The light did not fade.
It collapsed folding inward with a sound like the sky tearing cloth. Elara screamed as the force surged through her body, not as pain alone but as expansion, as if something vast were trying to remember the shape of flesh.
Draven was thrown back again, slamming hard against the fractured boundary wall. He tasted blood, felt ribs protest, but forced himself upright when he saw her.
“Elara!”
She hovered inches above the ground now, limbs trembling, black-silver light spiraling around her in disciplined arcs rather than chaos. The presence inside her was no longer pressing blindly. It was arranging.
The Hunger shrieked not in rage, but in wounded disbelief.
“You were dismantled,” it roared. “Scattered into laws and limits. You were never meant to be whole!”
The
