The Citadel had become a palace of lies. Polite, necessary lies, but lies nonetheless. The official story, murmured in corridors and proclaimed in the streets to keep panic at bay, was that Lady Amelia was in deep communion with the world-Song, seeking a subtle, harmonic solution to the Crimson Sickness. A narrative of serene, cosmic effort. A comforting fiction.Ethan knew the truth. He saw it in the way Amelia moved—a slow, careful precision, as if her body were a cracked vessel she was afraid would spill. He heard it in her voice, the resonant hum now frayed at the edges, stretched thin over a void of despair. She wasn't seeking a solution. She was hiding from the magnitude of her failure, and from the horrifying truth of what the sickness truly was.His own recovery had left him with a paradoxical clarity: the Shadow was gone, but the experience of having his mind used as a laboratory had honed his perception. He saw patterns where others saw chaos. He heard the silences between t

The end of the battle brought no respite, only a siege of another kind. The silence in Amelia's chambers was a physical pressure, thick with phantom screams of the dying and corrosive residue of corrupted magic. She stood right in the center of the room, her back to the door, her body rigid. The serene posture, saintly to so many, was gone. This was the raw architecture of a being under catastrophic stress.Yet within, her soul was at war.It started as a heat, a wrongness deep in her marrow. That unified core of her being, the glowing essence which was the fusion of all seven shards, was not now a harmonious sphere: it was a star in violent, internal collapse.The Shard of Will, a fragment of her own unyielding determination, was the first to fracture. It burned with a furious, righteous gold, screaming for action. It remembered Kaelen’s steadfastness on the walls, the simple clarity of meeting force with force. It wanted to march out and scour the land with purifying fire, to break

The annihilation of Port Seline was a lesson written in fire and blood. The old ways were dead. Walls were a trap. Armies were a liability. The enemy was not some foreign host to be met on a field of battle, but a cancer woven into the body of the world itself, dormant in every sickbed, awaiting the signal to metastasize.In the stunned silence that followed, a new, desperate strategy was born. It was not Kaelen who proposed it, nor General Yvaine with her tactical acumen. It was Sophia, her voice raw from the smoke of the funeral pyres, her bandaged arm a constant reminder of her own futility with a spear.“We cannot fight his army,” she said, her eyes sweeping the grim council. “We can only deny him its source. He uses the sick. So we will heal them. Faster than he can corrupt them.”A skeptical silence met her words. The successor to Lord Valerius, a pale, shaken man named Faren, scoffed. "Heal them? With what? Your power is gone. Lady Amelia's power is… unstable. The physicians ar

The Healing War was a grinding, soul-wearying stalemate, but it was a stalemate they were learning to live with. They had established a brutal rhythm: Amelia would create a pocket of stability, Sophia's healers would flood in, and they would wrestle death for every single life. They were saving people. It was enough. It had to be.But each day wore on, and the strain was etching deeper into Amelia. The grey light of her carvings, once a steady glow, now flickered like a guttering candle. She moved slower. Her responses were delayed by fractions of a second that felt like eternities. She was a shield, yes, but a shield of glass, and everyone could hear the cracks spreading.It was a crisis that came not from any new army, but from a single, desperate decision.A huge caravan of refugees, fleeing a collapsed settlement, had been caught in a spring storm. They came to Silverhold's gates drenched and freezing - and, unbeknownst to the gate guards, carrying a fresh, virulent strain of the

The Citadel had become a pressure cooker of desperation. The discovery of the orphans' immunity was a spark thrown into a room full of kindling. Lord Faren’s faction, now bolstered by terrified merchants and military pragmatists, grew bolder by the hour. The word "harvest" was no longer whispered in secret councils; it was spoken aloud in the corridors, a grim, utilitarian solution to an unsolvable problem.And then Sophia became a wall. She stood before the entrance to the orphanage's wing, a silent, unmoving sentinel. She was no longer the Dawn-Bringer, the wielder of shards. She was just a woman with tired eyes and a will of forged iron. Kaelen, understanding the line that was about to be crossed, placed two of his most steadfast guards at her side, their loyalty to him outweighing whatever fear of the plague they may have had.The confrontation came at noon. Faren arrived with a contingent of his own household guards and a physician carrying a case of gleaming, silver instruments.