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Fenna's quiver slipped from her fingers and hit the basalt with a dull clatter. Star slept on, unaware of the chaos his body had courted.
And the satchel at Zephyr's feet? Empty—
nothing but heat-creased emberfoil scraps fluttered like dead leaves in the morning breeze.
The three beast cores were gone.
Silence stretched between the pair, held taut like a bowstring. Only the ripple of pond water dared break it.
Something was changing inside that fledgling's body —something not even the Emberwood forest's oldest whisperers could have predicted. Power hummed in the air like a distant storm caught behind clouds, silent but swelling.
Zephyr and Fenna could only stare in shocked, unblinking awe as the sky lightened with the sun's rays.
No one knew yet what hatched inside those swirling embers. No one could say if the fledgling they had raised would remain the same in soul.
