Chapter 26
Dagan
The Last Battlefield, The Rooted Marches
War tastes like metal and ash.
The air outside the Barrow is thick with both—smoke boiling across the sky, earth torn open in jagged wounds.
The Glowworm Moon hangs above us, veined with pale green light, watching like a single unblinking eye.
SoulTakers swarm the slopes.
Not soldiers—hordes. Twisted things in stolen flesh, eyes hollowed out and refilled with cold fire.
Some still wear the faces of people I know—farmers, miners, guards.
My people.
Now puppets.
Idris stands behind them all.
High on a ridge of broken stone, wrapped in robes the color of old bruises, his staff driven into the ground like a spike.
Ember ore shards hover around him in a floating ring, each one black-veined and wrong, pulsing with a sickly green-red light.
The corrupted ore screams in the bones of the world.
I feel every note of it.
To my left, Thorne moves like a storm given legs. My brother of flame is pure inferno—bone-mask snapped over his face, body haloed in red-gold fire.
Every swing of his arm sends a wave of searing heat through the SoulTaker ranks, turning a dozen at a time to smoking cinders.
To my right, Kael answers with water.
Walls of tide rise out of thin air at his command, crashing through enemy lines, quenching dark fire and dragging shrieking bodies beneath churning whirlpools that vanish into the rock.
Above us, Alaric owns the sky.
He is Dragon—massive, silver-scaled, wings blotted with night. He dives and rakes, claws tearing through whole formations, his roar splitting the air. Blue-white flame pours from his jaw, carving glowing scars across the battlefield.
And me?
I am the bones of this place.
I stomp my heel into the ground and feel the Marches answer.
Pillars of stone erupt beneath SoulTaker feet, launching them into the air before crushing them back into the dirt.
Ridges heave and twist at my command, opening into pits that swallow entire squads whole.
A ring of sharpened obsidian spikes surges up to encircle Idris’ position—but his staff flares and my stone shatters, shards flung aside like sand.
“Dagan!” Kael shouts, voice rough over the din. “Center line!”
I feel it before I see it—a surge of corrupted heat, a pressure wave rolling out from Idris’ ridge.
