The first day of the trek through the dead zones was a slow crawl through a world that had forgotten how to breathe.
My eyes didn't stop burning. Even after the glow from the fight with Elara had dimmed, that ring of black ink around my pupils remained, a permanent stain on my reflection in every dark puddle we passed. I felt heavy. Not just tired, but heavy, like my bones were being replaced by the same leaden stone that made up the corrupted archway. Every step north was a battle against my own gravity.
"Keep your head up, Jake," Hazel muttered. She was limping now, a subtle hitch in her stride that she was trying to hide, but I could hear the way her boots dragged against the dry, cracked earth. "The air gets thinner the closer we get to the Divide. If you start slouching, your lungs will quit on you before your legs do."
"I'm fine," I said. It was the only lie I had left.
We hadn't spoken about Mom in hours. We hadn't spoken about the house or the life we had before the Ridge. It felt like those memories were being pushed out by the "hunger" Elara had talked about. When I thought about home now, it didn't feel like a place I belonged to anymore. It felt like a movie I'd watched a long time ago, a story about two brothers who didn't know how to kill.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the charred coin. It wasn't just vibrating anymore; it was cold. So cold it felt like a piece of dry ice pressed against my palm. I stared at the warped metal, the way the heat of the altar had twisted the face of the coin into a screaming mask.
"Do you think he's still in there?" I asked, my voice cracking in the dry air. "Underneath the 'perfecting' and the gates... do you think Jordan is still watching us?"
Hazel stopped. She looked out over the horizon where the Great Divide began... a massive, jagged canyon that looked like a scar across the face of the world. "I think the Jordan we grew up with is buried deep. But magic like that... it doesn't just erase you. It twists you. It uses what's already there. Jordan always wanted to be the strongest, Jake. He always hated being the one who had to wait for us to catch up. They just gave him a way to stop waiting."
I clenched my fist around the coin, the cold edges biting into my skin. "I'm going to pull him out. I don't care what Elara said. I don't care about the shadows."
"You should care," Hazel said, turning to look at me. The fear was back in her eyes, sharper than before. "Because right now, you're looking at that canyon the same way he looked at the Altar. Like it's an answer."
I didn't argue because I couldn't. She was right. The deeper we went into the dead zones, the more the shadows felt like home. The dark wasn't scary anymore; it was the only thing that made sense.
We descended into the first shelf of the Divide as the sun began to set, casting long, twisted shadows across the canyon floor. The temperature plummeted. In the dead zones, there was no transition between day and night... only a sudden, violent shift from heat to freezing cold.
We found a shallow cave tucked into the side of a cliff, a small pocket of stone that smelled of dry dust and old magic. Hazel didn't even try to start a fire. Fires were beacons in the dark, and in this part of the world, you didn't want to be found.
I sat at the edge of the cave, watching the darkness swallow the canyon. My shadow, cast by the rising moon, looked wrong. It was too long, the edges too sharp, moving slightly out of sync with my own body.
"Jake... sleep," Hazel whispered from the back of the cave.
I closed my eyes, but I didn't sleep. I fell.
I fell into a dream that felt more real than the stone beneath me. I was back at the lake, but the water was made of black ink. Jordan was standing on the far shore, his red eyes glowing like twin embers in the fog. He wasn't mocking me this time. He was just standing there, holding a hand out.
"It's great to be back, isn't it?" his voice echoed, not from the shore, but from inside my own chest.
I woke up screaming, my hands wreathed in black flames that didn't burn.
The black flames didn't go out when I opened my eyes. They clung to my fingers, dancing in the dark like living creatures, illuminating the cave walls with a flickering, violet light. I stared at them, paralyzed. They didn't feel hot; they felt like a void, a vacuum that was trying to pull the very air out of the room.
"Jake! Put them out!" Hazel scrambled toward me, her eyes wide with terror. She reached for my wrists but stopped short, her hands flinching away from the unnatural cold radiating from the fire.
I shook my hands violently, trying to throw the shadows off, but they were rooted in my skin. I had to reach deep inside, past the fear, and literally pull the energy back into my marrow. It felt like dragging a heavy chain across raw nerves. When the flames finally vanished, I was left panting, my sweat freezing on my forehead.
"It's getting stronger," I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. "I wasn't even trying to use it. It just... it came out."
