The swarm

**Kelly Thompson's POV**

The wasteland isn’t dead—it’s *digesting*.

Gray dust shifts like the innards of some colossal beast, the air thick with the metallic tang of half-formed realities. Eden stands ahead, his silhouette haloed by a sickly amber sky. His scars, once jagged cracks of gold, now pulse with a tarnished, greasy light. The Silence doesn’t trail behind him; it *radiates* from him, a stillness that leaches the warmth from my bones.

The Hunter grips my arm, his mask shattered to reveal a face I don’t recognize—sharp, weathered, a scar splitting his lip like a second mouth. “Don’t,” he warns. “That’s not him anymore.”

But Eden smiles, and for a heartbeat, it’s *his* smile—crooked, reckless, the one he wore when we buried Kael’s shadow under the old oak. “Miss me, Mom?”

The static in me surges, a fractured storm howling to life. “Eden, *fight it*—”