The wind howled through the dunes like a dying beast.
Kael crouched behind a jagged shard of black glass, one hand pressed to the earth, the other gripping the hilt of a blade still too light in his hand. The rune in his chest throbbed, slow and steady, like the heartbeat of something ancient waking beneath his skin.
They were here.
Not the Sealed. Not yet.
Something older.
Arin whispered beside him, small hands curled around a rusted throwing dagger. Her breath fogged in the chill night air, though the desert was dry as bone. She looked more like a child playing at war than a fighter, but Kael had seen her kill without blinking.
"They're burrowers," she said, eyes fixed on the ground. "Feel the tremors?"
He nodded. The sand beneath them pulsed like a distant drum.
"From the War of Splinters," she added. "What's left of the Bonewyrms."
Lira stood a few paces away, crouched on a dune's crest, eyes narrowed. Her hands gripped her twin blades, their edges coated in silver-oil.
"They only rise if they smell blood or rune-heat," Arin said, whispering now.
Kael frowned. "Then they're coming for me."
Lira's voice was tight. "Then we give them something else to chew on."
The ground split open with a scream like shattering metal.
A serpent of bone and ash burst from the sand, its skeletal body wrapped in ancient rune-bindings. Its skull gleamed with polished iron, eyes hollow and burning with blue fire. Another erupted behind it, then another. Three Bonewyrms, risen from a forgotten war.
Kael didn't think. The rune surged. His sword lit with fire.
He charged.
The world became heat, ash, and steel. He rolled under the first wyrm's snapping jaws, driving his blade upward through brittle ribs. Fire exploded from the wound. The beast shrieked.
Arin darted between its massive coils, slicing runes into its underbelly with glowing chalk. Each mark exploded in light, stunning the wyrm.
"NOW!" she shouted.
Lira vaulted from a dune, her twin blades cutting twin arcs through the air. She landed atop the wyrm's spine and drove both weapons into the base of its skull. With a final scream, the creature collapsed.
One down.
The second wyrm coiled toward Kael, fast despite its massive frame. He raised his blade—and the rune spoke.
"Unleash."
His body moved without thought. Fire coiled from his hands, searing white-hot. The blade became a brand of flame. He leapt, struck, and the wyrm's head burst like molten glass.
Two down.
The last one dove underground, vanishing into the dune.
Arin screamed, "It's going for the horses!"
Kael and Lira ran. Behind them, the sand exploded again—hooves flailed, a terrified scream echoed.
The wyrm lunged upward, swallowing a mount whole.
Kael skidded into the clearing, raised his palm, and let the rune burn.
The fire shot like a spear. It struck the wyrm mid-lunge, igniting it from the inside out. The beast thrashed, a living bonfire, before collapsing into a heap of scorched bone.
Silence fell.
Only three horses remained.
Lira cursed. "We're not walking through the Wastes. We'd die before dawn."
Kael knelt beside the ruins of the third wyrm. The fire had melted part of its skull. Inside, tucked behind the brain stem, was a sliver of crystal—rune-glass. He pulled it free.
Arin's eyes widened. "That's not just any shard. That's a memory-stone."
Kael turned it in his hand. It glowed faintly, like an ember caught in ice.
"What does it do?" he asked.
"It remembers what the beast saw in life." Arin stepped closer. "If you hold it while sleeping, you'll see through its eyes."
Lira raised an eyebrow. "You sure that's safe?"
Arin shook her head. "Nothing is."
Kael looked at the shard again.
"Then I'll sleep tonight."
That night, Kael dreamed.
But it wasn't his dream.
He was deep underground, coiled in darkness, surrounded by ancient tombs. He saw runes older than the First Flame, etched into the walls by hands no longer human.
He saw a temple—half-buried in ash, its spire reaching into a blood-red sky. And within that temple, something pulsed. A second rune. Not of flame, but of shadow.
The Bonewyrm had been hunting it.
He woke with a gasp.
Arin was beside him, wrapped in a cloak too big for her. She stared at him with wide eyes. "You saw it."
He nodded. "There's another rune."
Lira stepped into the firelight. "Then that's where we go next."
Kael sat up, the shard still clutched in his hand.
"We need to find that temple."
Arin looked at the stars overhead, then back at Kael.
"If the Prophetess is after you, she'll be after the other rune too."
Kael stood, fire-light flickering across his face.
"Then we get there first."
In the distance, across the black dunes, lightning flashed in silence. A storm was coming.
And with it, something worse than Bonewyrms.
The Prophetess of Chains was on the move.