Nox jumped up from his chair before he realized he was moving. His body reacted on its own, faster than his thoughts, and it was a strange, almost foreign sensation, as if Shadow inside him had jerked first and pulled muscles, bones, blood along with it. The pendant on his neck continued to vibrate, cold and insistent, and its blue light pulsed in time with something distant that was approaching with every heartbeat.
Sylvana was already at the window, having pulled the curtain aside just enough to see the street but remain in shadow. Her face was calm, too calm, and that calmness told Nox more than any words could. She was ready for battle. Not for training, not for a lesson, for a real battle where the stakes were higher than one person's life.
«Where is he?» Nox asked, moving closer but staying to the side so as not to be framed in the window.
«By the old fountain. At the end of the street. Do you see?»
Nox looked. At first, he saw nothing except an ordinary morning street in the middle tier: cobblestones wet from the night fog, a few passersby hurrying about their business, a lantern that had not yet been extinguished even though the sun had already risen above the rooftops. But then his gaze caught on something wrong. By the old fountain, long dry and serving more as a monument than a source of water, stood a figure. Tall, wrapped in a dark cloak with a deep hood hiding its face. People walked past without noticing it, the way you do not notice a shadow in the corner of a room or dust on a windowsill. Their gazes slid away and moved on, refusing to focus. And that was the most frightening part. The creature was not hiding. It simply did not allow itself to be seen.
«It is not moving,» Nox said.
«It is waiting. It sensed Shadow when you put on the artifacts, and now it is trying to understand exactly where the signal is coming from. The bracelet is working, but not perfectly. Your aura is blurred, scattered, and the hunter sees several sources instead of one. That confuses it. But not for long.»
«What do we do?»
Sylvana let go of the curtain and turned to him. In her hand was already the same thin, needle like knife she used to cut her finger to write in blood and heal his scars. Now the blade was dark, almost black, and crimson sparks ran across it, as if blood flowed inside the metal.
«The plan has changed,» she said. «I thought we had time until evening to prepare and choose a location. There is no time. It is here, on our street, and if it enters the house, Lin will be in danger. So you will not go to the magic rail line. You will go out the back door, through the courtyards to the old chapel at the crossroads, and wait there. Narrow streets, many shadows, few people. A good place for an ambush.»
«And you?»
«I will go out the front door and walk straight toward it.»
Nox stared at her.
«You said I would be the bait. That I would distract it, and you would strike.»
«I lied.» She said it simply, without apology, without trying to soften it. «You are not the bait, Nox. You are the second strike. It will come after me because I am a witch, because I reek of Blood a mile away, because hunters know who I am and have orders to destroy me if given the chance. It will focus on me, engage me, and at that moment, you will strike from behind. With all the Shadow you have. Without hesitation. Without mercy. Because if you miss or do not strike hard enough, it will kill me, and then it will come for you and Lin.»
Nox wanted to object, wanted to say it was madness, that she should not sacrifice herself, that they could come up with another plan. But the words stuck in his throat because he looked into her violet eyes and saw there not self sacrifice, not despair, but the cold, sober calculation of someone who had done this before and knew how to survive. She was not going to die. She was going to win. And she needed a second blade.
«I will not miss,» he said.
«I know. That is why I chose you.»
A soft sound came from behind. Lin stood by the stairs, and in her hands was something Nox had not seen before. A small dagger, very old, its handle wrapped in faded leather, the blade marked with dark stains that looked like rust but were most likely something else entirely.
«It was Mother's,» she said quietly. «I found it in the cupboard yesterday while looking for clothes. It was at the bottom, wrapped in a cloth. I thought maybe you could use it.»
Nox walked over to her and took the dagger. The metal was cold and strangely heavy for such a small blade, and when his fingers closed around the handle, he felt something familiar. Not magic. Rather, an echo of magic, a faint remnant of what had once been here. The Abyss. His mother had touched this dagger, held it in her hands, perhaps even fought with it. And now her son would hold it.
