The reflections

**Kelly Thompson's POV**

The reflections lie.

The glass shards scattered across the wasteland show Ravel and I as we *were*—bloodied, broken, but human. But the air tastes metallic, and our shadows ripple with gold, as if something beneath our skin is restless. Alive.

Ravel kicks the glass, her storm-wolf pup’s collar still looped around her wrist. “We need to move. This place is a grave.”

She’s wrong. Graves are silent. Here, the wind carries whispers—*their* whispers. Eden’s laugh. Veyra’s thorn-edged growl. The Hunter’s choked final breath. Ghosts of the garden, or the Bloom’s last trick?

We walk for hours, the sky bruising from twilight to a sickly amber. The wasteland shifts underfoot, dunes of ash giving way to jagged obsidian. And then we see it: a spire of fused bone and circuitry, jutting from the horizon like a broken finger.

**The Architect’s Grave.**