The petals that had once formed a protective cocoon around us finally cracked, then shattered outright, dissolving into motes of dimming pink light. The miasma waters rushed in at once, swallowing us whole. I thrashed, claws tearing through the vile liquid that clung to me like living tar.

  But the darkness clawed back, dragging me downward. It felt like struggling in syrup that was cold, alive, and eager to keep me under. Before I could drown back in it. The petal barrier that had saved us returned before it strained again, then cracked, splintering into drifting motes. The miasma lunged inward far more rapidly.

  I barely had time to scream before the Aera Avatar roared to life around me—a titanic specter of my human form, blazing blue and ghostly. Its shroud closed protectively around me, and its arms seized the small, limp MereShaman against its chest, forming an armored cage of transparent power. My chest heaved, and my vision swam from the sheer dazzle of energy. But I moved.

  Slowly, wrenchingly, I forced my Avatar to swim through the nightmare water, each motion like dragging mountains. The tendrils of darkness fought to pull us back down, curling over the Aera Avatar's shoulders, clawing at its throat.

  "Not today!" I snarled, voice overlapping with the avatar's deeper echo. With a furious roar, my Avatar broke the surface—miasma streaming off its form like oil. It crouched, then lifted its massive arms high.

  Between its hands, a colossal sphere of shimmering energy began to churn, swallowing up blue and silver light until it throbbed like a miniature star. Every spark of mana I could tear from my body flooded into it.

  I locked eyes on the sinuous river of darkness below, which twisted like a living serpent, racing to reclaim us.

  FIRE!

  The orb launched downward, smashing into the rising river. The darkness simply swallowed it—then a sunburst of blue detonated beneath us. The blast cracked the world open. Waves of shadow shrieked, pulling back in agony as a massive portion of the river simply ceased to exist, vaporized in a flash of brilliance.

  A chorus of wailing rose from the water. It began stitching itself back together almost immediately, with new tendrils gushing in from deeper pits.

  I barely had time to drag in a gasping breath before the MereShaman stirred, coughing violently. His tiny claws dug into my avatar's spectral hand.

  "How… utterly humiliating," he groaned. "To be saved by you, a mere E-rank. While I—"

  His eyes then eased with sour pride. "—am still far more dignified than your clumsy, overgrown puppet."

  "Keep talking," I groaned, wrapping my Avatar's arm tighter around him, "and I'll drop you back in."

  He stayed silent then. Instead, he waved a paw. Golden patterns rushed around us, forming a tight, glowing orb. It solidified into a traveling sphere-cube that rocketed up from the fractured riverbed. We rose swiftly into the haunted air, miasma streaming away from us like filthy mist.

  The sky was no comfort. It remained a chaotic ecosystem of dark iron, cracked moons, and drifting islands that even bled crystalline rain. A black horizon awaited us in every direction.

  That was when I realized with a jolt of nausea: we'd drifted closer to the center of this nightmare forest. I could feel it in my bones, like all the wrongness of the world wanted to crowd around my heart.

  "Wait—" I spun, ears flattening.

  The Wailfiend was there. Drifting through the sky behind us, hair of miasma cascading like a bridal veil. Gangwrolves flanked it on shifting trails of smoke, their bodies still smeared with dim streaks of my earlier attacks.

  The Wailfiend raised a claw and unleashed shadow bullets—countless—ripped through the air. The MereShaman's barrier flickered under the onslaught, runes distorting with each impact.

  "Can you open a hole?!" I shouted.

  He hissed, claws curling in agitation. "You want me to compromise the cube while that is shooting at us? Are you insane?!"

  "Yes!"

  His eye twitched. Then he snarled, muttered a harsh incantation, and a small port irised open on the side of our globe.

  My avatar's arm lifted, forming around me like a cannon cradle. I focused, imagine it, I thought desperately: a rifle. The shape obeyed, solidifying into a massive blue sniper rifle clutched in my avatar's grip.

  I braced it against the opening, sighted down the spectral barrel, and squeezed.

  Crack it resounded! The shot ripped through the void, catching a Gangwrolf and tearing it into shreds of shadow. Another shot. Another wolf fell. But the Wailfiend? It danced effortlessly through the air, every graceful turn making my stomach knot with helpless frustration.

  I growled low. Switched tactics. My avatar's hands formed a new sphere—a [MereSphere] laced with MereShaman's earlier arcane signatures.

  "Try dodging this."

  I launched it. The Wailfiend twirled elegantly aside. In that instant—mid-air, I snapped my mind around the orb and had it scatter.

