The Vale had always been a place of echoes — a bowl of wind and stone where sound returned to you changed.Now, it didn’t echo at all.

It breathed.

The survivors gathered among the broken pillars, the once-hallowed heart of the council now torn by light that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t sunrise yet, but dawn seemed to bleed through cracks in the sky. The air shimmered as though two different mornings were fighting for the same horizon.

Kael stood on the edge of the ruins, his armor ...