Izan’s hand lingers on my face for one more heartbeat. Then he steps back, and the Enforcer slides into place over the man who just kissed me like I was precious.
“Stay close to me in the cistern.” His voice carries the edge of command. “Whatever happens, don’t let them separate us.”
“I won’t.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
ALERIE
Dawn breaks over Pyraeth with the sound of dragonfire.
Corveth’s soldiers hit the outer nodes in coordinated waves while Kaelreth’s dragons seal the surface approaches with fire. The sounds of battle carry across the city’s tiers as Izan and I descend into the earth, following the route Seravax’s intelligence mapped through the oldest passages beneath the lower districts. By the time we reach the cistern’s outer tunnels, the assault is thirty minutes old. The trap is sprung. There is no going back.
The Sundered Cisternis wrong in ways that defy every sense I possess.
We descend through tunnels carved from living rock, following routes that Seravax’s intelligence marked as the least defended approach. Strike teams have already engaged the outer defenses—I hear the distant chaos of combat echoing through stone passages, the roar of dragonfire, the screams of the dying. The sounds should fade as we push deeper into the earth.
They don’t. The cistern’s acoustics carry whispers across impossible distances while swallowing shouts inches from the mouth. A man’s death cry reaches me as clearly as if he fell beside me, then vanishes into silence so absolute, it makes my ears ring.
The air grows thick as we descend. Heavy with magical residue that coats my tongue with the taste of old metal and older power. My Vireth senses recoil from it, screaming warnings that my conscious mind struggles to interpret. The aether here doesn’t flow the way it should—it pools. Stagnates. Waits.
Izan moves ahead of me, his body a wall of controlled violence between me and whatever lurks below. The ember-glow in his eyes has intensified until it casts actual shadows on the passage walls, and scales ripple beneath the skin of his forearms—the dragon riding so close to the surface that containment costs him visible effort. Every few steps, his hand reaches back to brush my arm. Checking. Confirming.
Still here.
The thought grounds me against the cistern’s wrongness. Whatever waits below, I’m not facing it alone.
“The strike teams have engaged the outer fortifications.” Izan’s voice carries the distortion of a throat not quite human. “We should have clear passage to the central chamber.”
Should.The word sits in the thick air, heavy with everything this place has already refused to cooperate with.
Nothing about this place suggests it follows anyone’s plans.
The passage openswithout warning into a cavern that breaks my understanding of scale.
The ceiling rises beyond sight into darkness, lost in shadows that the sickly yellow-green glow of crystallized aether stalactites cannot penetrate. The floor slopes downward toward a central depression where ancient channels converge—patterns carved into stone that are too regular to be natural, too worn to be recent. Scholars have studied these markings for generations without comprehending them.
The Blood Regent has achieved what scholars couldn’t. He’susedthem.
His ritual altar occupies the central depression, a construction of volcanic stone and processed blood that makes my Vireth senses shriek from a hundred feet away. Power pulses through the channels in sluggish heartbeats, feeding the altar from anchor points scattered throughout the chamber. The binding magic I analyzed on the strategy table—all those crimson lines radiating from ritual nodes—this is where they converge. This is where an entire city’s enslavement will crystallize into an unbreakable reality.
Ash Cardinals in gray robes maintain stations at each convergence point, their faces hidden beneath ritual masks, their hands weaving patterns of binding magic that my blood recognizes and despises. Dozens of them. More than intelligence suggested.
And at the chamber’s heart, standing before his altar with an expression of patient satisfaction, waits the man who orchestrated all of it.
The Blood Regent is handsome in the way executioner’s blades are handsome—attractive, functional, designed to cause harm. His eyes catch the sickly aether-light strangely, reflecting hints of ember-gold that shouldn’t exist in human irises. He wears rich crimson and black, colors that mock dragon imagery without earning the right to claim it. His movements carry a predatory grace that my instincts recognize asabsorbed—powerthat once belonged to others, processed through ritual until it has become his own skin.
“The Vireth witch.” His voice carries across the chamber with unnatural clarity, the cistern’s twisted acoustics amplifying his words while muffling everything else. “I wondered if you’d have the courage to come yourself, or if you’d hide behind dragon scales until the last moment.”
“I don’t hide.” I keep my voice steady despite the way my magic churns in response to the ritual’s proximity. Every instinct screams at me to sever the bindings I can feel pulsing through this chamber—to tear his network apart, strand by strand. “Not anymore.”
“No?” His smile doesn’t reach those wrong-lit eyes. “Then you’re more valuable than I anticipated. The Vireth are nothing more than fuel for the engine of my divinity. I don’t care about your ‘nature’ or your defiance; I care only for the resonance of your pulse against the stone. You’re a beautiful, screaming battery, Alerie—and I will drain you until there’s nothing left but the echo of your blood in my channels.”
“My nature is my own to define.”
The Blood Regent’s smile sharpens into a blade. “We’ll see.”
He raises one elegant hand.
