Three Demon Lords.
“I’ll bring him home,” I say it one more time, and maybe I’m even starting to believe it.
Then I turn and run, heart and bond blazing, toward whatever waits for me on the other side of the portal.
Hold on, Thorne. I’m coming.
Chapter 29
Thorne
The Ember Vein Mining Camp
War smells like hot metal, old blood, and fear.
It rolls over The Ember Vein camp in choking waves—smoke and ash and the copper tang of spilled life. The sky above the Broken Plains is lit with fire not my own, streaks of necrotic green and sickly violet carving through the natural glow of the forges.
The SoulTakers have come in force.
They pour over the ridges in jagged lines, armor made of scavenged bone and twisted ore. Their magic gnaws at the edges of reality—every spell they cast frays the air, unpicking what should never be undone.
Most of the miners’ families and the tradesmen have been evacuated. The noncombatants are on the move—herded toward the far caravans, toward hastily cut portals and warded holds.
But not all.
Too many stayed to fight. Too many who should be sheltered have chosen to stand.
The SoulTakers do not care.
They cut through tents and forges and flesh without distinction. Civilians, soldiers, Dreamwrights—it’s all the same to them.
They want chaos. They want silence. They want the Vein.
They want everything.
But I will burn the world before I give it to them.
A blast of bone-white magic slams into the ridge to my right, rock exploding outward. I throw up a wall of fire, molten and thick, vaporizing the shrapnel before it can tear through the fleeing line of miners.
“Fall back behind the third ward-line!” I roar, my voice magnified by the bone mask that clings to my face. “Keep formation—do not break!”
My power roars in answer, flames leaping higher.
To my left, Alaric is a storm given form.
He has fully shifted—Dragon, enormous and terrible, silver-scaled body coiled around the western perimeter. His wings beat once, twice, sending gusts of razor wind tearing through a SoulTaker flank.
He opens his maw and breathes blue-white flame, annihilating an entire Legion knot in a single, blistering sweep.
To my right, Kael moves like the tide in a fury.
He stands at the edge of a broken supply line, arms flung wide, hair whipping in an unseen gale.
Water roars from nowhere, pulled through rifts in the air—the very moisture in the Plains screaming to answer him.
It cascades over the field, smothering wildfire the enemy unleashed, hardening into spears that impale necromantic constructs from within.
At the shattered mouth of the main tunnel, Dagan is a living bulwark—an embankment of flesh and stone and power.