«Thank you,» he said.
Lin nodded. Then she stepped forward and hugged him, tightly, with her whole small body, burying her face in his chest. He hugged her back, feeling her tremble even though she tried not to show it.
«Come back,» she whispered. «Promise.»
«I promise.»
She let him go, stepped back, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, though Nox saw no tears. Then she turned and walked upstairs without looking back, her steps firm, like those of someone who had made a decision and was not going to change it.
Sylvana watched her go, then looked at Nox.
«You have a good sister. Strong. Like your mother.»
«I know.»
«Then let us go. There is no time.»
They went out the back door. It led into a narrow alley squeezed between buildings where direct sunlight never reached. The air smelled of dampness, old leaves, and something sour, like the basements of Ravnes, and for a moment, the smell brought Nox back to the slums, to their old life where every day was a struggle for survival. But now everything was different. Now he had power. Now he had a purpose. Now he was not just surviving, he was protecting.
Sylvana stopped at the mouth of the alley, peered out to make sure the hunter was not in direct line of sight, and turned to Nox.
«The old chapel is three blocks from here. Go through the courtyards, stay off the main streets. When you get there, hide in the shadows by the altar and wait. You will hear the fight. Do not come out until you are certain the hunter is completely focused on me. It is fast, very fast, and if you reveal yourself too soon, none of us will get a second chance.»
«How will I know it is focused on you?»
«You will know. It uses Shadow, a lot of Shadow, and when it fully commits to the fight, its own shadow begins to sing. It is hard to explain, but you will feel it. Your Shadow will feel it. Trust it.»
She placed her hand on his shoulder, squeezed once, short and hard, and in that gesture was more than any farewell.
«Good luck, Nox Endragon.»
And she left.
Nox watched her until she disappeared around the corner, a tall figure in a dark coat, silver hair escaping from beneath her hat. She walked calmly, steadily, like someone out for a morning stroll, not a deadly battle with a creature that knew no fear or pain. And in that calmness was something frightening and simultaneously reassuring. If she was not afraid, then she had a plan. If she had a plan, then they would survive.
He turned and ran.
The courtyards of the middle tier were a labyrinth. Narrow passages between buildings, rusted staircases leading up and down, blank walls plastered with faded advertisements and crude drawings. Nox moved fast but carefully, jumping over puddles and piles of trash, ducking under low arches, circling barrels of rainwater and abandoned carts. Shadow inside him was taut as a string, ready to burst free at any moment, and he struggled to restrain it, remembering Sylvana's instruction: do not reveal yourself too soon.
Halfway there, he stopped. Not because he heard something. Because he felt something.
The hunter had moved.
It was a strange sensation, unlike anything else. As if somewhere at the edge of his consciousness, a low, vibrating note had sounded, making his teeth ache and the hair on his arms stand on end. Nox's Shadow responded instantly, reaching in that direction like a dog straining at its leash, having caught the scent of prey. The hunter was walking. Slowly, heavily, but purposefully. And it was not walking toward Nox. It was walking toward Sylvana.
Nox ran faster.
The old chapel appeared before him unexpectedly, emerging from around a corner like a forgotten dream. It was a small stone building with a collapsed roof and empty window frames where stained glass once had been, now only rusted frames remained. The door hung on a single hinge, and Nox slipped inside without even touching it, not wanting to make any unnecessary sound.
Inside was dark and smelled of old stone, mold, and something else, sweetish, almost cloying, like incense that had faded many years ago but left its scent behind, absorbed into the walls. The altar at the far end of the chapel was split in two, and moss grew in the crack, pale and sickly, feeding on the little light that filtered through the holes in the roof. Nox walked to the altar, crouched down, and pressed his back against the cold stone, merging with the shadows as Sylvana had taught him. Shadow inside him enveloped his body, making him nearly invisible in the half dark, and he froze, becoming part of the chapel, just another dark silhouette among many.
