POV: Kael

“Don’t breathe too deeply,” I said. “This place remembers lungs.”

Lyra’s fingers tightened in mine, that was her answer.

The Dead Lands did not announce themselves with fire or thunder. There was no dramatic threshold, no wall of flame. One step, and the world simply… stopped trying to live.

The sky dulled into a colorless smear, like ash rubbed into bruised glass, the ground was cracked and pale, littered with fragments that might have been stone or might have been ...