The shadow creature moves toward you.

It doesn’t walk. It flows. Darkness sliding across the ground, up the walls, pooling and reforming. Where it passes, the stones crack with frost. Cold fire, the merchant said. Fire that freezes instead of burns.

Kira lunges with her sword.

The blade passes through the creature as if through smoke. She stumbles, off-balance. The shadow lashes out—a tendril of darkness that catches her shoulder and sends her spinning into the wall.

“It’s not solid!” she gasps, clutching her arm where frost forms on the fabric. “How do you fight something that’s not solid?”

You don’t know.

But the gem knows.

The light inside you—the connection to the crystal that burns in your bones—flares. Without thinking, you raise your hand, and purple light spills from your palm.

The shadow creature recoils.

For an instant, you see something in the darkness. A face. Contorted. Screaming. A person trapped inside the void, or the memory of one.

Then the light dies, and you stagger. Whatever you just did, it cost you.

But the creature is retreating. Sliding back into the walls, into the shadows between buildings, into the darkness from which it came.

“What…” Kira pulls herself up, staring at you. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That light. It came from you.”

You look at your hand. The palm still tingles, like pins and needles after sleeping on your arm wrong.

“It came from the gem,” you say. “Through me.”

Kira is silent for a long moment. Then she sheathes her sword.

“We need to find the others. Tell them what we saw. These things—” She gestures at the shadows, now just ordinary shadows. “They’re not random. The fire, the chaos, the ceremony interrupted. Someone sent them.”

“Or something.”

She meets your eyes. “Tell me you’re not thinking what I’m thinking.”

You don’t answer.

Because you are.

The shadow you saw in the square. The one wearing armor. The one that looked at you and knew you.

It’s him.

The Shieldborn.

The hollow one.

Whatever you call him, he sent these creatures. He caused this destruction.

And you just learned you can hurt them.