“For now,” I echo.
Hours pass in that work.
Checking the outer tunnels.
Shoring weak points.
Embedding smaller ward-stones where the rock feels thin.
By the time we emerge from the depths, the Gemini Moon has shifted in the sky, bone-bright side higher, rust-red side darker, as if even it is tired.
The moment we hit open air, Dagan doesn’t bother with ceremony.
“I must return,” he says gruffly. “The Rooted Marches will not tend themselves. The Stoneharrow Quarries need oversight—and my bed in The Barrow is calling to me. Besides, my people will ask too many questions if I am gone much longer.”
He barely gives us time for farewells.
One second, he’s a towering figure of stone and muscle.
The next, the ground cracks open beneath him in a graceful, spiraling column of rock and dust. When it collapses, he’s gone—already traveling back to his fortress of stone and storm, The Barrow, to walk his farmlands and quarries and reassure them their Lord still breathes.
Alaric snorts. “He hates goodbyes.”
Kael smirks faintly. “He hates anything that smells like sentiment.”
I don’t comment.
Because while they’re talking, my senses are already reaching outward—past the campfires, past the shifting lines of soldiers, past the mustering miners—to one place.
One presence.
Her.
Delia.
The bond thrums like plucked wire, vibrant and impatient.
I let it pull me.
Duty is done—for now.
The Ember Vein is warded, the SoulTakers thwarted, the realm still breathing.
Which means I am free.
Free to go to the one thing I did not plan for.
The one thing I never expected to need.
My Shula.
Chapter 24
Delia
Ashfell, Nightfall
Fire isn’t supposed to feel like coming home.
