“You won’t refuse once you see what Kendric is really like.”

The world shifts again, and I stumble as the ground beneath my feet hardens into scorched earth.

The air is thick and oppressive. Smoke coils in the sky like angry spirits, blotting out the sun and turning everything into a dim twilight. The trees surrounding the clearing are half-burned, their trunks blackened, their leaves gone, branches reaching like skeletal fingers into the haze. The fire still clings to the roots in some ...