Her eyes open to darkness. The glass is shattered around her. Shards glitter like diamond teeth in the faint emergency light.

She doesn't remember how to move. Her limbs feel like they belong to someone else. Her lungs ache with the first real breath they've taken in—how long? She doesn't know.

Then she sees it.

A thread of light. Electric blue. Fractured and jagged, pulsing like a heartbeat. It leaks through the crack beneath the basement door, spilling up the stairs like liquid energy.

Her power stirs awake inside her chest, rusty and disoriented. Soul tracking. It recognizes that trail. It remembers it.

Her fingers find the glass floor. She pushes herself up. Her legs shake. Her bare feet crunch over the remains of her cage as she stumbles toward the door.

Up the stairs. One step. Two. The soul trail burns brighter with each movement, swirling and looping back on itself in tight, panicked circles.

Someone up there is terrified. Someone up there is breaking.

The door at the top of the stairs hangs open. Voices spill through—sharp, overlapping, frantic.

Y/n reaches the top of the stairs. Her hand grips the doorframe. The light of the kitchen hits her face for the first time in years.

Six figures stand frozen around the kitchen island. In the center of them, a boy in an Academy uniform—too young for his eyes, too old for his body—holds a kitchen knife like he doesn't know whether to stab someone or himself.

His soul trail blazes like a wounded star.