Chapter 88

The celebration ran long into the night.

Not party ‘til dawn long - but long enough that the stars had wheeled overhead and the air had grown sharp with frost. By the time the bonfire collapsed into a bed of glowing coals, the children were swaying where they stood and even the adults were slowing.

Adhaneth had been one of the first to retire - though not before I claimed a dance. She moved like moonlight on water, all quiet grace. I spun Grams next, lifting her clear off the ground while she shrieked and smacked at me with her cane. I dragged Yveth into the circle too; she was stiff and uncertain at first, but my exaggerated, ridiculous movements were enough to draw a small, **** laugh from her.

I danced with Mirri, who hopped and twirled like she’d invented joy. With Serah, who moved like flame given form. With Ashlara, solid and powerful even in celebration. With Lilae, Issa, Mak, and Brinja. We formed circles, broke apart into pairs, collapsed into laughing heaps.

Eventually, exhaustion claimed the little ones.

Tib and Lilae fell asleep by the dying fire and had to be carried inside. Elarion and Mak made it halfway to their beds before wobbling. Torvek tried to pretend he wasn’t tired and nearly walked into a doorframe. One by one, we tucked them in.

It was the best birthday I had ever had.

I was crossing the entry hall, intending to check on Ashlara and the last of the coals, when Elise approached.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. Her pale cheeks were blotchy from crying. She looked fragile.

“Seth,” she said softly, not quite meeting my eyes. “May we speak?”

“Of course,” I replied gently.

I guided her into the common room and settled her into a chair. I took the seat opposite her.

“I- I am sorry. I did not know- I only wanted to-” Her voice broke. She covered her face with her hands and began to sob.

I scooted my chair closer and rested a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay,” I said softly. “Take your time. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

That only seemed to intensify her tears.

I moved closer still and wrapped my arms around her, rocking her gently.

The door slammed open.

“You lying wretch!”

Serah stood in the doorway, fury blazing in her eyes. Mirri and Ashlara crowded behind her, confusion etched across their faces.

Elise froze in my arms, terror flashing across her features.

“After all Seth has done for you,” Serah continued, voice shaking with rage, “you choose to betray him?”

She hurled something at the void-mage, hitting her square in the chest. A dead songbird. A scroll was tied around its leg.

Elise went white as snow.

Her trembling intensified.

“Serah,” I said quietly.

“I should burn the flesh from your bones, you craven worm!” the dragon-woman spat, taking a step forward.

“Serah.” My voice sharpened. “Stand down.”

Her eyes snapped to mine, still blazing.

“She has been spying on you,” Serah said. “Reporting to the Circle. Everything you’ve done.”

“I know,” I replied evenly. “Elise was just about to tell me why.”

All four of them spoke at once. “What?”

Elise stared up at me, stunned. “Y-you knew?”

I gave a soft, humorless chuckle. “I’m not an idiot. And you’re a terrible liar.”

Her mouth fell open.

“The Circle doesn’t trust me,” I continued. “Of course they’d ask you to keep an eye on me. You love libraries. You’re uncomfortable around people. You didn’t want to go to Crownreach. It wasn’t hard to put together.”

“Then why did you-” she began.

“Because I love you,” I said gently, cutting her off. “And I trust you.”

The room went quiet.

“I’m not hiding secrets,” I continued. “I’m not planning a war. If you want to tell the Circle what the queen and I had for breakfast, I don’t care.” My expression softened. “What I care about is why you felt you had to do it. I hope you trust me. I hope you’re not unhappy here. So why agree to something you didn’t want to do?”

Her tears renewed, but her voice steadied with effort.

“T-they said you might be corrupted,” she whispered. “By the Myrddin. That if you were, you would be a threat to the world. They asked me to watch you. To report.”

She swallowed hard.

“I thought… if I showed them you were not corrupted. That you were helping people. That you were kind… then they would not act out of fear.” Her voice cracked. “I wanted to protect you.”

She covered her face again.

“I told them this was my last report,” she choked out. “That I would not betray your trust again. You can read it.” She held the dead bird toward me with shaking hands.

