This is the end of a world trying not to die.
The battlefield sprawls beneath us like a wound ripped open and left to fester.
Stone is split into jagged plates.
Fire rains in sheets.
Water slams into the ground hard enough to crack it.
Wind shrieks through the broken terrain in knife-edged spirals, carrying screams and soot and the metallic tang of blood.
And threaded through everything—like oil spilled into clean water—is Idris.
His magic is wrong. Not elemental. Not alive.
It oozes.
It clings.
It stains the air a sickly green-black, like the sky itself is being poisoned from the inside out.
Where it touches, the earth doesn’t just burn or flood or shatter—it rots.
It crumbles into gray sludge that steams and writhes as if it wants to crawl.
My stomach turns.
And then I see them—the Lords of Nightfall, our viyens.
Dagan is a wall of stone and storm at the center of it all, wings spread wide, obsidian feathers ragged at the edges like they’ve been shredded by claws.
His skin is streaked with blood—dark against the pale gold glow of his eyes.
He’s holding the ground together with pure will.
Thorne is an inferno that keeps trying to go out and refuses. Fire lashes around him in furious bursts, then gutters as if something is drinking it down.
His bone-mask is cracked. His shoulders are heaving.
Kael stands near the western line, water churning around him in a tidal ring that slams back SoulTakers again and again—but even from here I can see his hands shaking.
He sways. He steadies. He pushes.
Alaric—half Dragon, half man—dives out of the smoke with a roar that hits my bones like thunder.
He lands hard, claws tearing trenches through the earth, and for one terrifying second he falters.
They’re losing.
Not because they aren’t strong enough.
Because every time they strike, something steals the strike from them.
Idris’ ritual is a siphon.
A net.
A parasite latched onto the spine of Nightfall itself.
