Copyright © 2025 by Ravan Tempest

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Chapter 1: Dreams of Ash

Claire

The wolf came for her again.

In the darkness behind her eyelids, the world contorted. The ceiling of her childhood bedroom folded inward, closing like the mouth of a beast; the walls gaped, oozing liquid shadow from the corners. Claire could not move, not from terror, but because her body belonged to someone else, a strange puppet suspended in brine. Every muscle cowered, hollowed out, replaced with brittle glass.

And through that glass she watched Theron.

He strode the corridor of the dream, monstrous and elegant, the shape of him wolfish but stretched, distended, all the boundaries she once thought absolute reduced to mere suggestion. His eyes caught the failing light: twin coals, each burning with that unmistakable Hollow fire, a spectral intensity that ate into the sockets and chewed at the delicate skin beneath. When his lips curled, if lips could be called what had become of them, he revealed rows of needle-thin teeth, each drooling with blood too bright and oily to be human.

"Claire," he rasped, though the sound came not from his mouth but from somewhere deeper. She knew it, somehow, the way one knows the taste of a lightning storm or the promise of pain before the blade draws blood.

He stumbled, and as he fell, the world pivoted, drawing her along. She fell with him, down through a floor that melted like charred wax, into a pit where the scent of burnt fur and scorched bone stung her nose. She reached for him. Her fingers broke into cinders before they could touch his cheek.

The corridor elongated, became a hallway of infinite doors, every one pulsing at the edges with that peculiar, ashen light. On the farthest end, Theron's form buckled and writhed. Flesh peeled back from his forearms in sticky, wet banners, the muscle beneath pulsing with the rhythm of a second, deeper heart. Claws sprouted from the broken beds of his fingernails. From his side, a wound gaped, revealing not organs but a roaring cavern of white-hot energy, Hollow fire seething and uncontained.

She tried to speak, but her tongue was ash, mouth thick with the taste of burnt sugar and regret. He howled. It reverberated down the corridor, splitting the doors apart. His body thrashed, changed shape: at one moment a man, next a thing of claw and hunger, then smoke. Each transformation left behind a thick residue, like a sequence of negatives burned onto her retinas.

And then he collapsed, bones liquefying, then combusting, until only a drift of fine, gray dust remained where her brother once stood. A wind picked up, curling around the scattered remnants, and swept them away in a hungry spiral. The scream that broke from her mouth was not hers, but the echo of what her family once was.

Claire came to on a damp mattress, clutching fistfuls of her sweat-drenched blanket, the shriek still ricocheting through her skull. The early sun lay weak on her face, filtered through curtains so thin they did nothing to muffle the world. Her heart slammed at her ribs, desperate to evacuate.

The sheets, soaked and tangled around her thighs, told the story with ruthless clarity: She was not safe, not even here, not even with the doors locked and the wards freshly painted on every sill and lintel. She sat up, forced herself to count three steady breaths, and peeled the blanket away. As she did, the air changed. She caught, beneath the sterile aftertaste of fear, a trace of something sour and acrid.

Ash. The word landed with an unwelcome familiarity, and her throat ached around it. The nightmare always left residue, but today, it felt less dream and more invasion. She rose unsteadily. The wood beneath her feet was cold and slightly tacky with last night’s condensation. There, by the window, marks along the painted sill. Four narrow streaks, burnt deep, radiating outward in a fan. She reached out to touch them; the skin on her fingertips prickled and blistered with residual heat, enough to make her jerk back and swear under her breath.

Impossible, unless…

She shut her eyes again, tried to focus, to dredge up the old grounding mantras. Instead, the images spilled over in ugly fragments: the way Theron's wounds glowed with living fire, how his face became less itself with every cycle of the dream. The sound of that howl, echoing even now in her marrow.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, steadied herself on the edge of the desk, and forced her gaze back to the present. The rest of the room was undisturbed: books shelved with geometric precision, amulets hung at perfect intervals, the stack of journals by her bed untouched. Everything normal, except for the lingering taste of smoke in the air, and the faint, unmistakable stench of burning that crept in through the window seams.

She opened the window with both hands. The frame stuck briefly, then gave way with a groan. Outside, the morning looked the same as always, pale sky, thin winter trees clawing upward, the distant static of the city. Yet something in the atmosphere had shifted. In the far tree line, blackened branches bent away from each other, leaves singed and curling. There was a residue clinging to everything, a delicate soot, as if the world had exhaled its own nightmare.

