The air was a thick, choking veil of charcoal and regret as I forced my eyes open.
"Hello, brother..."
The voice was a mischievous sliver of ice, a sound I had known since childhood, echoing in the hollows of my mind.
"Jordan?" I rasped. My eyes shrunk open, fighting against a blinding, incandescent glare that felt like it was trying to sear my retinas. I squinted, desperate to confirm it was him, to see that annoying smirk one more time, but the light was a wall. All I could see was a tall, dark figure silhouetted against the brilliance a shadow that didn't belong to the sun.
"Wake up, wake up, Jake... wake up!"
The dream shattered. The mischievous voice was gone, replaced by Hazel's sharp, panicked command. I stirred, my body screaming in protest as I pushed myself off the ground. My palms sank into something soft and gray. When I pulled them back, they were coated in thick, white soot.
I looked around, and my heart plummeted. The lush ridge we had stood upon was gone. In its place was a burnt valley, a graveyard of cinders where every tree had been reduced to a skeletal remains of ash. The smell hit me then the cloying, heavy scent of burnt wood and ionized air, a reminder of the power that had just detonated in our faces.
"Jordan... where is he?" I asked, my voice cracking. I scrambled to my feet, spinning in a circle, searching for a splash of red hair or the glint of his eyes. But the proof was evident in the silence. Nothing remained of the altar, the creatures, or the brother I had come here to save.
"He's gone, Jake," Hazel spoke, her voice a low, hollow thrum. She didn't look at me. Her head was bowed, her gaze fixed on the gray earth beneath her boots as if she were trying to read the secrets of the dead.
"Gone? What do you mean gone?" I stepped toward her, the ash kicking up in little clouds around my shins. "The explosion... he was right there. He was right in the center of it!".
Hazel finally looked up. Her face was streaked with soot, and her eyes were rimmed with red, but the "General" was already crawling back into her expression. "The altar didn't just explode, Jake. It collapsed. It took everything that was tied to it into the void between the lines".
I felt a sudden, violent surge of shadow beneath my skin my magic reacting to the grief I couldn't process. "He wasn't tied to it! He was under an influence! You said it yourself! We could have pulled him out!".
"I pulled back the brother who was still breathing," she snapped, her voice finally breaking with the weight of the night. "Jordan was lost to that place the moment he stepped through the portal at the lake. He knew what that altar was, Jake. He recognized it. He was a part of this before we even knew there was a 'this'".
The memory of Jordan's bitter smile flashed in my mind the way he had looked at the altar like it was an old friend. I wanted to hit something. I wanted to blast the remaining cinders of the valley into nothingness. Instead, I reached into the pocket of my torn jacket. My fingers brushed against something cold and hard.
I pulled it out. It was a small, charred coin a trinket Jordan used to flip when he was bored. It was black now, the metal warped by the heat of the summoning, but I could still feel the faint, rhythmic pulse of his energy clinging to it.
"He's alive," I whispered, clutching the coin so hard the edges bit into my palm. "He's out there somewhere. He has to be".
Hazel didn't argue, but the pity in her eyes was worse than any shout. She reached into her gear and pulled out the ancient scroll the map of the ley lines we had taken from the Sanctuary. As she unrolled it, the parchment didn't just show the map. It glowed.
A single red sigil, located miles to the north, was pulsing with a rhythmic, heartbeat-like light.
"The disturbance has moved," Hazel noted, her voice regaining its cold, tactical edge. "If he's still out there, that's where he's going. Or that's where whatever took him is headed".
I looked back at the ruins of the ridge. I thought about Mom, waiting in a house where the memories of her sons had been wiped clean by Jordan's touch. I thought about Cecilia, lost in the same shadows that had just swallowed my brother.
The circle wasn't broken yet. It was just stretching, pulling us toward a confrontation that had been centuries in the making.
"Then we move," I said, my voice finally steadying as my shadows settled into a dark, protective layer around my boots. "We follow the map. We find the next sigil. And I find my brother".
Hazel nodded once, a short, sharp movement. "The path through the northern woods is dangerous. The energy there is raw. Are you ready?".
I looked at the charred coin in my hand one last time before shoving it back into my pocket. "It's great to be back," I muttered, the irony tasting like ash in my mouth.
We turned away from the burnt valley, leaving the ruins of our past behind as we stepped into the thickening shadows of the forest. The search had begun.
Every step through the valley was a lesson in desolation. The ash didn't just sit on the ground; it hovered, a ghostly fog that coated my throat and made every breath feel like I was swallowing glass. I watched Hazel's back as she moved.... she was a shadow against a gray world, her movements stiff, as if she were carrying the weight of the entire ridge on her shoulders.
I tried to summon my shadows again. I reached deep into that cold space in my chest where the power usually lived, but it felt like reaching into an empty well. A flicker of dark energy licked at my fingertips for a second before vanishing with a pathetic hiss.
"The ley lines here are scorched, Jake," Hazel said, not even turning around. She always knew when I was pushing. "Don't waste your strength. The altar didn't just take Jordan; it drained the local well dry. It'll be miles before the earth starts giving back".
"How can you be so calm?" I snapped, the frustration finally bubbling over. "We left him there. We left him in a crater while we ran to save our own skins".
Hazel stopped. She didn't turn, but her shoulders hiked up toward her ears. "I am not calm, Jake. I am functional. There is a difference. If I stop to scream, the things following us from the shadows will hear. And right now, we aren't in any condition to fight a second round".
She was right, and that made it hurt worse. I thought back to the lake.... the way the water had been so still before Jordan showed up. I remembered the look on Cecilia's face when she whispered that apology. Had she seen this coming? Had she known that the "pull" she felt would eventually lead to a valley of ash and a brother lost to the void?.
We reached the edge of the burnt zone where the blackened trees finally gave way to the deep, oppressive green of the northern woods. The transition was jarring. One moment, the world was dead; the next, it was vibrantly, aggressively alive. But the birds weren't singing. The forest was holding its breath, waiting for the two interlopers who carried the stench of the altar on their skin.
Hazel pulled the map out again. The red sigil was no longer just pulsing.... it was bleeding, the light spilling over the edges of the parchment like a fresh wound.
"We're being led," I muttered, looking at the glowing mark. "This isn't a search mission anymore, is it? It's an invitation".
"An invitation or a trap," Hazel replied, her hand moving to the hilt of the dagger at her waist. "But since we have nowhere else to go, we might as well RSVP".
We stepped into the treeline, the shadows of the canopy swallowing us whole. Behind us, the burnt valley remained a silent scar on the earth. I kept my hand in my pocket, my fingers tracing the scorched edges of Jordan's coin. It was the only thing I had left of my brother, and as the forest grew darker, it started to feel warm. almost like a heartbeat against my thigh.
"I'm coming for you, Jordan," I whispered into the dark. "And this time, I'm not running".