A lullaby.
A soft, tragic thing he hadn’t heard in centuries—sung in cradles and bedrooms. Meant to soothe children through nightmares, through things they were too young to understand.
Where in the gods-damned realms had they learnedthat?
The shadows didn’t learn from others. Not truly. Not without his will behind it.
But this wasn’t his.
This washers.
The melody Isara had sung when she killed the girl. They’d remembered it. Taken it in. Echoed it back. They’d chosen to learn from her.
Whynow?
And before he could think better of it—before he could remind himself of where he was, of what Xyliria would do—he hummed back.
A different melody.
One older.
Darker.
A song he’d carried since he was a fresh-faced High Lord, standing on blood-soaked soil with too much power in his bones and too little wisdom in his heart.
It was a ballad of death. Of glory and tragedy and warriors sent to die for causes that never cared for them. A hymn to fallen brothers. To lost leaders. To the cost of war.
Fitting,really.
The moment the sound left his throat, he felt Xyliria’s presence shift, sensed the fury before it struck.
The blade sliced clean down his chest. A line of fire, of torn flesh and burning nerves.
But he didn’t flinch.
Didn’t make a sound.
Because the shadows had taken the two melodies andmergedthem.
And it was… breathtaking.
It shouldn’t have been beautiful. But it was. It filled the room like light slipping through battlefield smoke. And for a single, precious heartbeat?—
Nothing else mattered.
Just the music.
Just the shadows singing.
A final gift, perhaps. From a power that knew, just as he did, that his time was nearly done.
67
Isara wasn’t really there. She stood inside his chambers, exactly where the guards had left her, just past the threshold. As though she’d forgotten how to move forward. Perhaps she’dforgotten how to move at all.
Caked in blood, some dried and flaking, staining her skin and torn clothes. But there was fresh blood too, dripping from her hands. Not hers. He could tell in the way she held herself, no pain in her stance, no protective hunch over unseen wounds. But that wasn’t what drew his attention, not truly.
Her eyes were vacant.