Then, on the wind, the sound: a long, low howl, stretched past the limits of pain. Not animal, not quite human. Claire shivered as she pulled her robe around herself, and drew the frayed belt tight. There was no time to wallow, not when there were signs. Signs meant a trail, and a trail meant Theron was not gone, not entirely, not yet. Even if what remained was less her brother than the thing they had last seen, the thing the Brotherhood had made of him.

She dressed with mechanical care, muscle memory dictating each motion. Shirt (woven with protective sigils inside the seams), leggings (double-layered, for warmth and the potential of running), and boots (already caked with a week's worth of city grime). Her hands trembled when she tried to lace them. She told herself it was the chill, but her reflection in the mirror said otherwise. Her eyes looked too wide, ringed in purple. A wraith in the shape of a sister.

She paused, palms flat on the windowsill. The scorched marks radiated heat, the char still fresh. She pressed her hand to them, not flinching this time, and whispered: “I hear you.” The burn traced her palm like a brand. There was no scream in the room, only the low hum of old wards reacting to new trauma.

She should have called Archer. Or Elira. Or Kade. But the idea of another’s voice in her head, before she’d sorted her own, filled her with the panic of drowning. She needed a moment, just one, to collect what fragments she still claimed as herself.

With one last look at the window, she gathered her satchel, checked it for salt and chalk, and slipped out the door. Downstairs, she moved quietly, careful not to disturb the fragile bubble that contained the Sanctuary’s morning routine. She reached the threshold, hesitated, and looked back up the stairs, half-expecting to see a shadow crouched on the landing. Nothing. Only the tremor in her hands betrayed the battle raging within her.

She stepped outside, into the thin morning, and let the cold sharpen her resolve. The scent of burning was stronger now, impossible to ignore. And in the silence between heartbeats, she swore she heard, again, that distant, broken howl. Theron was out there. Not just a memory, not just a ghost. Something of him remained, and it was reaching for her through the thinning boundaries of the world.

Claire squared her shoulders, teeth set against the chill, and walked toward the only promise she still believed in: family, no matter the cost.

~~***~~

The spare room they now used as a headquarters outside of the Sanctuary was two stories above street level, hidden behind a street sign for the pub below them. The sign used to glow with sigils but those had ironically stopped working the day Theron vanished all those years ago. Even the glass in the windows was dusted with a thin, gray residue that never came clean, no matter how much Archer scrubbed at it.

The town outside pressed in with its usual soft threat: beasts of burden complaining, humans pushing through their lives, oblivious to the stains of the world behind the world. Here, among the mismatched tables and battered chairs, Claire found her friends exactly as she knew she would: Archer hunched over a mug of something black and lethal, Elira hunched over a crown’s worth of magical apparatus, both of them pretending not to see her until she spoke.

“Is it just us?” Claire’s voice was a ghost, trailing after her as she slipped into the booth. Archer didn’t look up. “If you’re expecting the cavalry, you’re going to be disappointed. After the last run-in, everyone else is keeping their heads down.” Elira spared a glance, eyebrow twitching up beneath the sharp bar of her bangs. “More for us,” she said, then resumed prodding at the trembling runestone on the table, its surface crawling with faint blue script.

Claire slid into the seat opposite them, digging her nails into the grain of the wood. “I had another one,” she said. Now they both looked up. “Full-scale?” Archer’s voice was flat, but there was a tic in his jaw she recognized. “Yes. Worse, this time. There was… bleeding.” She opened her palm. Across it, four parallel lines shone red against the skin, perfectly matching the marks on her windowsill. “Something’s changed.”

Elira’s eyes flicked over the wounds with professional detachment, then moved to the small glass vial Claire set between them. “What’s this?”

“Ash. From my window. Still warm when I touched it.” That made even Archer pause. He tilted the vial, watched the powder sift from side to side, then set it down as though it might explode. “You sure it’s not just your imagination playing catch-up with your nightmares?” Claire glared at him, more tired than angry. “My nightmares don’t burn through treated paint and leave physical evidence, Archer.” He held up his hands. “I’m not doubting you, Claire. I just… these days, it pays to check.”

Elira was already pulling a tiny pair of tweezers from her satchel, her focus narrowing to a point. She opened the vial with her teeth, typical, and plucked out a single grain, holding it to the light. She mumbled a quick string of runic syllables under her breath, then flicked the ash onto a scrap of waxed paper. As soon as it landed, the speck hissed, eating a pinhole clear through.

