Smoke curled above the plains like black rivers, twisting toward the blood-red dawn. The siege had dragged into its fifth day. Arrows fell like rain. The world stank of oil, ash, and iron.Elias stood upon the citadel’s outer wall, cloak whipped by the wind, eyes fixed on the horizon where the banners of the Crimson Order shivered. Thousands of them. Their campfires burned through the night, an ocean of orange lights stretching to the edges of sight.Behind him, the citadel trembled with exhaustion. The defenders were starving. The wounded filled the halls. The forges ran cold. Every hour, more men begged to surrender.Helena lay in the tower chamber, still feverish from the wound she’d taken in the mountains. Lira tended to her with quiet desperation, whispering spells of warmth and renewal. Marcus, meanwhile, stalked the ramparts like a wolf denied prey.“Another breach on the southern wall,” Marcus reported, armor streaked with soot. “We held, but barely. They’re probing for weakne

For the first time in months, the sky was clear—a pale, bruised blue stretching endlessly above the ruins of Valmere. The wind still carried the cold, but it was gentler now, almost tender, as if even the storm had grown tired.Lira sat beside a dying fire. The smoke drifted upward in thin, uncertain spirals. Her right hand still glowed faintly beneath the skin, tracing veins of silver light that pulsed every few seconds. She tried to ignore it.Across from her, Marcus sharpened his sword. The sound of the whetstone scraping steel was the only rhythm left in the frozen air.Neither had spoken in hours.Elias stood apart from them, at the edge of the cliff, overlooking what was once the heart of the northern kingdom. Where the tower had been, there was now only a crater—smooth glass, melted by something beyond fire.He didn’t move. He hadn’t since dawn.Lira finally said, quietly, “He hasn’t eaten.”Marcus didn’t look up. “He hasn’t done a lot of things lately.”“You think it’s gone? T

The palace at Valemere was silent except for the wind that scraped along its black marble towers. The banners of the fallen False King still hung from the battlements, half-burned and dripping ash into the courtyards below. Within the great hall, torches sputtered blue. The air trembled as if something unseen were breathing just beneath the floor.Elias stood before the shattered throne. In his hands, the fragments of the Obsidian Crown pulsed faintly, each shard veined with crimson light that throbbed in rhythm with his heartbeat.Helena approached carefully, armor dented, hair tied back with a strip of linen still stained with another man’s blood.“Everyone’s waiting,” she said. “The council’s ready to proclaim you Regent.”“I didn’t fight to wear another man’s title,” Elias murmured. The fragments floated above his palm, orbiting each other like dark planets. “I only wanted peace.”Helena smiled sadly. “Peace needs a name to follow. Right now, that name is yours.”Across the hall,

Elias stood amid the ruin, cloak torn, the fragments of the Obsidian Crown glimmering faintly around his wrists like chains of night. His heartbeat was the only steady rhythm left. Every step sent ripples through the broken marble — the ground responding to his presence as if unsure whether to kneel or flee.You called me, the voice murmured.It came from everywhere at once — from the cracked pillars, from the shattered glass, from the shadow that stretched behind him even when no light remained.“I called for balance,” Elias said hoarsely. “Not you.”The voice laughed — soft, ancient, hollow. Balance is a lie mortals invent to quiet their fear. You wanted power that obeys your will. I am that will, unbroken.Helena’s voice cut through the dark. “Elias!”She stumbled into view, half her armor scorched, half her face lit by the eerie violet glow that pulsed from the Crown’s fragments. Her sword was gone; in its place she held a spear fashioned from the wreckage of the hall itself.He t

Helena awoke to the sound of her own heartbeat — doubled, distorted, as though another heart beat in time with hers. The air shimmered, vibrating like the surface of a disturbed lake. When she opened her eyes, there was no sky, no earth — only an endless expanse of light and shadow, folding in on itself like glass caught between moments.She rose slowly, her body weightless, her boots sinking into a surface that looked like water but felt like memory. With each step, a faint echo followed — not just sound, but pulse. Two beats. Hers, and someone else’s.Elias.The thought cut through her fog like a blade.She looked around. The Veil stretched infinitely in every direction, painted with reflections of places she half-remembered — the marble courtyard of the Citadel, the bloodstained corridors of the Sanctum, the lonely field where she once buried Lira’s pendant. Everything shimmered, overlapping like broken glass. She reached out, touching a nearby reflection — her own face stared back