And he waited.
At first, there was silence. Only the wind wandering through the empty window frames, howling in different voices, and somewhere in the distance, on the main streets, a magic train hummed, heading north. Nox counted his heartbeats, each one echoing in his temples with a dull, measured pain. Fifty. One hundred. One hundred fifty.
Then he heard it.
Not a sound. Rather, the absence of sound. As if someone had turned off the entire world for one second, then turned it back on, but differently. The wind stopped. The magic train fell silent. Even Nox's own breathing seemed to pause on its own.
And then Shadow inside him howled.
Not figuratively. It actually emitted a sound, a silent scream that he heard not with his ears but with his entire body, every cell, every nerve. The hunter was close. Very close. And it was using its power.
The battle had begun.
Nox did not see the first strike, but he felt it, the ground beneath the chapel shuddered as if something huge had fallen nearby. Then a sound reached him, low, rolling, like thunder, but too sharp, too close. Then another. And another. They came one after another, merging into a continuous rumble that made the chapel walls vibrate and stone dust fall from the ceiling.
Nox gripped his mother's dagger tighter, his knuckles white. Every instinct screamed at him: run there, help, strike, do something. But he held on. He remembered Sylvana's words: do not come out until the hunter is completely focused on her. Until its Shadow sings.
And then he heard it.
The singing.
It was not like music in any human sense. Rather, it was a vibration that permeated the air and stone, making everything around resonate in unison. Low, guttural, it rose from somewhere deep, growing, filling all of space, and though it had no words, it had meaning. The hunt. Blood. Death. The hunter had fully committed to the battle. Its Shadow was singing its ancient, terrible war song, and in that song, there was room for nothing but killing.
Nox stood up.
He moved silently, as he had been taught, Shadow flowing around his body, muffling the sound of his footsteps, blurring his silhouette. He left the chapel through a side breach in the wall and found himself in a narrow alley that led toward the source of the sound. With each step, the singing grew louder, the vibration stronger, and Nox's Shadow answered it, reaching forward, straining at the leash, wanting to join that eerie symphony.
He rounded the corner and saw them.
A crossroads of three streets, once a busy place, now empty and abandoned, with a broken lantern in the middle and a pile of windblown trash. Sylvana stood in the center, and around her, blood swirled, her own blood, drawn from the ground and suspended in the air as hundreds of dark drops that spun around her like planets around a star. Her left arm was bare, the venous network on her forearm blazing bright crimson, and heat radiated from it that Nox could feel even from twenty paces away. She was breathing heavily, but she stood firm, and in her violet eyes burned a cold, focused fire.
Across from her stood the hunter.
Nox saw it up close for the first time, and the first thing he felt was revulsion, deep, instinctive, at the level of his body. The hunter was tall, half a head taller than Sylvana, but that was not what mattered. Its cloak, which from a distance had seemed simply dark, up close revealed itself to be woven from living shadows that constantly moved, flowed, changed shape, and sometimes, in their depths, something like faces flickered, distorted, eyeless, frozen in silent screams. The hood had fallen back during the fight, and Nox saw the hunter's face. Or rather, what remained of it.
It was the face of a person who had been stripped of everything human. Gray skin stretched so tightly over bone that the contours of the skull showed through. Its eyes were two hollows filled with pure, churning Shadow, no pupils, no whites, just two holes into nowhere. Its mouth was a thin line that did not move, even when the hunter made sounds. And it did make sounds, the low, guttural singing Nox had heard in the chapel flowed from it in a continuous stream, and with each sound, the shadows around it thickened, grew denser, darker.
The hunter carried no weapon. It did not need one. Its hands themselves were weapons, long, unnaturally flexible, with fingers ending in claws of pure Shadow that left black trails in the air, slowly fading like smoke.
Nox looked at this creature and understood: this is what the Moon Goddess does to Shadow bearers. This is what she had wanted to do to his father. This is what she would want to do to him. And from that understanding, not even rage rose inside him, but something else, a cold, icy resolve that pushed everything else aside, leaving only one thought: this must be destroyed.