Hazel sat back on her heels, her face pale in the moonlight. "The Divide is a conduit. The closer we get to the center, the more the physical world thins out. Your power is reacting to the raw energy in the earth. You have to lock it down, Jake. If you lose control here, you won't just hurt yourself. You'll tear a hole in the ley lines that we can't patch up."
"I'm trying," I snapped, the frustration flaring up again. "But it's like trying to hold back a flood with my bare hands. Every time I think I have a grip on it, it finds a new way out."
I stood up and walked to the mouth of the cave, needing to feel the biting wind on my face. The canyon was silent, but it wasn't the silence of peace. It was the silence of a predator waiting for its prey to make a mistake.
Across the Great Divide, on the far northern rim, I saw it.
A pillar of dark, crimson light was rising into the sky. It was faint, barely visible against the blackness, but it was there... a beacon of corruption that matched the pulse of the coin in my pocket.
"The second altar," I said, pointing toward the horizon.
Hazel joined me at the edge, her jaw tightening as she saw the light. "That's where he is. And that's where Elara is taking the 'perfected' version of our brother. We have two days of climbing left, Jake. No more dreams. No more surges. We move as soon as the sun breaks."
We didn't sleep the rest of the night. We sat in silence, watching that red light pulse like a dying star. I kept my hand on the stone wall of the cave, trying to feel the "balance" Hazel kept talking about, but all I felt was the hollow ache of the void.
When morning finally came, the sun was a pale, sickly yellow through the haze of the dead zones. We began the descent into the heart of the Divide a labyrinth of jagged rock and shifting sands.
By noon, the hallucinations started.
At first, it was just small things. A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye. The sound of Cecilia's laughter echoing off the canyon walls. But as the sun reached its peak, the visions turned dark. I saw Jordan standing on the ledges above us, his silhouette flickering like a glitching video. I saw Mom standing in the middle of the trail, her face a blank, featureless mask of skin.
"Don't look at them," Hazel commanded, her hand firm on my shoulder. "They're just echoes, Jake. The Divide feeds on your memories. It's trying to distract you so you lose your footing."
"They look so real," I whispered, my eyes tracking the phantom of Jordan as he walked along the cliff edge, parallel to us. He was flipping the coin the same coin that was currently sitting in my pocket.
"It's not real. Focus on my voice. Focus on the path."
We reached a narrow bridge of natural stone that spanned a drop so deep the bottom was lost in shadow. As I stepped onto the bridge, the wind picked up, howling through the canyon like a chorus of the damned.
Suddenly, the figure of Jordan wasn't on the cliff anymore. He was standing in the middle of the bridge, blocking our path.
He looked exactly like he did the day he left. He was wearing his favorite leather jacket, a cocky grin on his face, and his eyes were the normal, annoying brown I'd known my whole life.
"You're late, Jake," he said, his voice perfectly clear over the wind. "I've been waiting for hours. Did Hazel slow you down again? You always were her favorite."
"Get out of the way," I growled, my hands beginning to smoke.
"Is that any way to talk to your brother? After everything I've done for you? I opened the door, Jake. I showed you what you really are. You should be thanking me."
He stepped closer, and for a second, I forgot it was a hallucination. I reached out, my fingers inches from his jacket.
"Jake, no!" Hazel's voice pierced through the fog.
The image of Jordan shattered. In its place was a creature of raw, red energy... a 'projection' that had been hiding behind the mask of my memory. It lunged at me, its claws made of solidified blood.
I didn't hesitate. I didn't hold back. I let the shadow-mantle explode out of me in a wave of black force. The creature was vaporized instantly, its red energy scattered into the wind. But the force of the blast sent a tremor through the stone bridge.
Cracks appeared beneath my feet.
"Run!" Hazel screamed.
We sprinted across the crumbling stone, the bridge collapsing into the abyss just as we leaped for the far ledge. I hit the dirt hard, rolling onto my back as the sound of falling rock echoed through the canyon.
I lay there for a long time, staring up at the sickly yellow sky. My hands were still shaking, the black veins on my arms pulsing with a life of their own.
"I'm not a memory," I whispered to the sky, repeating the words I'd told Elara. "And I'm not a god. I'm just the one who's coming for him."
Hazel pulled me up, her face grim. We looked back at the gap where the bridge had been. There was no going back now. The only way was forward, into the heart of the Great Divide, and whatever was waiting for us at the top of the northern rim.
"We're close," Hazel said, her voice barely a whisper. "God help us, we're close."