The carriage rolled unevenly over frozen earth.

  Each jolt rattled the wooden frame and pulled quiet grunts from the injured inside. The winter air seeped through the seams, cold and thin.

  Briarstead was long behind them. Lumaire was still a day away.

  Team Argent rode ahead, silhouettes steady against the pale sky. The Silvers watched them through the small rear window until the trees swallowed the view again.

  Inside, the air felt smaller than it should.

  Four of them. Alive.

  Barely.

  Derren shifted, wincing as the bandage around his ribs tightened. “You’re sure it didn’t follow?”

  Halren, seated closest to the door, had asked that same question twice already since morning.

  “If it wanted to,” Halren said, though his voice lacked conviction, “we wouldn’t be here.”

  That didn’t make anyone feel better.

  Mira stared at her hands. There was dried blood beneath her nails she hadn’t managed to scrub away.

  “It was right in front of me,” she said suddenly.

  No one responded at first.

  She swallowed.

  “I cast without thinking. Fire first. Then binding.” Her voice trembled despite her effort to steady it. “It didn’t block. It didn’t counter. The mana just—”

  She stopped.

  “Just what?” Derren asked.

  “It disappeared,” she whispered.

  The carriage creaked.

  Halren frowned. “Spells don’t disappear.”

  “They do when they’re broken,” Derren muttered.

  Mira shook her head harder this time. “No. It wasn’t broken. It was like…” She pressed her palms against her thighs, trying to find the word. “Like I’d never cast at all. Like the spell had never existed.”

  Silence pressed in.

  Rell, pale and quiet in the corner, finally spoke. “It looked at me.”

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  Derren gave a strained laugh. “It looked at all of us.”

  Rell shook his head slowly.

  “No. I mean—” His throat worked. “It looked through me.”

  The wheels hit a rut. The carriage jolted hard. Mira flinched as if something had struck her.

  Halren gripped his sword instinctively.

  He hadn’t let it leave his side since they’d been found.

  “I’ve fought beasts that wanted to tear my throat out,” Halren said, voice low. “You feel that. You feel the hunger.”

  He looked down at the faint warp near his blade’s hilt.

  “That thing didn’t feel hungry.”

  Derren’s jaw tightened.

  “It disarmed me like I was a trainee,” he said. “One movement. One correction. I didn’t even see it step.”

  “You flew,” Mira said quietly. “You hit the wall.”

  “I know,” Derren snapped—then immediately looked ashamed. “I know.”

  Another stretch of silence.

  Mira’s fingers curled in her cloak.

  “When it grabbed my staff,” she said, “I thought it was going to snap it.”

  “Did it?” Halren asked.

  She shook her head.

  “It just… disabled it.”

  That word again.

  Derren let out a humorless breath. “We were nothing to it.”

  Rell’s voice came smaller now. “Why didn’t it kill us?”

  No one had an answer.

  They all remembered the moment.

  Pinned.

  Weapons gone.

  Spells unraveled.

  Waiting for the final strike.

  It had simply stood there.

  Watching.

  “I attacked it again,” Halren admitted quietly. “After I was on the ground.”

  Three pairs of eyes turned to him.

  “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “It was just standing there.”

  “What did it do?” Mira asked.

  Halren’s grip tightened on his sword.

  “Nothing.”

  The word hung heavier than any scream.

  “It didn’t even look angry,” Mira whispered.

  Derren stared at the wooden floorboards.

  “When it looked at us…” he said slowly, “I don’t think it saw enemies.”

  Rell swallowed.

  “What did it see?”

  No one answered.

  Outside, wind moved through bare branches.

  Inside the carriage, their breathing felt too loud.

  After a while, Derren spoke again, voice raw.

  “It wasn’t a monster.”

  “No,” Mira agreed, almost to herself.

  Halren looked toward the back window, toward the forest shrinking behind them.

  “It was waiting,” he said.

  “For what?” Rell asked.

  Halren didn’t respond.

  None of them wanted to say the thought forming in the back of their minds.

  Waiting for something else.

  Waiting for someone else.

  The carriage rolled on.

  And though Team Argent rode ahead, steady and unshaken—

  inside the carriage, the Silvers no longer felt like adventurers.

  They felt like survivors.

  And none of them were certain that surviving had been the intention.