The voice came like frost creeping across glass—silent in its approach, impossible to ignore once noticed. Selena felt it before she heard it, a coldness that had nothing to do with temperature pressing against the back of her neck, turning her ember-warmth to something brittle and uncertain.
"Do you hear that?" she whispered, pulling away from Dante's embrace.
His shadow-threaded features tightened, eyes scanning the transformed void as if he could locate the source of her unease through sight alone. "I hear... something. Like an echo that hasn't decided whether to exist yet."
The coldness intensified, and with it came a sound that might have been laughter or might have been the universe itself cracking under strain. It built slowly, starting as a whisper at the edge of perception and growing into something that resonated in Selena's bones, in her scarred back, in the very ash that had reformed her body.
Then, impossibly, the voice spoke.
