Rain whispered through the trees of Lanternwood, a hush like breath on glass. The path that wound between the ancient oaks was slick with moss and shadow, lit only by the eerie glow of the lantern fruit hanging overhead. They pulsed faintly, like sleeping hearts in the boughs, casting a violet sheen over the forest floor.

  Kaelen adjusted the strap of his satchel and stepped carefully over a tangle of roots. His boots, worn soft with years of use, made no sound. He had learned silence early in life—when to walk, when to wait, and when to disappear.

  Lanternwood was not a place to linger, not after dusk.

  The stories his grandmother told had not exaggerated. Trees that moved when backs were turned. Whispers that didn’t come from mouths. Creatures that wore the faces of the lost. He had seen none of these—yet—but the weight of unseen eyes pressed on his shoulders, and the air here had a taste, metallic and humming, like the sky before lightning.

  He pulled a slip of parchment from his coat and turned it toward the light of a low-hanging lantern. A map, hand-drawn in dark ink. Half of it had blurred from the rain. Still, he could just make out the symbol etched near the base of a gnarled tree ahead: three interlocking circles. The mark of the Arkenward.

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  It was real, then.

  He’d found it.

  Kaelen’s breath caught in his throat.

  Not even the wardens of the Reach dared this deep into Lanternwood. And if the stories were true, the Arkenward had been gone for nearly two centuries, wiped out in the Magefall, their relics lost to time and myth. But this map—smuggled to him in the belly of a hollow book—had led him straight to the threshold of the last place anyone sane would dare look.

  The forest suddenly fell still.

  Even the rain stopped.

  Kaelen froze. A sound—not quite a growl, not quite a voice—threaded through the air behind him.

  He turned slowly.

  The path was empty.

  But something shimmered at its edge, just beyond the reach of the lanternlight. Like smoke. Or shadow. Or both. It moved wrong. Unnatural.

  He took a step back.

  The map crinkled in his hand, damp and trembling.

  Then, the lantern fruit nearest the shimmer blinked out. Darkness swallowed the space it had lit.

  Another blinked out.

  Then another.

  And the shimmer advanced.

  Kaelen ran.

  He bolted down the path, heart pounding, dodging roots and low branches, guided by instinct and desperation. The forest blurred. The glow of the lanterns flickered past in streaks, but they, too, were fading behind him, one by one, like candles snuffed by invisible fingers.

  He didn’t dare look back.

  Only forward—to the circle-marked tree.

  To whatever lay beneath its roots.

  The last known door to the Arkenward.

  And maybe, if the old stories held any truth at all, the one place in the world that could stop what was coming.