“Not mundane,” she announced. “I’ll need the rest of this for a full analysis, but there’s Hollow residue in it. Weak, but distinct.” Archer let out a sigh, all pretense of calm draining from his face. “So. We have a smoking gun.” Claire gripped the edge of the table, relief and terror knotted together in her chest. “He’s not gone, Archer. I know it. They haven’t won.”

He shook his head, gaze slipping to the window, as if expecting to see Theron’s silhouette standing on the fire escape. “Even if he’s alive, Claire, it doesn’t mean he’s… recoverable.” A sharp crack sounded from Elira’s end of the table. She’d broken off a sliver of runestone and was mixing it with the ash. The mixture fizzed, throwing up a sickly, iridescent vapor that swirled around her fingers. “Definitely Hollow,” she said, eyes bright with the rush of new data. “But the signature’s unstable, like it’s fighting itself.”

“That tracks,” Claire whispered. “In the dream, he was… shifting. Couldn’t stay in one body. Like he was being pulled apart.” Archer’s hands drummed a soft rhythm against the tabletop. “We need to be careful. If the Brotherhood’s doing experiments with hybrid stock again, it could be a trap. They’d love to use you as bait.”

“They already did,” Claire snapped, louder than she meant. “I don’t care. If there’s even a chance Theron is alive, I have to try.” Elira closed the vial and slid it back across the table. “You should see this,” she said, more gently than usual. “It’s a marker, Claire. He’s reaching out to you.” That made her shiver. “Or he’s losing control.”

“Both, maybe,” Archer said. He reached into his coat and drew out a battered map of the town, stained and repaired so many times it looked like a relic of war. “Show us where you found the trail. We can start with the physical evidence and triangulate the probable center of activity.” Elira smirked. “Spoken like a true hunter.”

“Just doing what I’m good at.” Archer’s gaze softened a degree. “We’ll figure it out, Claire. But we do it by the numbers.” She nodded, unrolled the map, and began to mark out the sites: her own window, a secondary location behind the school, another patch of ash and scorched bark at the edge of the river walk. Elira muttered approvingly as she noted the alignment. “There’s a pattern here. It’s not random. He’s circling something.”

“Us,” Claire said, sudden dread hollowing her. “He’s circling us.” Archer’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Then we stay inside the perimeter, don’t get caught out alone. Elira, you prep your kit for containment. Claire, you… prep yourself.” She flushed, thinking of how every plan in her life for the past year had ended in disaster. “I will.”

The rest was logistics, what to bring, who to call, fallback points and escape routes, but the hard part was already done. They believed her. Or at least, they believed in the threat.

They left the room in a tight knot, boots crunching down the stairs and across the frost-laced sidewalk, each of them peering into shadows for a glint of red or the sudden snap of teeth. Claire kept the vial of ash in her pocket, one thumb rubbing the glass raw. It anchored her, even as she doubted every step.

When they reached the edge of the woods behind the river, the air grew thick with anticipation. Archer went first, scanning with an old soldier’s caution; Elira came next, her toolkit clinking softly; Claire followed, resisting the urge to look over her shoulder. As they disappeared into the trees, the town dropped away, and the only sounds were their own breath and the distant, ragged pulse of something that was once her brother.

They walked in silence, the tension between them no longer suspicion but the solidarity of survivors. Claire’s mind reeled with what might be waiting at the center of the spiral, but for now, she focused on the trail, on the next step, and on the warmth of the scorch in her palm, a brand she would follow to the end.

~~***~~

The farther they walked, the less the woods resembled themselves. There was a break in the clouds, but the sunlight couldn’t seem to penetrate beyond a certain point, somewhere between the fourth and fifth survey marker on Archer’s map, the day became a liminal dusk, the trees pressing closer, all color draining out of the world.

Claire’s shoes crunched over dead leaves, then over something grittier, fine dust, gray as gunpowder, sifting between the roots. She bent, scooped a pinch of it, rolled it between her thumb and forefinger: ash, so light it nearly lifted on her breath. She held it to the others but said nothing. Elira frowned, took a sample, and tucked it into her pouch without a word.

They moved in single file, Archer at point, his movements shrinking into a hunched, predator’s glide. The further they went, the more deliberate his pace: every footstep tested before he gave it weight, every tree passed at arm’s length, eyes flickering from shadow to shadow.

“Something’s tracking us,” he muttered, just loud enough for Claire to hear. “Someone?” she asked, already knowing. “More like the forest itself.”

Elira brought up the rear, hands busily sketching in the air as she traced invisible patterns of force. She stopped at intervals, pointed to where the bark blackened and cracked, or where the leaves overhead hung in brittle, ghostly clumps. “This entire section’s been laced,” she observed. “Low-level Hollow seeping up from below, not a single point source. Almost like… it’s being diffused.”

