rasped. Its voice was dry as a tomb, layered with a dozen others speaking at once. “She has returned.”
The bond with Darian was gone. Not frayed, not strained. _Gone_. Like someone had cut it with a blade. Panic clawed at her throat, but the creatures didn’t move. They waited.
“Daughter of th