  It burst, spraying needles of blue light in all directions. Several slammed into the Wailfiend's side, eliciting a strangled hiss as it staggered.

  "Now dive!"

  The MereShaman didn't argue this time. Our orb plunged, skimming between haunted trees just as the Wailfiend summoned grotesque spheres of its own. They howled with damned voices as they sailed after us.

  "Now UP!" I yelled again.

  He wrenched the cube's trajectory skyward. I opened a tiny hatch on the bottom, dropping a series of miniature spheres that drifted in our wake like mines.

  The Wailfiend swept beneath us, jaws opening to wail a massive beam of dark energy; right as my spheres ignited in a chain of deafening explosions. The shockwaves rippled upward, slamming into the banshee mid-climb.

  Still it kept coming.

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  A beam cut through the air, striking the cube. The entire construct split apart with a shriek of tearing magic. I felt the world lurch, but the MereShaman was quick; he flung us out with a desperate pulse of telekinetic force.

  We tumbled free, just as the Wailfiend soared up to intercept.

  The MereShaman conjured quick platforms beneath my feet. I hit the first one, then leapt—then another, then another. Spells lanced past me, each close enough to burn. The MereShaman's counter-barriers flared, deflecting beams and eruptions that would have vaporized me outright.

  Then I lunged. My Aera Avatar flew through the air as I soared until my head collided with the Wailfiend's chest. It shrieked, staggered, and reformed—then retaliated with a piercing scream that vibrated through my very marrow.

  Blood welled from my nose. My avatar cracked, fissures spidering through its luminous surface. I fell, only to catch myself by whipping my avatar's hair out like a grappling line, seizing the Wailfiend even as it turned to mist.

  "Not this time!" I roared.

  Hair from my Avatar continued to shoot outward, snaring the Wailfiend. It tried to turn to shadow—but a golden bolt from the MereShaman struck it dead center, freezing its form long enough for me to slam upward.

  I yanked, launching myself up in a spiral. As I rocketed past it, I absorbed my avatar, pulling all that force into my body. My fist then collided with the Wailfiend's head with a thunderous thud.

  Abyssal particles bled from it. I drank them in without hesitation. Then pivoted in midair, driving a kick into its ribs that sent it spiraling.

  I followed, both fists raised then crashed them down in a colossal hammerblow. The impact created a shockwave that flattened entire swathes of forest below. The Wailfiend's chest cratered inward, abyssal particles leaking from the wound. It wailed, flailing, and I hammered it again—sending it spiraling down into a crater of shattered trees and pouring rivers.

  I floated down, heart thundering then clutched my chest.

  Agony flared through my mind and soul like barbed wire. Images—my village, Emma, Skadi, the countless faces of my travels—flashed, fragmented, threatened to tear me apart.

  Not now, I hissed to the darkness clawing at me. Not now. It's not my time.

  My feet hit solid ground, knees buckling. I forced myself to stand, even as strange markings ran from my nose and ears. The Wailfiend's wails still shook the air, promising it wasn't over yet.

  But I was still here. Still breathing. And for now, that was enough. I barely understood that, but my mind was in free fall. My soul was pulled in every direction, as if someone were playing tug-of-war with my very identity. Every atom of my being screamed as the Unique particles I had absorbed fought to unmake me.

  I couldn't see anything. But suddenly, I wasn't falling; I was standing again, within a dark void illuminated by shifting shapes and possibilities. Images of various forms appeared around me, their silhouettes constantly changing, embodying power and essence. Some were monstrous, others divine, and some I didn't even have words for.

  A soft giggle threaded through the darkness behind me. My fur stood on end—no, I was human again. Beside that, somewhere in that swirling black, I thought I caught a faint glimpse of a grin that was too wide, too knowing. Then it was gone. Yet, the sound of it lingered.

  It all unraveled when the silhouette of a woman appeared before me. She sat primly at a hovering table that drifted over nothing, crossing one leg over the other with languid grace.

  But from her dress spilled a bouquet of coiling tentacles, one curling around her teacup with possessive delicacy. She looked directly at me, her veiled eyes a swirl of galaxies that somehow pinned me in place. Then, with a faint smile, she set the cup down on its tiny saucer. The clink was far too loud, echoing into infinity.

  "Ah, a new candidate. You've made it just in time. Please sit. I have tea. It would be terribly rude not to taste it."

  Against every survival instinct I possessed, my legs carried me forward.

  "Fine. Let's get this over with."

  ??? ??? // ??? ???

  Without warning, the world warped again.

  The rain didn't let up.

