[Emma's POV]
The oppressive quiet of the sealed Blackwood estate was a world away, separated by miles of dark, hostile territory and the profound, self-imposed silence of the Lazarus Seal.
Here, in the geographic and spiritual antithesis of that refuge, silence was not an absence, but a presence. It was the dense, resinous quiet of a forest turned to stone, a held breath that had lasted centuries.
In the heart of the Ironwood Preserve, sound did not echo; it was absorbed, swallowed by the porous, petrified flesh of a landscape that had forgotten life.
The stronghold was not built; it had been grown, or perhaps convulsed, from the earth. Its central chamber was a vast, hollow cavity within the fused trunk of a primordial oak the size of a cathedral, its interior walls polished to a si
