Chapter 20 Leo
I could feel the shift before I saw it. The air around the Dark Realm’s edge throbbed with static tension, like a wound that hadn’t healed but had been stitched shut and was now starting to tear again. The ground beneath my boots was cracked and dry, not like the earth above in the world of humans but like broken stone soaked in shadow and memory. I rode up on the bike, engine muted down to avoid drawing attention, and dismounted quietly, sword already sheathed at my side in anticipation rather than habit.
This place was always wrong. Not wrong in the sense of evil or haunting, but wrong in a fundamental, cosmic way, the kind of wrong that gnawed at reality itself. The Dark Realm wasn’t a place you visited. It was a seam, a thin boundary between worlds, a breach in the fabric of existence that pulsed with every beat of the universe. The common folk had a dozen fanciful names for things they sensed but could never see. This was not one of those things.
Long before my time, long before any of the Bloodhounds walked this earth, there was a seal here. A gate that kept one world separate from another. It was strong, impermeable, the kind of barrier that didn’t invite intrusion. But nothing holds forever. That’s a lesson of time itself.
A war had broken out once between a Kyro and the gargoyles.
Not gargoyles like the gargoyles of legend that perched on cathedral spires or guarded ancient crypts. This was a clan, a world of them, fierce and alien, brutal and shaped by the hunger of survival and conquest. They could shift forms, mimic flesh and bone, infiltrate minds without warning, and dissolve trust like acid. They were everywhere and nowhere, and they never forgot a weakness. The Kyro was the only one of its kind, a creature born of purity and force beyond measure. It wasn’t just powerful. It was the counterweight that held the balance.
I had only heard the stories, passed down by mouths that trembled when they spoke its name. The Kyro had fought the gargoyles and sealed the tear in reality with its blood and bone and spirit. But it died in the process. The lore said that only another Kyro, one with a pure heart, could seal the breach again. If the Kyro was not pure, it would rip the fabric apart instead and collapse both worlds in fire and ruin.
That had been hundreds of years ago.
For centuries since, it had been the job of the Bloodhounds to guard the tear, to watch the boundary and keep the gargoyles from slipping through. Some days every shift was quiet. Other days were carnage. We were meant to vanquish the demons before they learned how to use their powers against us. We were meant to hold the line. But not every war is fought in open fields with swords raised. Some wars are fought in quiet moments like this, when the static in the air tells you that the calm has an expiration date.
I stepped forward, scanning the mirrors of shadow and light that hung between the trees at the edge of the breach. The world here was jagged. Nothing was aligned. Every horizon bent in a way that made your senses untrustworthy. I could feel the pulse of the tear, the slow vibration under the ground, like an animal breathing just beneath the soil.
A voice broke the uneasy stillness. Not loud, not commanding, but there in the air like it had been waiting for me to hear it.
“How’s it going.”
I didn’t turn immediately because I didn’t need to. The voice had a cadence I recognized. Logan’s tone was always blunt, not rude but precise, like he measured his words before discharge and rarely wasted syllables. He stepped out from behind a fractured stone pillar, hands resting on his belt, eyes scanning the horizon with the same trained caution I carried like an old wound.
I exhaled slowly and met his gaze. “Quiet,” I said. Quiet was a lie. Something was wrong. But this wasn’t the place to admit doubt. Not yet.
“Weird quiet,” he corrected, his eyes never still. The Dark Realm didn’t allow stillness, not really. Not if you were alive. “Last hour was dead silent. That usually means they’re either hiding or gathering.”
We both knew which one we preferred less.
Then the oracle arrived.
He didn’t make an entrance. No dramatic flare. No ancient echoes in the air. He just appeared, glasses low on his nose, long dark coat brushing the cracked earth like he walked a runway not a rupture in existence. He was lean, his face calm in a way that suggested he always knew something before anyone else did. He didn’t need an introduction because his presence carried weight, like gravity shifted just a little closer when he stepped into a space.
“How long have you been here,” he asked, not looking at us but at the fractured horizon.
“Minutes,” Logan said, cocking his head toward me and leaving out the part about hours spent watching the perimeter for signs of shift.
The oracle nodded once, as if that answered everything he needed. Then he turned his gaze to me. His eyes were unreadable behind the glasses, like glass that reflected everything but revealed nothing.
“I can sense it,” he said, voice calm and deep, like he wasn’t trying to unsettle me but simply stating a fact as though it were normal. “The gargoyles are growing more restless. Something tells me war is coming again soon.”
That word lodged in me like a stone.
“Why,” I asked without thinking. “What changed.”
He looked out through the misty edges of the Dark Realm, colors bending in ways that shouldn’t be possible, then looked back at me once, slowly, with an eerie patience.
“They know,” he said. “They know there is another.”
The blood drained from my face a little when he said it. My mind slipped back to her. To Kristen. To the girl who didn’t have a power that was obvious yet but walked through that academy like she was a question everyone wanted an answer to but couldn’t find a reason to ask. The oracle’s words didn’t have to elaborate for me to understand where this was heading.
“They will do everything they can to find whoever it was,” he said, as if reading my unfinished thoughts. “And once they do, they will not stop.”
His gaze settled on me then, unflinching. “You are not just protecting a girl. You are actively preventing the end of the universe and reality as a whole.”
The gravity in his voice was not metaphor. Not exaggeration. It was a simple statement of cosmic stakes delivered in the same tone he might use to ask if it was raining outside.
My jaw tightened. I could feel the weight of it settling over my shoulders like armor that was too heavy to shrug off. If what he said was true, then everything I’d been doing, every maneuver, every watcher placed around Phoenix, every silent shift of guard and shadow, was scratching at the surface of something much larger.
“She can never find out who she really is,” the oracle continued. “Or what she can do. That knowledge would draw them faster than blood scent draws a wolf. And a Kyro must be protected until its nature is known. Until then, you must guard her with your life.”
My teeth clenched so hard it sounded in my head like grinding metal. I buried the rest of that reaction where no one could see it. Not even Logan. You never flinched in front of the oracle. That was bloodhound protocol. Discipline over impulse.
“If it comes to that,” I said, voice flat but steeled, “I will.”
The oracle’s expression didn’t change, but there was a flicker, slight and quick, that suggested approval. Then he turned, facing the torn veil of the Dark Realm once more.
“In the meantime,” he said, voice carrying over the brittle wind, “you will probably need to perspire a way. The kind we haven’t seen in millennia.”
The word smeared the air with strange weight, like an old warning disguised as an everyday phrase. He didn’t wait for questions. He simply walked back into the distortion of flickering light and shadow that marked the boundary between worlds.
Logan watched him go for a moment, then exhaled slowly. “He’s not a man of easy words,” Logan said.
“No,” I replied, didn’t sound like myself, felt heavier than myself, “he’s not.”
We stood there in silence, the wind arriving in small, uncertain gusts that felt almost like breath against your neck. I turned my head slightly toward the tear. The colors rippled like heat haze, like memory leaking into the present. I knew that if I listened close enough I could hear something low and distant, like a heartbeat in the soil.
Maybe it was just the world breathing.
Maybe it was something else.
But there was a sinking feeling at the bottom of my spine that told me I would never hear silence the same way again. Not after this. Not since she walked into the academy gates unaware of the fate stitched into her blood, unaware that the universe was already shifting around her.
And in the quiet beneath that restless air, I wondered whether she was sleeping. Whether she was dreaming. Whether whatever was coming might already be touching her mind even now.
I exhaled slowly and turned my gaze back toward the ripple of the tear, feeling the weight of every possibility pressed against the skin of the world.
This was far from over. Far from quiet. And the war was just beginning.