I glanced at Serah. Her jaw was tight, but she didn’t speak. Mirri and Ashlara were silent too, waiting.

I took the bird gently and set it aside on the floor.

“I don’t need to read it,” I said softly. “I trust you, Elise.”

I pulled her back into my arms.

She broke completely then, sobbing into my shoulder as I held her steady.

* * *

Nyssira waited.

That alone was enough to grate on Urzan-Brak’s nerves.

She drifted through his forge as though it were a gallery, humming softly to herself while her fingers skimmed along blades, pauldrons, helms - lingering just long enough to irritate. He did not like others touching his work. She knew that. That was precisely why she did it.

He **** himself to ignore her.

Forging necromium was hazardous at the best of times - the metal devoured Faith and mana alike.

There was precious little of it left in existence - mainly because it did not belong to this world. It had come with the Myrddin during the Silent War. Their weapons had been wrought from it - razor chains and barbed bands, tools that blurred the line between armor and armament, shaped for bodies that had no need of hands.

Urzan-Brak remembered how those weapons moved - their horrible song as they tore through flesh and divinity alike.

He also remembered how brittle they were. Regular steel could turn them aside - if one survived the creature wielding it.

After the war, what scraps remained had been studied relentlessly. And while the weapons were devastating, it took mortals precious little time to improve on the design. Alloying necromium with star metal - rare, fallen from the heavens yet native to this world - produced something far more stable. Harder than steel. Deadlier than the alien ore alone.

But the process was perilous.

The fumes stripped Faith from the lungs. The sparks burned hotter the more mana they touched. In the early years, an entire foundry had vanished in a single catastrophic blaze when one errant ember met a careless mage.

So Urzan-Brak prepared.

He warded himself. He warded his forge against the world. The last fragment of necromium in his possession - an ancient relic salvaged from carnage more than a millennium past - melted into the crucible. He fed it star metal and **** the two into union.

His War Forge howled.

Heat roared through the chamber, turning the air to a living hell. He drew the molten mass free and set it upon the anvil. Then he began to hammer.

Each strike was a contest of wills. The metal resisted. It did not want to be shaped. It wanted to unmake.

He hammered anyway.

Hours passed.

The lump slowly yielded, stretching thinner, longer - black as the void and flecked with faint silver like distant stars. The blade narrowed until it was scarcely wider than a finger. The tip tapered to a merciless point, like an icepick meant to punch through the heaviest plate. He added only the simplest crossguard - barely more than a lip to keep a hand from sliding forward.

It was not beautiful.

It was efficient.

An ugly blade, forged from an uglier metal, for an ugliest purpose.

A godslayer.

He did not ask which god she intended to kill. He did not want to know. He wanted her gone - from his forge, from his life, from his thoughts.

He extended the stiletto toward her, his expression carved from contempt.

“The blade is yours,” he said. “Take it and leave. Our bargain is fulfilled. Do not return.”

Nyssira accepted it as one might cradle a newborn.

Her parchment fingers traced the edge, hovering dangerously close. Her breath quickened. Color flushed faintly beneath inked sigils along her skin.

“Oh… yes,” she whispered, reverent. Then louder - shuddering with something dangerously close to ecstasy - “Oh, YES!”

Urzan-Brak turned away, staring into the roaring forge. The flames reflected on his slag-formed skin.

Had it been worth it?

A heaviness settled in his iron gut.

She would use it. Of that he had no doubt. The blade would taste divinity. And if it did - would suspicion trace its origin back to him? Would he share in the blame?

His massive hands gripped the edge of the forge until stone groaned.

This was the cost of silence. The cost of carelessness. The price he had paid for once conspiring with the Myrddin - an attempt to **** Aurelion. A plot undone by Arthyr.

“Thank you,” Nyssira breathed behind him.

He had nearly convinced himself she had left.

Her fingers brushed his shoulder.

He rolled it, trying to shrug her off.

“I promise,” she murmured, “the **** this blade brings will not stain your name. Your secret remains mine. Always.”

