I'd seen a lot of strange things in the past two weeks. None of them prepared me for the still-zone.

  The trees looked normal from a distance. It was only when we walked into the outer edge of Seraphine's influence that I noticed: nothing was moving.

  Every branch frozen mid-sway. Every leaf hanging without fall. Not dead — preserved. Like someone had just paused everything at a specific moment and walked away. The ground beneath us was silent in a way that went beyond no-wind. Life makes constant small sounds — insects, rustling undergrowth, the tiny creak of living wood. There was none of that.

  Between the still trees, the air tasted of ash.

  "Don't touch the trees," Dren said quietly. "The stasis carries."

  We moved fast and quiet.

  The Obsidian Court found us anyway.

  A dozen soldiers spreading out through the still forest in a loose cordon — they'd been warned we were coming. Two of them were mages. I could tell by the light gathered around their hands.

  "Stand down!" The call from a tall woman in black at the center of the line. Pure command, no negotiation. "The stone and the boy. Hand them over, the others leave unharmed."

  Dren said: "No."

  And then everything happened very fast.

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  Dren was moving before the echo of his own word faded — sideways, into the trees, taking the right flank. Not toward the soldiers but around them, cutting off angles. He moved like a man who had spent twenty years thinking about exactly this kind of situation.

  Lyra had her ward up and cracking with static. Tam drew the short sword he'd traded for in Enderly and put himself between Lyra and the nearest soldier, which was probably not the tactical arrangement Dren would have chosen but it worked.

  The second mage pointed something at me. Telekinetic force, from the look of it — a compression wave, invisible but felt, aimed at my chest.

  I didn't run.

  I raised my right hand. And I pulled.

  The wave hit the mark on my wrist, hit the Sealstone in my left hand, and I absorbed it the same way I'd absorbed the granary fire at fourteen — instinctively, the way you reach out to catch something before you decide to. Except this time I was choosing it.

  It hurt. Not badly — not Seraphine-level — but sharp and immediate, like catching a fast pitch bare-handed.

  I held it. Changed it. Let it dissolve into my own warmth.

  The mage stared at me.

  Didn't throw a second wave.

  The tall woman in black was looking at me differently now. The calculation had changed.

  "You can't stop her," she said. Still in command mode, but something underneath it had shifted. "She is the end of all built things. She's the ruin that was always coming."

  "She was stopped before," I said.

  "And will be again," Dren said, emerging from the trees. Two soldiers short of where he'd started.

  The woman looked at all of us. Did the math.

  She signaled retreat.

  Not a rout — a tactical withdrawal, well-executed. She was a professional.

  "She'll be aware of you now," she said, as a parting line.

  "Tell her we're coming," I said.

  I didn't feel as confident as that sounded. But I'd learned from watching Dren that confidence sometimes was a thing you built by saying it out loud before it was true, and letting the truth catch up.

  The forest stood around us in its awful stillness.

  Ash-Mordhen was ahead.