POV: Kael

“The world didn’t end, and that frightened me more than if it had.”

I kept waiting for the scream not from the Void or the medallion but from the world itself.

After everything that had been torn open, after the child I loved more than my own breath stepped into something ancient and came back altered, I expected the land to answer with fury, earthquakes, fire in the sky, or some unmistakable declaration that we had gone too far.

Instead, morning arrived; mist drifted lazily ...