The nightmares began before dawn.
Not just Aria's.
Across the Citadel, wolves woke gasping, claws tearing through sheets, hearts pounding like war drums in their chests. Some howled without realizing it. Others fell to their knees, pressing hands to stone floors as if the earth itself had shifted beneath them.
Because it had.
Not physically.
But deeper.
Something in the bones of the world had moved.
Aria felt it the moment sleep took her.
She wasn't dreaming.
She was falling.
Not through darkness. Through memory. Through something older than memory.
The sky above her stretched endless and wrong, painted in fractured colors that didn't belong to any dawn or dusk she had ever known. Beneath her feet spread a plain of blackened glass, jagged and endless, reflecting a broken version of the heavens above.
The Hollow Expanse.
But not as it was now.
As it had been.
Alive.
Burning.
Screaming.
She could hear it.
Not with ears.
With her soul.
