When we came back north, the world no longer knew our names.

The air shimmered strange neither cold nor warm, neither alive nor dead. The land had begun to unmake itself and then rebuild in ways it did not understand. Mountains folded, rivers reversed, ash turned to flowering stone.

And Iron Howl once fortress, once shrine now stood like a scar at the world’s center, its bones wrapped in creeping light.

Kael was waiting there.

He looked older, his fire dimmed but steady. The moment his ...