Not a tremor.
Not a simple quake.
A massive blow.
The first blast slams through the Barrow’s outer wards like a hammer into the bones of the realm.
I feel it before anyone else—the shock rippling through the foundations, cracking along fault lines only I and the earth can see.
The floor bucks beneath our feet.
Stone groans, a low, grinding roar that rattles my teeth. Dust sifts from the joints in the ceiling.
A deep BOOM rolls in from outside, followed by another, layered sound—avalanche, earthquake, siege.
Alina’s hand clamps around my arm.
“Dagan?” she demands over the din. “What was that?”
I lift my head, listening.
Not with my ears.
With the Marches.
The outer ring of wards shivers, flares, fights. Impact after impact crashes against the Barrow’s defenses, each one setting off a chain reaction of strain and resistance through the stone.
Roots tear free of their resting places to reinforce weak points. Cracks birth themselves along the outer walls only to seal again beneath a flood of green.
The castle shivers.
Not in fear.
In fury.
“The wards,” I say, and my voice does not sound like my own. It is lower. Rougher. “Someone just slammed straight into the outer ring.”
Lightning—root-light, not sky-fire—lances along the ceiling, tracing bright fractures that mend almost as quickly as they appear.
Dust starts to fall, then stops midair as vines punch through from above, catching the debris and knitting it back into the stone.
The Barrow is awake.
The next blast is closer.
The floor lurches. A cabinet slides an inch before the wall swallows its base to keep it steady.
Jules cries out, curling around Marcel, who wakes and wails, his outrage thin and fierce.
Clarisse stumbles and clutches the wall, words of old prayers spilling from her lips.
Thorne’s flames roar higher, wreathing his hands. Kael’s pupils slit, sea-bright eyes darkening as water rattles in the air around him.
Alaric moves in front of the bed on instinct, putting himself between his family and the door, wings flaring wide.
All of them turn to me.
The Lord of Earth.
