THE ASHES LEFT BEHIND

Sera Voss knew something was wrong when Lyra didn't return.

She waited on their usual rooftop, three blocks from the palace district, watching the Festival of Lights paint the sky in gold. Midnight came and went. The eastern spire remained dark, then lit, then dark again. No signal fire. No messenger pigeon. Nothing.

By dawn, Sera had moved through all five stages of worry and landed on the sixth one that didn't have a name — the cold, calculating state where you planned for the worst while hoping for the best.

She returned to the Hollow's safehouse in the merchant district, a bakery that served as cover for their operations. The baker, a gray-haired woman named Matilda, took one look at Sera's face and stopped kneading dough.

"She's not back."

"No."

"The festival ended hours ago. If she succeeded, she'd have signaled. If she failed—" Matilda didn't finish the sentence.

Sera went to the back room, where their communication equipment waited. Thread-crystals, keyed to specific magical signatures, allowed limited distance messaging. She activated Lyra's crystal and felt... nothing. Not the dead silence of a destroyed crystal, but the strange void of one that was still active but no longer connected to its owner.