Chapter 6. The Bond Bleeds

Selene slept.

But it wasn’t sleep in any human sense of the word. It was a plunge—sudden and suffocating—into something old, thick, and molten. Her body stilled, her lungs moved like bellows, but beneath it all, her blood was a drumbeat. A rhythm not her own. Something was shifting.

She dreamed—but not randomly, not freely.

It was precise. Sculpted. Like a memory gifted to her without permission.

She stood barefoot in a clearing unlike any she’d seen before. The sky above her was not black, not violet, but a burning storm of both—like dusk had caught fire and never gone out. The stars pulsed faintly overhead, but they blinked unnaturally, like eyes, not suns.

Around her, trees rose—enormous, skeletal things with bark like scarred bone and leaves that shimmered translucent in the strange light. Their roots twisted in and out of the blo