Darkness swallowed everything after Nathan told me to run. It was not the soft kind of dark that comes when you close your eyes. It was a crushing, living dark that pressed against my skin like cold hands. It pulsed in time with my heartbeat, slow and heavy, as if something enormous was breathing with me.
When light snapped back, I found myself on my knees in the ritual clearing, gasping like I had been underwater.
The air shivered. Silver fog rolled across the stones and parted. Nathan stood in the center of the ruins. Only half of him was there.
His torso and head were solid, shimmering with a faint glow like moonlight caught on glass. But everything below his ribs dissolved into smoke and silver threads that writhed on the air like tentacles. His eyes burned with two lights. One fami
