It started like any other night at the gods' camp.

Dionysus had insisted on winding down with “grape meditation,” which was really just him feeding us different flavors of wine and analyzing our emotional reactions. Astronaros had made a face at a sweet honey blend, I’d nearly dozed off against Hephaestus’s shoulder, and Hermes had been caught trying to switch everyone’s cups again. A normal, strange, almost peaceful night.

But then I woke up.

And the world was wrong.

The air felt... too still. Too quiet.

Astronaros always made noise in his sleep—half-breaths, restless shifting, soft sighs like stars collapsing in miniature. But now—

Nothing.

“Astro?” I whispered, propping myself up.

The bedroll beside mine was empty.

I stood slowly, magic trembling at my fingertips.

"Astronaros?" I called louder, stepping out of our tent. The campfire had burned down to coals. Dionysus was asleep in a wine-drenched sprawl beneath an olive tree, and Hermes was nowhere to be seen. Hephaestus’s forge-light was still pulsing faintly in the distance, but otherwise—nothing stirred.

Until something did.

Something moved.

A flicker in the woods.

Time fractured for a second, vision doubling—triple—then snapping back.

No.

No, it couldn't be—

I ran.

The forest swallowed sound. Swallowed light. My breath caught in my throat as I moved through the trees like a ghost chasing a nightmare. And then—

There.

A flash of violet fabric.

Astronaros’s cloak snagged on a branch, torn.

"Astronaros!" I shouted.

But I felt it before I saw it.

The same cold ripple from before. The monster. That impossible distortion, a twisting of magic and malice and something ancient that should not be.

The thing we’d barely survived back on the first day.

Only this time—it was smarter.

It didn’t attack in daylight. It didn’t come when we were together.

It came for Astronaros when he was most vulnerable. Alone. Asleep.

A trap.

A whisper of black mist passed ahead of me. I pushed harder, tearing through space with a pulse of magic to slow the moment—stretching time like taffy. I reached a clearing—and stumbled to a halt.

Astronaros was suspended mid-air, unconscious, tangled in strands of something black and shimmerless, like the absence of starlight itself. The creature—if it could be called that—was less visible this time. A crack in the world. A wound shaped like hunger. Its eyes, if those were eyes, were small lights within its smoky outline, and they glowed like dying suns.

I felt it see me.

Felt it know me.

And then—it was gone.

With Astronaros.

Like a match being snuffed out mid-burn.

I don't remember falling. Just the cold aftershock of it. The silence after a scream that never reached my throat.

I barely made it back to camp. I don’t know if I walked or ran or blinked and reappeared. Time bent too much.

“Pneumeros?” Hephaestus was the first to spot me. He’d rushed out of his forge, shirtless, hammer in one hand, the glow of molten gold still on his skin.

“Where’s Astro?” Dionysus asked, voice still half-sleepy but suddenly sharp.

I collapsed to my knees.

“He’s gone.”

Those words felt foreign in my mouth. Wrong.

“What do you mean gone?” Hermes appeared beside me in a gust of wind, wild-eyed.

“The monster,” I whispered. “From the forest. It came back. It took him.”

Silence rippled through them.

And then fury.

Dionysus’s goblet shattered in his grip, the wine boiling as it hit the ground. Hephaestus’s hands flared with heat, and Hermes’s pupils narrowed to slits.

“They dared,” Dionysus growled, his voice lower than I’d ever heard it. “They dared touch ours.”

Hephaestus knelt beside me. “You saw it?”

I nodded. “It was... different. Like it evolved. Like it waited for the right moment.”

Hermes vanished and reappeared with a handful of silver feathers and a torn fig leaf. “Northwest edge of the forest. They went into shadowspace.”

“Shadowspace?” I choked. “That’s forbidden. Even for gods.”

“Exactly,” Hermes muttered. “Whatever this thing is, it’s not bound by rules anymore.”

Dionysus looked at me, all trace of flirtation gone. “Do you know what this means?”

I stared back. “We’re not training anymore.”

He nodded once. “We’re hunting.”