The forest did not feel the same as I walked back.
It wasn’t darker. It wasn’t louder. If anything, the night had softened, the moon spilling silver light through the canopy as if nothing unusual had happened at all.
But I had changed.
The figure’s words clung to me like mist.
The bond has always been a part of you.
Not just a connection to Kael.
Not just fate.
Something deeper.
Something older.
I moved carefully between the trees, my senses alert, but no longer hunting danger. I was hunting understanding. The rogue had sent me here to face something, and whatever that shadowed being was, it hadn’t attacked me. It hadn’t tried to destroy me.
It had tried to warn me.
That unsettled me more than claws would have.
By the time I reached the edge of the rogue territory, the sky was
