The Ash Cardinals move.
The assault comesfrom every direction at once.
Gray-robed Cardinals abandon their ritual stations and converge on our position, their movements coordinated with the mechanical precision of the blood-bound. Behind them, soldiers pour from passages I hadn’t noticed—blood-oath enhancedwarriors with borrowed strength and empty eyes, more than we anticipated, more than our intelligence suggested.
He knew we were coming. He prepared for exactly this.
Izan’s fire erupts with a roar that makes the cistern’s ancient walls shudder. He carves a burning path through the first wave of soldiers, his flames consuming flesh and blood-oaths alike. His heat washes over me in waves that would scorch anyone without Vireth resistance.
I fall into the rhythm we discovered during the market ambush. His fire clears the space; my magic severs the bindings that power our enemies. When his flames strip away the blood-oaths’ borrowed strength, my power ensures those bindings can’t reform. We move in concert—not planned, not practiced, but instinctive. Natural in ways that should terrify me.
A cardinal lunges at me with a ritual blade dripping with processed blood. I catch his wrist, twist, feel the blood-oath that drives him andpull. The binding unravels in my grip, and he collapses with a sound that’s half scream, half sob—a man waking from a nightmare to find himself in a worse one.
“Push toward the altar!” Izan’s command cuts through the chaos of combat. “If we disrupt the ritual before it reaches critical mass?—”
His words cut off as a fresh wave of blood-bound soldiers crashes against him. Not attacking to kill—absorbing. They throw themselves at his flames in endless waves, forcing him to burn through body after body while more replace the fallen. Sacrificial lambs designed to occupy a dragon while the real threat approaches its actual target.
They’re separating us.
I see the tactic for what it is an instant before it succeeds. The Blood Regent isn’t trying to defeat Izan—he’s trying tooccupyhim. Pin the dragon down with disposable bodies while his real attack focuses on the target that matters.
On me.
“Izan!”
He hears my warning. I see him try to break through the press of bodies, see fire erupt with renewed fury as he fights toward me. But the soldiers keep coming, and the distance between us grows with every heartbeat. Twenty feet. Thirty. His heat fades against my skin, replaced by the cistern’s fluctuating cold.
A figure steps between me and escape.
High Ritualist Threx looks like devotion eaten from the inside out. Gaunt and hollow-eyed, his body mapped with ritual scarification that traces patterns of blood-oath magic across every visible inch of skin. His hands are permanently stained with the iron-red of processed dragon blood, and his eyes hold the unfocused intensity of someone who sees divine purpose in mass enslavement.
He wears the robes of an Ash Cardinal, but he’s modified them with additional symbols. His tongue flickers out, tasting the iron in the air—a wet, hungry gesture. He doesn’t see a woman; he sees a ritual completion, his eyes tracking the silver binding marks on her skin as if he’s already imagining carving his own name into her marrow.
He believes he’s creating a new religion. I can see it in every line of his ruined face.
“The last Vireth.” His voice carries a fervent edge that makes my blood crawl. “Do you have any conception of how long I’ve waited for this moment? How many techniques I’ve developed specifically for your bloodline?”
“I’ve heard similar threats before.” I raise my knife, let my magic coil in preparation. “Usually from people who didn’t survive the encounter.”
Threx smiles with the certainty of a true believer whose faith has never been tested. “You’ve never faced me.”
His magic erupts.
TWENTY-EIGHT
ALERIE
The attack is unlike anything I’ve experienced.
Threx’s power tasteswrong—ash magic twisted by blood-binding techniques until it becomes a perversion of everything my bloodline represents. Where my Vireth abilities sever bindings and reject imposed authority, his workingsinvertthat power. They don’t strike at me directly. They try to turn my own magic against itself.
The first blow nearly drives me to my knees. Pain lances through my blood like fire, and I feel my power convulse in response—reaching for the bindings Threx creates and finding them designed specifically to trap Vireth magic. Every instinct screams at me to pull, to sever, to break his workings the way I’ve broken every blood-oath I’ve encountered.
That’s exactly what he wants.
I understand with cold clarity an instant before disaster. His magic is a trap. If I sever his bindings with my Vireth power, the backlash will tear through me instead of dissipating safely. He’s turned my greatest strength into a weapon pointed at my own heart.
He studied us. Prepared for exactly this.
