He stands braced, both hands pressed to the rubble that used to be our primary entry to The Ember Vein—stone and metal piled high from the initial bombardment.
His eyes glow deep earthen gold as he strains, breath a low rumble that the ground echoes.
The broken rock shivers. Groans. Then, it begins to move.
Huge slabs of basalt and obsidian shift aside, forming an angled passage just wide enough for a single massive body.
“If you do not hurry,” Dagan grits out, sweat beading on his brow, “I will let the mountain crush you.”
A SoulTaker bolt slams into his shoulder, necrotic energy eating at his flesh.
He growls, stone flowing up his side to form crude armor, sealing the wound as fast as it opens.
“Hold it,” I snarl. “Just long enough.”
I do not wait for a reply.
The crown safe in the Eyrie burns against my consciousness, distant but insistent.
The wards we wove around the Vein scream in the back of my mind—hammered, tested, not yet broken.
Not yet.
The Ember Vein must hold.
For Nightfall. For the multiverse. For Delia.
My flame surges, answering a call that is older than any crown.
I step into the half-formed gap Dagan has carved.
Stone presses tight around me, heat building.
I let my corporeal form go, body unraveling into smoke and fire.
I pour myself through the crack—through the smallest fracture in the rock, slipping past stone and ward and earth.
For an instant, there is nothing.
No sound. No sky. No brothers.
Only pressure and heat and the wild, exultant rush of being pure flame.
Then I reform on the other side of the collapse, in the dark throat of the main tunnel.
The Ember Vein breathes around me.
Veins of molten rock pulse in the walls, threads of cinder ore glowing like buried lightning.
The air is hotter here—thick, oppressive, humming with power.
Every surface shimmers with residual magic, the life’s blood of the Vein traveling in hidden arteries toward the forges deeper below.
The wards we set together—Alaric’s blue sigils, Kael’s rippling water-spirals, Dagan’s runes carved into stone—flare with sickly light.
Something has been gnawing at them from the inside.
“IDRIS!”
