ARTEMIS POV
Shane walks ahead of me with the assured, unhurried stride of someone who believes the world—and everything in it—already belongs to him. The fortress corridors stretch ahead in an endless network of shadowed passages, each one narrower and darker than the last. The deeper we descend, the more the entire place begins to feel strange, as if nothing here is entirely solid. The walls seem to breathe in shallow, unsettling rhythms, the stone expanding and contracting like a creature in its sleep. The floor hums beneath my bare feet, warm in some places and cold in others, as though it’s pulsing with the beat of a heart too large and too old to fully comprehend.
Thin veins of gold run through the black stone, glowing faintly. They pulse in time with the hum under my feet. The effe
