Page 72 of The Sin Binder's Chains

I frown.

That isn’t natural.

The Void isn’t supposed to hesitate.

Something else is interfering with it.

Luna steps up beside me, watching the way the Rift bends and twists at the edges. "What is it?"

I don’t answer immediately.

Because I don’t know yet.

But something about the way the Rift is behaving, reacting, feels too precise. Too intentional.

Not just unstable.

Controlled.

The horse's paw the ground harder. Elias whistles low. "So… worst-case scenario, we’re about to die."

"And best case?" Luna asks.

"The horses are possessed, I get a fun curse, and Lucien stops glaring at the sky like it personally offended him."

I glance at him. "Not likely."

Elias sighs dramatically. "Yeah, I figured."

The Void reacts first.

A deep, unnatural ripple rolls through the ground, warping everything it touches. The horizon snaps, once, twice, like the world is caught between two frames of existence. It’s wrong. This whole place is wrong.

The horses panic. The void-touched ones shouldn’t. They should be immune to the warping madness of this place, but they thrash violently, their bodies flickering at the edges like they’re being rewritten. Their hooves don’t even make contact with the ground anymore.

Because the ground isn’t there.

A windless force surges through the air, sharp as a blade, grating against reality itself, a soundless rupture, a distortion I feel in my bones before it fully takes shape.

I already know we won’t like what steps through.

I turn to Luna first. "Stay close."

Elias hums lazily, but there’s a current beneath it, something rare, awareness. "So… whatever’s coming," he muses, rolling his shoulders, "are we hoping it kills us quick, or should we at least try to put up a fight?"

The question is rhetorical.

Because we both know we’re fighting.

The Rift tears.

Not fully, just enough. Enough to let something slip through.

A clawed hand emerges first, stretching wide, impossibly long fingers curling against the warping air. Then another. The body follows, sleek and skinned, its shape wrong, shifting. No eyes, just the suggestion of a face that stretches too long, too hungry.It tastes the air as it steps fully into this world, the edges of it still glitching, like it doesn’t belong, like it’s caught between what it was and what it’s becoming.

It locks onto Luna first.

Of course it does.

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