Whispers of Dusk

Darkness fell fast on the Black Hollow. The last light of the speakers' broken spire still dully lit the cracks in the splintered ground, like dying embers having slow deaths. Smoke rose over the fields, swirling in slow languid spirals in the stillness. The air was thick with the scents of char, flame and something primal — something that considered itself freed with the gates opening.

Serena kneeled beside a singed patch of dirt and ran her fingers over a barely legible rune scorched into the rock. It was still warm. Bare but still ringing with some remnant of power.

Behind her, Lucian was busy erecting a little perimeter of sharpened iron stakes, in case anything got up and crawled back from the dark. Kael lay in repose, his back pressed against a fractured boulder, eyes shut, breath shallow, dried blood crusting beneath his nose.

"This is not a place to be dawdling about," Lucian said.