Emily Rosewood’s Point of View.
The Shattered Range – the first night after the Chainspire fell
The silence that followed the collapse of the rift was unlike any silence I had ever known.
It wasn’t peaceful.
It was waiting.
The battlefield was covered in steam rising from the burned earth, the stench of scorched bone and ash mingling with blood and frost. What remained of the Chainwalkers lay strewn across the mountain pass—broken, twisted, or already turning to dust.
I stood at the center of the ruin, my sword still embedded in the last remains of the Echo, the fragments of myself I had refused to become.
For a heartbeat, I felt hollow.
Then a sound pulled me back.
“Emily—”
Lyra’s voice.
Raw. Human. And alive.
I turned.
My sister knelt amid a spiral of charred grass, the sigi
