Emily Rosewood’s Point of View.
The Shattered Spine – the night the world met its reflection
The ground still trembled.
I stood with my hand pressed to the blackened stone, the last echo of my twin’s awakening reverberating in my bones. My eyes flicked upward—above the Hollow, above the dead Well, above the Veil that still rippled like wounded skin across the sky.
Lyra was the first to speak. “You felt that too.”
I nodded once, my voice hollow. “She’s real. She’s… awake.”
The chamber we stood in was deep within the Hollow’s Rootward Sanctum, a place sealed by both time and will. I had broken that seal hours ago. What I had found had not been a corpse, nor a dream, but a being—shaped like me, pulsing with old Seer-forged power and tethered by iron chains made from Veilsteel.
The Heir
