Prologue 1: Dagan
The Fall of the Prime, Nightfall
The ground screams when gods bleed.
I hear it before I see it—the crack of bedrock beneath the battlefield, the shudder in the bones of Nightfall itself as if the realm draws breath to howl.
The sky over the Rooted Marches is a bruise, streaked with green lightning and SoulTaker fire.
Shadow armies swarm below, a hive of black armor and stolen light, their blades drinking the glow from the air.
And in the middle of it all, he stands.
The Prime.
Lord Aurel of the Crystal Caves.
My friend.
My king.
The only being who ever understood what it meant to have a realm wired into your veins.
“Dagan!” His voice booms through the storm, steady even as the wind tries to rip it apart. “Hold the line!”
I land beside him in a spray of broken stone, wings flaring wide.
Obsidian feathers catch the stormlight, throwing dark rainbows over the churned earth.
My claws sink into fractured rock and power answers me—a deep, resonant thrum that starts in the bedrock and floods my limbs.
“I am the line,” I growl.
He laughs once, short and harsh, eyes blazing with all the colors of Nightfall.
“Then don’t break, Dagan! By the gods, do not break!”
SoulTakers rush us.
They are not men.
Not really.
They wear the shapes of Nightfall’s fallen—twisted shadows of Demons and Dreamwrights—but their eyes are hollow pits, lit only by hunger.
They come for power, for the ore, for the dream forges, for the unmaking of everything that ever dared to hope.
I plant my feet and call the earth.
Stone spears rip from the ground, skewering the front ranks. Vines thicker than a man’s torso whip up from the cracked soil, thorns glistening with my blood and the realm’s magic.
They lash around SoulTaker limbs, dragging them screaming back into the dirt.
Beside me, the Prime is a storm given flesh.
His power is all four elements at once—fire in his hands, water at his command, air shuddering with every breath, earth bending to his will without argument.
When he moves, the battlefield moves with him.
