Chapter 97

Chapter 97 Kaelos's POV The village of Millhaven had been beautiful once. I could see it in the remnants—flower boxes beneath charred windows, cobblestones worn smooth by generations of footsteps, a fountain carved with laughing children that now ran red with something that wasn't water. Seraphina knelt beside one of the bodies, her face stone. The sigil on her palm flickered like a dying ember as she touched the victim's forehead. A young woman, barely past her twentieth year, with burn marks that spiraled inward toward her heart. "Ritual scarring," Esra murmured beside me, her voice tight with controlled fury. "They used her as a conduit." "All of them," Callista confirmed from across the square. She stood over a cluster of bodies—men, women, children. None had been spared. "Forty-three souls. Drained to fuel whatever working they attempted here." I crouched beside Seraphina, studying the pattern burned into the cobblestones. Unlike Ashfold's grand summoning circle, this was crude, h