The transition into the Wildlands was not marked by a clear road, but by a sudden, jagged drop into a forest of twisted gray trees known as the Ash-Weave.
The canopy overhead was so thick it choked out the light of the twin moons, leaving the family to stumble through pitch-black thickets of thorn-vines.
John sprinted blind, the small weight of seven-year-old Thomas pressed hard against his shoulder.
Behind them, the horizon was no longer dark; it bled a violent, pulsating orange.
“They’ve crossed the breach!” Martha panted, her boots catching on an exposed root.
She looked back just in time to see several bright streaks of crimson cutting through the sky over the ruined perimeter wall.
It didn’t take long for the sky to clear.
The House of Embers trackers didn’t fly blind.
They carried Ash-Hounds—monstrous beasts forged of hardened soot and burning magma, capable of smelling the residual mana of an elemental collapse from miles away.
Aroo-ooo— A low, resonant baying echoed through the gnarled trees, shaking the ash from the leaves.
The sound was terrifyingly close.
“They have his scent,” John hissed, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
He looked down at the boy in his arms.
Thomas was convulsing.
His small body was burning hot, but not with natural fever.
The stolen earth-mana he had violently torn from Supervisor Kael was clashing violently with the liquid silver vortex inside his heart.
Strands of dull brown energy pulsed under the skin of Thomas’s arms, threatening to burst his veins from the inside out.
“John, his core…
it can’t hold it,” Martha cried, touching the boy’s forehead.
“He’s suffocating on the noble’s magic!” “We have to hide the signature,” John muttered, scanning the dark forest.
He spotted a narrow, deep ravine cut into the earth by an old dried-up mineral creek.
“In there!
Under the shale!” Before they could dive into the trench, the brush behind them erupted into flames.
Three Ash-Hounds burst through the treeline.
Their bodies were skeletal frames of black obsidian rock, filled with a core of swirling, molten lava.
Their glowing yellow eyes locked instantly onto Thomas.
Behind them, gliding effortlessly through the burning foliage, came a Tier 2 Embers Seeker.
The soldier wore lighter, segmented crimson leather armor and carried a curved runic bow, an arrow of pure flame already notched to the string.
“Halt, low-born scum!” the seeker bellowed, his voice amplified by fire-mana.
“Relinquish the anomaly and face your execution, or burn where you stand!” John didn’t freeze.
With a roar of pure, paternal fury, he spun around, throwing his weight in front of Martha and his son.
But a mortal weaver stood no chance against an elemental soldier.
The seeker let fly the arrow.
A streak of blinding white-hot flame hissed through the dark, aimed directly at John’s chest.
At that exact microsecond, Thomas let out a silent, agonized gasp.
The silver vortex inside his chest reacted to the lethal danger.
It spun backward, violently expelling the suffocating brown earth-mana it had stolen from Kael.
The expelled energy shot out of Thomas’s small hands as a jagged shard of solid, reinforced stone.
The rock shard slammed into the incoming flame-arrow mid-air, causing a violent, localized explosion of stone shrapnel and sparks.
The concussive blast blew the Embers Seeker off his feet and sent the Ash-Hounds scattering back into the brush.
“Now!
Into the ravine!” John roared, seizing the momentary chaos.
He grabbed Martha, and together they tumbled down the steep, crumbling shale slope of the ravine, burying themselves deep beneath a heavy overhang of fallen roots and dead leaves just as the rest of the hunting squad arrived above, turning the forest floor into a roaring sea of fire.