The stiletto plunged into his spine.

It slid through warped slag-flesh as though it were smoke. Just as he had forged it to do.

His blood - his Faith - ignited.

White-hot sparks erupted from the wound, flaring like magnesium in open air. They scattered across the forge, across the anvil, across every surface they touched.

Nyssira stepped back.

Each ember burned independently, consuming mana, devouring Faith. The forge roared out of control. Stone blackened, then sagged. Metal ran like wax. The building collapsed inward as fire and molten slag swallowed it whole.

From beyond the inferno, she watched.

Watched as the structure melted. Watched as stone became magma. Watched as the world reshaped itself into ruin.

Hours later, silence.

Where the forge had stood lay a vast sheet of smoking obsidian.

She walked across the glassy surface without hesitation, her reflection distorted beneath her feet. At the center, protruding from the black mirror of cooled stone, stood the stiletto.

Untouched.

She wrapped her fingers around the hilt.

The blade slipped free effortlessly. She admired it - her hand reaching out to the blade, shaking with ecstasy. But she drew back, biting her fingertips sensually.

She shifted her grip - let it lay across her palm. It vanished from her hand.

Nyssira smiled.

* * *

Benn ran.

He ran until the howls of the orcs faded behind him. He ran until the screams of his companions no longer echoed in the distance. He ran until his lungs tore at his ribs and his legs turned to water.

Then he stumbled into a drainage ditch between two grassy rises and collapsed face-first into the mud.

For a long moment, he didn’t move.

The commission had been simple. Picked up in Northgate - the Office of Public Contracts and Civic Commissions. D-rank. Observe the western border. Watch the Hordes of the Iron Nation. Don’t engage. Don’t provoke. Don’t cross into orcish territory. One week. Return with a report.

Easy money.

Enough to keep a roof over his new wife’s head. Enough to keep his newborn son warm for another month. Maybe two if they stretched it.

It had gone according to plan. Mostly.

A dragon came from the east. It roared, circled, descended, and landed among the orcs - vast wings blotting out the sun. They’d watched from their rocky perch where plains gave way to mountains, hidden and silent. No campfires. No careless silhouettes against the horizon.

The dragon never left.

It vanished from sight within the camp, but it didn’t fly away.

The others joked about hazard pay. Maybe a bonus for witnessing something rare.

They were still in Arvellian territory. No one was stupid enough to wander into a nation gathering for war. I wasn’t needed.

Instead, the orcs crossed.

Benn still didn’t know how they’d been found.

There had been no signal. No sound. Just a sudden presence behind the rocks. Then steel. Then red.

Joch went down first. A single sweep of an axe opened him from shoulder to hip. He hit the ground in pieces, and the orc didn’t stop there. It hacked and hacked and hacked until Joch was no longer a body - just wet, ruined meat splattered across stone.

Tereeza fought back. She drove her blade up under an orc’s ribs and ripped sideways. His guts spilled into his hands in a slick, steaming cascade. It should have killed him. Should have dropped him screaming.

Instead he laughed.

Laughed.

He gathered his intestines like coiled rope and looped them around her throat. Pulled tight. She clawed at the slick coils as he squeezed, her boots kicking uselessly against stone until she went still.

Mertin - poor, skinny Mertin who told the worst jokes and laughed at his own punchlines - thrust his sword into an orc’s chest up to the hilt.

The orc didn’t fall.

Two more seized Mertin. One grabbed an arm. One a leg. They pulled.

Benn could still hear the sound.

He would hear it for the rest of his life.

The scream that followed chased him down the hills long after he started running.

He didn’t remember turning. Didn’t remember leaving them. Only the need to move. To survive.

To tell someone.

He pushed himself up from the ditch with shaking hands. His left leg screamed in protest. A chunk of muscle hung loose where something - axe? Blade? - had carved into him. Blood slicked his boot. Every step felt like walking on a snapped bone.

He staggered forward anyway.

Someone had to carry the message.

The orcs had crossed the border.

They hadn’t fought like soldiers.

They had fought like something else.

War wasn’t coming - it was already here.