Then the temperature plummeted.
Frost raced across the floor in expanding circles. The walls crackled as moisture within the wood crystallized instantly. Saguna's breath fogged before his face, and the metal hinges of the chest grew painfully cold against his skin.
A new shadow formed in the center of the room, larger than the others, its darkness so absolute it seemed to devour the light around it. Unlike the others, this one had a defined shape, almost human but stretched too tall, too thin. It moved with terrible purpose directly toward Sahara.
His sister sent a massive wave of fire toward the new threat, but the flames parted around it like water around a stone. The fire protecting her flickered and dimmed as if struggling against some invisible force.
The Walker awakens, the shadow thing said in that bone-vibrating non voice. We have waited so long.
"Stay back!" Sahara commanded, but fear had crept into her voice.
The shadow advanced steadily, unaffected by her increasingly desperate attacks. The other creatures circled closer, emboldened by their leader's arrival.
Saguna couldn't take it anymore. His sister was in danger. He pushed against the chest lid, forgetting Sahara's warning in his desperation to help her.
The chest creaked.
Every shadow in the room froze. The largest one slowly turned toward the sound, those empty eye-sockets somehow fixing directly on Saguna's hiding place.
There you are, it purred in his mind. The true prize.
It moved with impossible speed, flowing across the room toward the chest. Sahara screamed a word Saguna didn't recognize, and a wall of fire erupted between the shadow and his hiding place. But the creature simply plunged through the flames, reaching for the chest with elongated fingers that trailed frost in their wake.
Saguna pressed back against the far side of the chest, clutching the strange disk Sahara had given him. The lid began to frost over, ice spreading from the outside inward. The air inside grew painfully cold, his lungs burning with each breath.
Then Sahara was there, throwing herself bodily between the shadow and the chest. Her hands blazed with fire so bright it hurt to look at directly. The flames spiralled around her in a protective tornado, pushing the shadow back momentarily.
"RUN, SAGUNA!" she screamed, throwing the chest lid open with one hand while maintaining the fire barrier with the other.
Saguna scrambled out, clutching the disk so tightly it cut into his palm. The bedroom had transformed into a nightmare. Frost covered every surface, shadow creatures clung to the walls and ceiling, and the largest shadow loomed over Sahara, its form seeming to absorb the light and heat from the room.
"The window!" Sahara ordered, gesturing toward the small window at the back of the room, the only one still intact. "Jump into the water. Swim to Old Man Reza's house!"
"I can't leave you!" Saguna cried, even as his body moved instinctively toward the escape route.
"You must!" Sahara grunted with effort as she maintained the fire shield against the pressing darkness. "I'll be right behind you!"
The large shadow suddenly split into multiple tendrils that whipped around the fire barrier, trying to encircle Sahara. She spun, flames trailing from her fingertips in a deadly arc that severed the shadow appendages. But where she cut them, they simply reformed, advancing relentlessly.
Saguna reached the window, his small hands fumbling with the latch. Behind him, he heard Sahara cry out in pain. He turned to see a shadow tendril wrapped around her ankle, black frost spreading up her leg where it touched.
"GO!" she shouted, her voice cracking as she sent another wave of fire toward the center mass of the shadow.
The window finally gave way. Saguna balanced on the ledge, the dark water of the bay visible below. Their house stood on stilts over the shallow section of the harbor—it wouldn't be a dangerous drop for a boy who had been swimming since before he could walk.
He hesitated, looking back one last time.
What he saw would haunt his nightmares for years to come.
The largest shadow had finally broken through Sahara's defenses. Its arms wrapped around her, black frost spreading wherever it touched. His sister's fire was dying, flickering weakly as the cold overwhelmed her.
"SAHARA!" Saguna screamed, abandoning his escape to run back toward her.
His sister's eyes met his across the room, as the shadow constricted around her torso.
The air in the room suddenly distorted, as if reality itself was being warped. A tear appeared behind Sahara, not a physical rip, but a violation of space itself. Through it, Saguna glimpsed a landscape of swirling mists and strange mass that hurt his eyes to look at directly.
"NO!" Saguna cried, lunging toward his sister.
Sahara raised her hand toward him, a final spark of fire blooming in her palm. "Go, little brother. Save yourself."
The shadow engulfing her seemed to collapse inward, pulling Sahara with it toward the tear in reality. As it did, a pulse of force knocked Saguna backward, sending him tumbling through the open window.
The last thing he saw before falling was his sister's face, already half-translucent, her hand reaching toward him as both she and the shadow were drawn into the impossible tear in the world.
Then he was falling, the cold waters of the bay rushing up to meet him.
***
The official report called it a typhoon. But no one could explain the ice that coated the Taksa house interior, or the strange burns on the walls. They never found Sahara's body, and when young Saguna tried to tell them about the shadow creatures, they patted his head and spoke of trauma and grief hallucinations.
His parents stopped speaking to each other after the third month of searching. His father left for the Ember Isles before the year was out. His mother took to staring at the sea for hours, waiting for a daughter who would never return.
Only Old Man Reza, who had pulled Saguna from the water that day, ever seemed to believe him. "Some storms aren't made by nature, boy," he'd said once, when Saguna was twelve and still having nightmares. "Some come from the spaces between worlds. Keep that disk safe. One day, you'll need it."
Saguna had tried to show him the disk, but discovered it had vanished from his pocket during his fall into the bay. Another piece of Sahara, gone forever.
Eventually, he stopped talking about shadow people and impossible tears in reality. He learned to keep his head down on Wednesdays, when the whispers at the edge of his hearing grew strongest. He built a life around avoiding anything that reminded him of that day.
Until now.