The chapel ruins were quiet.
Lyra stood in the hollowed nave, surrounded by broken pews and creeping vines. Moonlight streamed through what remained of the stained-glass windows, splintering the shadows. The old book—a fragment of her mother's journal—lay open at her feet. Pages whispered in the wind like voices trying to rise from the dead.
She had redrawn the symbols carefully, exactly as the ritual described: the Rite of Thorns. It was meant to break a soul's binding. To set it free.
Elias stood just beyond the circle she'd carved into the stone floor, his form flickering like candlelight.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"No," she whispered, "but I'm doing it anyway."
She placed four mirrors at the corners of the circle. The reflections were distorted, too dark, as if they captured more than the chapel's decay.
Elias hesitated. "Once you speak my name, the Hollow will listen. It may not like what it hears."
"I don't care what the house wants anymore," she said. "I came to end this."
Lyra took the silver dagger. Its hilt was cold, the blade still stained from the last time it had been used—for a binding, not a release.
She drew the blade across her palm and let the blood drip into the circle.
Then, with a breath that felt like it might break her ribs, she said his name.
"Leontius Vale."
---
The wind screamed through the chapel.
The candles extinguished themselves. The mirrors trembled, and then cracked one by one. Elias cried out, falling to his knees. The air pulsed with something old and furious, something that had waited too long.
A voice—not hers—echoed across the stone.
"You were warned."
Lyra steadied herself, heart pounding. The symbols she'd drawn began to glow faintly red, then white. The light hurt her eyes, but she kept going, reciting the last words of the rite. Her mother's handwriting blurred on the page, but she knew them now. They'd etched themselves into her.
The wind rose again. Something beneath the floor shuddered.
Elias gasped.
And then—silence.
Not the peaceful kind, but the kind that feels like the world holding its breath.
Elias blinked, eyes clearing. His form no longer flickered. He looked… alive.
He looked free.
"You did it," he whispered. "You broke it."
Lyra knelt, exhausted. The circle had burned away, nothing left but ash. The mirrors were dust. The chapel, once filled with spirits and echoes, now felt hollow.
But something still felt wrong.
The floor beneath her feet was too warm. The air too still. The silence… too deep.
Then, from somewhere far below them, came a sound.
A breath.
Not hers. Not Elias's.
Something else had woke