  It clung and each drop catching on the edges of my coat, my lashes, my thoughts. The forest should've swallowed the sound, but somehow the rain sang here soft and strange, like a lullaby for something ancient and long-forgotten. I walked slow, each step deliberate. I wasn't afraid, exactly. But I was aware. And in my world, that counted for more than bravery.

  Then the silence shifted.

  The kind of shift you don't hear but you feel. Like the air's watching you back. A pressure behind the lungs. An instinctive need to stand up straighter, check your weapons, make peace with whatever past mistake might catch up to you in the next thirty seconds.

  I turned, one hand half-raising out of habit.

  And there she was.

  At first glance, she looked like someone from a world that had never exploded. A woman maybe in her early thirties, tall and upright and impossibly composed. Her light grey hair was tied back in a tight bun, not a strand out of place despite the rain. A single monocle glinted over her left eye, catching light from nowhere, and she held an umbrella—white, lace-fringed, utterly impractical.

  And beneath the hem of her immaculate, high-collared Victorian dress, tentacles stirred.

  Not metaphorical ones. Not illusions. They rose gently from the folds of her skirt like roots testing new ground—sinuous, smooth, more suggestion than threat. They shimmered, too, but in a subtler register than the rain. Like shadows remembering how to breathe.

  "Oh," I said, before I could stop myself. "You're real."

  She inclined her head, pleased. "Delightfully so."

  Her voice was velvet dipped in old ink—smooth, rich, a little dry at the edges. The kind of voice you imagine sipping tea alone in a library made of memory. She smiled at me like we were old acquaintances meeting at a dinner party instead of in a rain-drenched haunted forest during a Rite of Ascension.

  "KiAera," she said, and the name curled in her mouth like she was savoring it. "I do so enjoy when they send me the unruly ones."

  I blinked. "Sovereign, then?"

  She tilted her head as if I'd complimented her hair.

  "Indeed," she said. "Szylla of the Sovereign Nine. It is I you sensed watching since the beginning. And yes, I was terribly entertained."

  Right. Of course she was the one watching. That certainty that had dogged me since I stepped into this place—the sense that the shadows had their own hierarchy—it had always been her. And now she was standing ten feet from me with a smile like a secret and a dress that shouldn't have been able to move the way it did.

  "You were waiting for me?"

  "Hardly," she said, with a casual flick of her umbrella. "I was hoping."

  Her eyes—the one visible, not swallowed by the monocle—were a soft, unreadable grey. The kind of color that made you think of moonlight on a frozen lake. Pretty, but not safe.

  "I'll admit," she continued, "when you stumbled into the forest, all tense and haunted, I did wonder if I'd be forced to consume you just to get it over with."

  The tentacles shifted at that, lazy and elegant. Like a cat stretching.

  I didn't flinch.

  "But," she added lightly, "you intrigued me."

  "Lucky me," I said, keeping my voice dry but even. "So this is the part where you test me? See if I'm worthy to ascend? Or do you just bring all your victims back to your cabin for tea first?"

  Szylla grinned, and something about the curve of her smile suggested she'd been waiting a long time for someone to speak to her that way. She stepped forward—only once—but the forest shifted around her like it moved with her. The air turned warmer. The rain softened into a mist.

  "Victims? No. Guests. Candidates. Occasionally… company."

  That last word lingered in the air longer than it should have.

  "Come," she said, extending a gloved hand toward the path behind her. "My cabin is close. There's firelight and real chairs. You look like someone who hasn't sat down properly in weeks."

  She wasn't wrong.

  Still, I hesitated. Something about her wasn't just off; it was too precise. Too curated. Like everything she said had been rehearsed and rewritten a hundred times.

  "Why help me?"

  Her smile faltered, just barely. And then she sighed.

  "Ah, KiAera. Is it so hard to imagine that one might simply want to be known?"

  That landed heavier than I expected.

  Before I could say anything, she turned on her heel and began walking into the woods, her umbrella steady, her tentacles trailing like a dark train behind her. She didn't look back.

  "You may follow," she called. "Or not. But the last phase of the Rite won't wait forever."

  I stood there a moment longer, letting the rain whisper over my shoulders, weighing my options. Going back meant facing whatever stalked the forest from the outside. Staying meant trusting a woman whose soul was likely stitched together from regret and old stars.

  So of course, I followed.

  Because I'm not the kind of person who turns away from the impossible.

  Though deep down, something in me—something older, maybe a little broken—wanted to see what kind of fire an Eldritch sorceress kept lit in a place like this.