Pain lances through my chest, sharp and blinding, as if something has stabbed my core.
Far above, far away, I feel my bond flare again.
Delia.
Her fear, her stubbornness, her wild, reckless love.
“No more,” I snarl, letting the mask and the fire and the fury take me fully.
The chamber becomes an inferno.
Skeleton wings stretch to their full span. My flames roar, shoving back the null-magic by sheer force of will. Every dead thing Idris has twisted becomes tinder, burning in my wrath.
“I am Thorne,” I bellow. “Lord of Fire. Keeper of The Ember Vein. And I am done watching you gnaw on my world.”
I hurl myself at him, through undead and shadow and screaming magic.
Let him try to distract me.
Let him try to break me.
He will learn, as everyone does, that there is nothing more dangerous than fire with something to protect.
The chamber around Idris becomes a furnace.
Undead things writhe in my flames, bone, and tainted ore cracking, shrieking as they are reduced to ash.
Shadows scream and peel away from the walls, unable to withstand the full fury of my fire.
For a heartbeat, I see only him—Idris, staff planted, robes whipping in the heat.
Then something else tugs at me.
A sound under the roar of battle.
Scraping.
Gnawing.
The wards.
I tear my attention away, every instinct howling in protest, and feel for the pulse of The Ember Vein.
There.
Deeper still. Beneath this guard node, beneath this desecrated chamber. A second set of protections, one only I and the other Lords touched when we wove them.
Someone—or something—is clawing at them.
Idris howls amid the inferno of my making. Then, his mouth curls in a knowing smile, and with a mighty clap of dark power he is gone—boom!
“IDRIS! YOU COWARD!”
I have no time to snarl at the wretch, and so I hurl myself into the next tunnel.
Stone blurs into streaks of red and black around me. The deeper I go, the hotter it gets—heat even I can feel, lava-thick and ancient.
The Ember Vein hums louder now, its power thrumming through the rock like a heart under strain.
