SEVENTEEN
TANITH
Ileave before dawn, while Arax maintains his vigil across the shelter.
The decision crystallized during the darkest hours of the night, while I lay on my cot pretending sleep I couldn’t find. Intelligence from Syrren’s latest report: three captives scheduled for sacrifice at a nexus site seventeen miles deep in the Reach. Two women. One child. The strike teams don’t deploy until noon—standard protocol, coordinated assault, systematic elimination of defenses.
By noon, the sacrifice cycle will be complete.
The camp’s perimeter wards recognize my magical signature and let me pass without raising alarms. I move through the gray predawn silence the way I’ve moved through hostile territory for years—each step calculated, my presence muted by the same skills that kept me alive during the long months before a dragon decided I was his to protect.
He will notice I’m gone within minutes of waking.
He will come for me.
I know this with a certainty that should trouble me more than it does. But I keep walking anyway, because three peoplewill die if I don’t, and I’ve spent too many years watching people die while I waited for better timing.
The nexus manifestsas the sun crests the horizon, casting sickly orange light across a landscape that shouldn’t exist. It’s built around a ley-line scar—one of the magical wounds left behind when the Reach first began its expansion—and the ash flows that power it pulse with rhythmic malevolence. Temporary structures cluster around a central platform where the ritual framework hums with accumulated energy.
Not permanent. The nexus relocates through ash currents, following paths the Choir’s leadership tracks but never shares. Catching one requires either perfect intelligence or catastrophic luck.
Syrren’s intelligence was perfect.
I settle into position behind a collapsed wall—what remains of a structure erased so long ago that even the memory of its purpose has faded. The ash here is thick, coating everything in fine gray powder that tastes like metal. My lungs protest, but I control my breathing the way I’ve learned to control everything else: with discipline gained through years of running.
I count guards. Seven visible—four patrolling the perimeter, three stationed near the platform where the captives will be held. More concealed, probably. The Choir doesn’t leave its mobile operations understaffed.
The captives themselves are barely visible from this angle—shapes huddled in the makeshift cage near the platform’s eastern edge. I can’t make out details, but I can see the way they’re positioned: protective, clustered, the larger shapes shielding the smaller one.
The child. The one Syrren’s report mentioned.
She was separated from her parents during a refugee convoy attack three days ago. The parents are dead. The girl was kept because children process differently during sacrifice rituals—their fear is purer, their desperation less contaminated than adult resignation.
The Choir values that purity.
I circle wide, approaching through a gully choked with ash thick enough to mask my presence. The Choir’s own ambient magic provides cover against their detection wards. There’s bitter satisfaction in using their tools against them.
The first guard notices me three seconds before my knife finds his throat.
Three seconds too long.
His warning shout brings the others running, but I’m already past the outer perimeter, already moving through the ritual preparation area toward the holding structure. The element of surprise is gone. What remains is speed, precision, and the hope that I can reach the captives before the defenders reorganize.
The holding structure is crude—a cage of woven ash-metal, its bars humming with containment spells that prevent escape. Three figures huddle inside: two women in their thirties, hollow-eyed and trembling, and a girl who can’t be older than eight. The child looks up as I approach, and I see recognition flare in her face.
Not recognition of me specifically. Recognition of rescue. Of hope.
“Stay quiet.” I work the lock with picks I’ve carried since Morrith—tools that have opened worse doors than this. “Stay close. Do exactly what I tell you.”
The lock yields. The cage swings open.
And the trap springs.
They don’t emergefrom the structures.
They rise from the ash itself—cultists who buried themselves in the corrupted substrate, their bodies suspended in partial dissolution until the moment I breached the cage’s wards. Twelve of them. Fifteen. Twenty. Their faces bear the characteristic blur of the devoted—individuality consumed, identity erased.
Some of them might have been beautiful once. Some of them might have had families, histories, reasons for breathing that didn’t involve annihilation theology. None of that matters now. What stands before me are shells animated by borrowed purpose, and they will kill the people behind me if I let them.
