The child-thing continued its terrible lullaby, each note designed to entrance and destroy. But Serenya saw past the corruption to what it had once been—an innocent turned into a weapon, a baby’s song perverted into something that reeked of the Gloam’s influence.
Her hands trembled as she muttered a counter-sigil. Not from fear—from furious grief that something so pure could be twisted into an instrument of devastation. The sight broke her heart even as rage ignited her magic.
“When the dark comes, baby will fall...”
Something snapped in Vaelrik’s consciousness. His dragon eyes blazed crimson as he recognized the truth—this wasn’t a child anymore. It was a corrupted weapon aimed at everything in its path, using innocence as camouflage for annihilation.
His shadowfire erupted in a controlled torrent, violet-black flames consuming the shadow-creature mid-song. The lullaby died in a shriek of collapsing darkness, the last note obliterated before it could complete its deadly melody.
Silence settled over the battlefield. The remaining shadow-creatures dissolved into ash, their forms too weak to maintain cohesion without their conductor. Fog began to thin, revealing the devastation beneath—collapsed roads etched with corruption burns, scorched bodies twisted into impossible angles, and the brackish water of the marsh glowing faintly with residual poison.
Serenya’s hands shook from the burn of spent sigils and the lingering echo of channeling light through Vaelrik’s curse. Stabilizing him and fighting beside him had taken more out of her than she wanted to admit.
Vaelrik’s transformation back to human form sent tremors through the ground. When the light faded, his skin gleamed with sweat and ash, and his dark hair fell across his face as he breathed hard from the exertion. He gathered his tattered clothes and surprisingly intact armor, and dressed with practiced efficiency.
Serenya knelt down beside a survivor whose arm bore the telltale blackening of shadow-touch. Her lumen sigils flared as she pressed her palms to the infection, light threading through the corrupted flesh to knit away the worst of the damage. The process left her drained but satisfied—one more life pulled back from the edge.
But the child-lullaby still rang in her head, each note a puzzle piece in a pattern she was beginning to recognize. From her studies of corruption magic, she knew Gloamrot followed certain principles. It consumed. It spread. It adapted.
But this felt different. Coordinated. Like something was guiding the plague’s movements, spiraling inward toward the Gloam with purpose she couldn’t yet understand.
“The pattern’s wrong,” she murmured, rising to her feet as Vaelrik approached.
“Which pattern?” His voice carried the rough edge of a man who’d just crushed something that should have been innocent.
“All of it.” She gestured toward the devastation around them. “Gloamrot spreads randomly. Chaotic. But these attacks—they’re moving toward the Gloam with intent. Like they’re being directed.”
Vaelrik’s jaw tightened. “Directed by what?”
Before she could answer, the Citadel’s bells began to blare across the distance—three long peals followed by rapid chiming that spoke of urgent summons. The Dragon Council’s leash tugged tight once more.
“Orders,” Kyr announced grimly, approaching with the handful of survivors they’d managed to save. His armor bore scorch marks, and his gray eyes held exhaustion that spoke of battles fought with too few resources against too many enemies.
Vaelrik glanced at Serenya, something unreadable flickering across his features. She rose to stand beside him, her jaw set with purpose despite the binding sigil that still burned on her wrist. Her lumen sigils continued to glow faintly beneath her skin, responding to his proximity with warmth she didn’t want to acknowledge.
They walked back toward Cinderhollow together, Kyr leading the way with survivors who looked like they’d witnessed the end of the world. The partnership between her and Vaelrik was no longer political, Serenya realized. It had become a necessity forged in shadowfire and light. What worried her was that the shadows were learning faster than either of them could.
Thirty minutes later, the Citadel’s obsidian halls stretched endlessly before them, each step echoing like a countdown to judgment. Serenya’s legs ached from their battle in the Weeping March, ash still clinging to her boots, but the Council’s summons brooked no delay for rest or recovery. Her body craved food, sleep, and a moment to process what had just occurred.
“Can’t even let us wash the blood off first,” she muttered under her breath.
Vaelrik walked beside her in silence, his presence solid and unnervingly steady. Streaks of soot still marked his jaw, and his dark hair fell across his eyes in a way that made him look more human than the weapon the Council treated him as. But there was tension in his shoulders, a coiled readiness that spoke of a man preparing for another kind of battle entirely.
The Dragon Council chamber doors loomed ahead—twin slabs of black stone carved with sigils that hurt to look at directly. The same doors she’d been dragged through yesterday when her life had been stripped away without consent.
“Ready for round two?” Vaelrik’s voice carried a thread of dark humor.
“I wasn’t ready for round one.” She flexed her fingers, feeling the binding sigil pulse warm against her wrist. “But apparently my opinion is decorative.”
They stepped into the chamber, and Serenya’s stomach clenched with remembered violation. The circular amphitheater carved into Cinderhollow’s highest tower remained exactly as it had been yesterday—black stone polished to a mirror sheen that reflected distorted images of power and cruelty. But today, without the haze of shock, she noticed details that made her skin crawl.
Obsidian mirrors lined the walls at precise angles, creating an infinity of reflections that fractured every face into sharp, inhuman geometry. The four ruling Houses—Obsidian, Ember, Storm, and Bone—occupied elevated thrones arranged like a tribunal of gods passing judgment on mortals. Light filtered through volcanic glass above, casting everything in hues of ember and ash.
It wasn’t a meeting place. It was a theater designed to strip dignity from anyone who wasn’t born with wings and fire intheir blood. And witches were rarely given speaking roles in this performance.
Archon Serect rose from his Ember throne with predatory grace, his golden eyes sweeping over them both.
“Our witch asset returns,” he announced, each word chosen to cut.