“Bleed-off from the binding,” Claire said, voice hoarse. “It has to be.”

They pressed deeper. The air took on a sharp, metallic taste, like iron and ozone, or maybe just the smell of ancient cautery. After another hundred meters, the woods thinned, the ground falling away in a shallow declivity, the undergrowth giving up entirely. Here, there was only bare earth, scorched in a circular patch maybe twenty feet across. The ground was veined with spidery cracks, as if something had clawed upward from below.

In the center of the circle, a stone plinth jutted from the ground, an unadorned hunk of granite except for the runes gouged deep into its face. Each sigil crawled with a faint orange glow, as if the stone itself was a barely cooled ember.

Archer was first to the edge, weapon already out, his left hand outstretched in a silent command for the others to stay back. He crouched, squinting at the ground. “No tracks in or out. Not human, not animal. This place is… sterile.”

“It wouldn’t need to walk here,” Elira murmured, her voice strangely reverent. She approached the stone, her tools already in hand, eyes scanning every inch of the inscription. “Look at the binding; these are layered wards, recursive logic. This is Brotherhood work, very advanced.”

“Is it a cage?” Archer asked. Elira shook her head. “A yoke. It’s not meant to hold a being in place, but to direct its power. A relay, or a leash.” Claire’s stomach knotted. The stone, the ash, the resonance of Hollow energy, all of it pointed to the same conclusion. She stepped forward, past Archer’s outstretched arm, and laid a palm on the side of the plinth.

She expected cold. Instead, the surface radiated a slow, animal heat, like the warmth that lingers after a body stops moving. The runes writhed under her touch, a ripple of sickly orange shivering up her arm. She closed her eyes, reached through the layers of sensation for the signature she knew best in the world.

It was there. Hiding, battered, but alive: a kernel of Theron’s self, flickering at the far end of a tether. She gasped as her eyes flew open, breath catching in her throat as the presence pressed against her own, a raw, wordless plea. “He’s alive,” she said. “They didn’t kill him. They made him… into this.”

Archer’s eyes narrowed. “Can you tell if he’s aware? If he’s suffering?”

“He’s conscious. Not all the time, but enough to know what’s being done to him.” Her voice broke, the words slicing her open from the inside. “He wants us to run.” Elira knelt, ignoring the dirt, and unpacked her instruments: silver calipers, a quartz lens, a bundle of copper wire so thin it looked like hair. She pressed the calipers to the first rune, twisting them until the sigil’s glow shifted shade. “If he’s signaling, we can try to answer. But if we make the wrong move… ” She left the sentence unfinished, but Archer filled it in with a loaded silence.

“Do it,” Claire said, forcing steel into her tone. “We came here to bring him back. I’m not leaving him, whatever the Brotherhood’s done.”

Elira’s hands moved faster now, weaving copper through the grooves, adjusting the tension until the whole array vibrated like a living thing. She barked a single command, the syllable clipped and guttural, and the plinth shuddered. A spark leapt from the rune to the wire, and a gout of ash billowed up, blinding them.

In that moment, Claire saw everything: the experiments, the pain, the relentless grind of commands forced through Theron’s body until every cell ached to obey, to burn, to destroy. She felt him, somewhere deep in the maze of bindings, clawing for the surface. It would take a thousand years to reach him at this rate, but she felt the tug, the unmistakable yearning for connection.

When the ash cleared, the runes were brighter, the air crackling with static. The entire forest leaned away from the clearing, as if it feared contamination. “He knows we’re here,” Claire whispered, tears streaming, unheeded, down her face. “He’s waiting for us.” Archer holstered his weapon, jaw clenched. “If the Brotherhood’s still monitoring, they’ll know we found the relay. We need to plan, not to rush in.”

Claire nodded, but her hand stayed on the stone. She whispered again, the words barely audible: “Hold on, Theron. I’m coming.” Elira disconnected the last wire, packed her tools with shaking fingers. “We have maybe two hours before this thing resets. If we’re going to act, it’s now or never.”

They stepped back into the ring of ash, three silhouettes rimmed in ghostly orange, ready to challenge the world. For the first time since the nightmares started, Claire felt the faintest flicker of hope. It tasted like blood and smoke, and it burned going down, but she embraced it, knowing it was all she had left.

In the silence that followed, she listened, not for howls of pain, but for the promise of a future unshackled. It was enough, for now.