Chapter 33. Wolves of Ashlight

The ash began at the edge of the map.

There was no sudden blaze, no scarlet frontier—only the slow, stealthy retreat of green. First the mosses stiffened to a dusty pewter, then the earth below them baked into fissured leather, each crack a sunken vein. Beyond that, only black—an absence so complete it swallowed even the memory of color.

Aeryn knelt on the fringe of that ruinous land, fingertips pressing into the brittle loam. It gave beneath her touch, powdered into her palm like forgotten ashes of an ancient pyre. The wind tasted of char and dry bone. Behind her, Thorne stood with arms crossed, his hood drawn low, the fabric rumbling faintly in the stale breeze.

“They don’t patrol,” he murmured, voice tight as a drawn bow. “They stalk.”

Ryker shifted, leather creaking as he glanced northward. “So we’re being watched?”

“Always,” Thorne replied, and in his tone lay no comfort.

All around them, the Ashlight borderlands stretched in hollow desolatio