He stepped forward, still hidden by the shadows of the alley, and began to circle the crossroads, moving behind the hunter. Sylvana noticed him, her gaze flickered toward him for a fraction of a second, then returned to her opponent. She understood. She would keep its attention.
The hunter attacked.
It did not move like a human. Its body flowed from one position to another like mercury, like water, like the very Shadow it carried. One moment it stood still, the next it was three steps to the left, its claws slicing through the air where Sylvana's head had just been. She dodged, ducked, and the blood drops around her condensed and shot at the hunter in dozens of sharp needles. They pierced its body, its chest, its shoulders, its face, but it did not even slow. The shadows of its cloak absorbed the blood, consumed it, and the needles vanished as if they had never existed.
«Blood is not working,» Nox heard Sylvana's voice. She was not speaking to him, to herself, but he heard. «It has adapted. Too fast. Too…»
She was retreating, evading the hunter's relentless attacks, and her movements were still fast and precise, but Nox could see she was tiring. The blood drops around her were thinning, the venous network on her arm no longer blazed so brightly. She was spending herself, putting part of her life force into every strike, while the hunter simply absorbed everything she threw at it and only grew stronger.
Nox was behind it now. Twenty paces. Fifteen. Ten.
The hunter froze.
Abruptly, unnaturally, like a mechanism with a jammed gear. Its head turned, not smoothly but in jerks, like a bird's, and its empty eyes stared directly into the shadows where Nox was hiding. The singing stopped. Silence fell over the crossroads, so deep that Nox could hear blood dripping from Sylvana's fingers onto the cobblestones.
«It sensed you,» Sylvana said. «Run!»
But Nox did not run.
He stepped out of the shadows.
His mother's dagger in his right hand, Shadow swirling around his left, ready to take any form he wished. The scars on his face burned cold in the presence of another's Shadow, and the sensation strangely invigorated him, like ice water thrown in his face. He looked at the hunter, and the hunter looked back at him with empty eyes that held nothing but Shadow.
«You were searching for the Abyss,» Nox said, his voice loud in the silence of the crossroads. «But you found Shadow. A mistake.»
The hunter did not answer. It could not speak, could not think, could not feel. It could only hunt and kill. And now its target had changed. Sylvana, the Blood witch, was no longer the greatest threat at this crossroads. The greatest threat was the boy with Shadow who stood before it and was not afraid.
The hunter leaped.
Nox met it with Shadow.
They collided in the center of the crossroads, two Shadows, two opposites, two reflections of the same power, one corrupted, one pure. The hunter's claws sliced through the air where Nox's throat had just been, but Nox had already moved aside, guided by his own Shadow, which felt every movement of its opponent before it even began. He struck with the dagger, aiming for the side, where a human's ribs would be, but the blade passed through the cloak of living shadows and met nothing but emptiness. The hunter was not entirely here. Its body existed simultaneously in the real world and in the world of Shadow, and to wound it, one had to strike in both worlds at once.
«With Blood!» Sylvana shouted. «It is vulnerable to Blood! Your dagger! Your mother's blood is on it!»
Nox did not ask questions. He called on Shadow, all he had, and poured it into his left hand, shaping not a blade, not a shield, something new, something being born right now, in the heat of battle. Shadow condensed, grew dense, heavy, taking the form of a chain with a hook at the end, long and flexible as a serpent. He hurled it at the hunter, and the hook sank into the creature's shoulder, piercing the cloak of shadows and lodging in something solid inside.
The hunter screamed.
It was the first sound it had made besides the singing. A high, grinding shriek, filled not with pain, hunters felt no pain, but with something else. Surprise? Rage? Nox's Shadow, amplified by his mother's blood on the dagger, had touched its true essence, and that was something it had not expected.
