The taste of blood and ash filled his mouth.

  Draven lay among the dead, half-buried in the wreckage of what had once been a battlefield. The scent of charred flesh and rusted steel hung heavy in the air, thick and suffocating. The sky above churned with dying embers, dark clouds swallowing what little light remained.

  He should not have survived.

  His fingers twitched against the frozen dirt, pain lancing through his limbs like fire. His armor was shattered, its once-gleaming metal now cracked and useless. His chest burned where a blade had nearly run him through—deep, but not deep enough. Not enough to finish him like it should have.

  A cruel joke.

  He turned his head, vision swimming. Bodies littered the ground—soldiers, knights, creatures of war torn apart by forces beyond their understanding. They had fought. They had bled. And unlike him, they had been allowed to die.

  His own men had abandoned him.

  Draven let out a breath, ragged and uneven, watching it curl in the cold air. He pressed a shaking hand against his chest, feeling the thrum of something deep inside. An absence. A hollow space where something should have been.

  They had told him he was weak. That he would never be like them. That his bloodline had rejected him.

  And yet, the world refused to let him die.

  His fingers curled into the dirt.

  "Why?"

  The whisper barely left his lips before something shifted at the edge of his vision.

  Draven stilled.

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  The battlefield should have been empty. The war was over. Or at least, this part of it was. He forced himself to breathe through the pain, straining to listen past the howling wind.

  Then he saw it.

  Not a man. Not a soldier.

  Something else.

  A figure stood at the edge of the battlefield, cloaked in shifting darkness, its form flickering in and out of focus. Its presence was wrong—too still, too silent, as if the world itself refused to acknowledge it.

  Draven had seen many horrors on the battlefield. But this was different.

  The thing did not move toward him. It simply watched.

  A cold dread curled in his stomach. He had survived a battle meant to kill him, but he was not alone. And whatever has come for him now…

  It had not come to save him.

  His breath came shallow. His body screamed in protest as he willed himself to move—just enough to shift his weight, just enough to drag himself away. His hand pressed into the dirt, trembling, pushing against the dead weight of his limbs. He clenched his jaw, swallowing back the groan of pain that threatened to escape.

  The thing did not react.

  Draven forced himself forward, his elbow digging into the mud as he dragged himself an inch. Then another. Slow. Weak. Pitiful.

  The wind howled across the ruins of war, and the scent of rot thickened in his throat. He barely moved another inch before he felt it.

  The weight of its gaze.

  His pulse pounded against his skull. The thing was closer now, though it had not moved.

  Draven swallowed hard, sweat cold against his skin. His breath came in sharp bursts as he tried to ignore the tremor in his limbs, pushing himself forward again, scraping across the blood-soaked earth.

  The silence stretched, suffocating. Then—

  A whisper.

  Low. Indistinct. Curling through the wind like something not meant to be heard. Not meant to exist.

  Draven froze.

  It was speaking. Not with words. Not with sound. But inside his mind.

  His blood turned to ice.

  The whisper slid through the cracks in his skull, brushing against the edges of his thoughts. It was not a voice. It was a presence.

  "Why do you run?"

  Draven’s breath hitched.

  His fingers dug into the dirt, his body trembling from exhaustion, from pain, from something far worse than either. The thing was still behind him. Watching. Waiting.

  For what, he did not know.

  The wind howled, the battlefield stretching endlessly before him. Somewhere beyond the ruins, there might have been safety. A place beyond the reach of whatever this was.

  But he knew the truth.

  He would never make it that far.

  He clenched his teeth, forcing himself forward once more. His body was failing. He could feel it in his bones, the way his limbs screamed against his will. Every inch forward was stolen.

  And still, the thing did not move.

  Yet the space between them had disappeared.

  Another whisper curled against the edges of his thoughts, colder this time. Deeper.

  "You should not exist."

  Draven’s breath came in sharp, uneven bursts. He clenched his fists against the trembling in his limbs, forcing himself to move. To turn.

  To see it.

  His blood ran cold.

  The entity loomed over him, its form shifting like smoke against the dying light. No face. No eyes. Nothing human. And yet, it watched him.

  Something inside him cracked.

  Draven had faced death before.

  But this was the first time he had felt truly small.

  The wind howled. The thing did not speak again.

  It only waited.

  And in that silence, Draven understood.

  This

  was no specter of war. No remnant of the battlefield.

  This thing had come for him.

  It had always been coming for him.

  And now, it had found him at last.