Nox pulled the chain toward himself, drawing the hunter closer, and at the same moment, Sylvana struck. She gathered all the remaining blood, every shard of her power, and hurled a single spear at the hunter, thin and sharp as a needle. It entered its back, where a human's heart would be, and emerged from its chest, spraying not blood but thick, black mist, the very essence of the hunter.
The creature froze. Its empty eyes stared at the spear protruding from its chest, and for a moment, something like recognition flickered in them. Not thought. Rather, instinctive understanding: the end. The hunt was over. The prey had proven stronger.
The hunter began to crumble. Its body, its cloak, its shadows, all of it turned to black ash, caught by the wind and carried away into the gray sky of the middle tier. Within seconds, nothing remained at the crossroads but a handful of ash slowly settling on the cobblestones.
Nox stood, breathing heavily, and looked at what remained of the creature that moments ago had been a living weapon of the Moon Goddess. Shadow inside him still churned, refusing to calm, and he struggled to force it back down, along his spine, into its usual course.
Sylvana walked over to him. She looked exhausted, aged a decade in a single battle, but she stood straight and her gaze was clear.
«You made a chain,» she said. «I did not teach you that.»
«It just happened. I just… imagined it, and it appeared.»
Sylvana looked at him with a long gaze, and in her eyes was something he had not seen before. Respect? No. Something deeper. Recognition.
«Your father also created weapons from Shadow that no one taught him. He used to say that Shadow itself knows what shape it wants to take, you just have to not get in its way.» She paused, looking at the pile of ash. «You just killed a hunter of the Moon Goddess. Together with me, but you killed it. This is the first time you have used Shadow not for defense, but for destruction. You have crossed a line, Nox. There is no going back.»
«I know,» he said.
And in that moment, he truly knew. Something had changed inside him as he stood at that crossroads and watched a creature that had once been human crumble to ash. He was no longer just a boy from the slums who had received power and did not know what to do with it. He had become someone who used that power to protect. And to kill, if necessary.
Sylvana bent down and picked up something from the ground. A small shard, black and shiny, like obsidian, but darker, if that was possible. She handed it to Nox.
«The hunter's heart. Or rather, what remains of it. When a bearer's Shadow is completely burned out, it crystallizes. This is a rare artifact, very powerful. Keep it. It may prove useful.»
Nox took the shard. It was cold as ice and pulsed in his palm with a faint, barely perceptible rhythm, like a distant heartbeat. He put it in his pocket.
«Let us go home,» Sylvana said. «Lin is waiting. And we need to talk. About what comes next.»
They walked back, through the courtyards and alleys, and the city around them lived its ordinary life, unaware that on an abandoned crossroads, a creature sent by a goddess had just died. People hurried about their business, magic trains hummed, factories smoked, and the world had not changed one iota. But for Nox, it had changed. He was no longer who he had been that morning.
When they reached the house, he stopped at the door and looked at the sky. The moon had not yet risen, but he knew it was there, behind the clouds, watching him. Somewhere far away, in her unreachable hall, the Moon Goddess had just lost one of her servants. And she knew who had done it.
«I am coming,» he said quietly, addressing her. «I am coming for you.»
And he entered the house.
Lin was waiting on the stairs. When she saw him, alive and mostly unharmed, she did not cry, did not rush to embrace him. She just looked at him with her gray eyes, in which the silver sparks of the Abyss danced, and said:
«I knew you would come back. You promised.»
«I always come back,» he answered.
And in that moment, standing on the threshold of the house that had become their refuge, with his sister looking at him with faith, and the witch standing silently behind him, Nox Endragon, the last of his bloodline, the Child of Shadows, understood something important. He was no longer just surviving. He was beginning his path. A long, dark path, full of pain and loss. But his path.
And somewhere far away, in the halls of the Moon Goddess, another Shadow stirred. One that was older, stronger, and much, much more dangerous than a hunter. And it received its order: find the boy with Shadow and the girl with the Abyss. And do not return without their heads.