The heavy oak doors of the council chamber burst open, the sound echoing off the marble walls like a gunshot.Cassian did not run, but every stride carried the silent, lethal promises of a man who had nothing left to lose. Rain soaked through his wool coat, dripping onto the pristine floor as the guards at the threshold drew their steel. Eight swords gleamed in the dim torchlight. Eight men who had broken bread with him three seasons ago, now standing between him and the throne room."Step aside," Cassian said. His voice was dangerously quiet, missing the roar of a defeated warrior and carrying instead the razor-thin calm of an executioner."We have our orders, my Lord," Marcus said, his blade trembling slightly. Marcus was barely twenty, a farm boy Cassian had trained himself. "No one enters. By order of the Regent.""The Regent is a traitor, Marcus. And if you don't lower that blade in three seconds, you will die for a lie."Silence hung in the air, heavy and suffocating. The air sm

​The horizon did not glow with sunrise; it bled with fire.​A low, guttural roar shook the marble floor beneath Cassian’s boots as three massive iron-shod warhorns sounded from the northern ridge—a tone so heavy it rattled the glass panes surviving in the balcony frames. The Northern Host was no longer a distant threat lurking past the border plains. They were at the river, their pitch-black banners unfurling against the smoke-filled sky like tattered wings.​"How many?" Cassian slammed his hands onto the cracked marble balustrade, his bloodied knuckles leaving dark smears against the stone as he leaned out into the freezing night air.​"Ten thousand vanguard," Elena whispered, her blood-stained fingers trembling as she pressed them against her lips. "With fifty iron siege-engines... and the Council’s war-sorcerers leading the line."​Cassian turned back to the chamber, his eyes sweeping over the shattered mahogany desk, the sprawling, lifeless body of Julian, and the dark pool of blo

The obsidian dagger did not catch the light; it drank it.High Councillor Vane raised the dark glass blade above his head, and the green sorcerous flames roaring through the breached doors immediately flattened, drawing inward toward the dagger like water rushing down a drain. The air in the inner sanctum didn't warm—it plummeted into a freezing, razor-sharp vacuum that made the blood freezing on Cassian’s jaw crackle into tiny crimson crystals."You are too late, General," Vane murmured, his white silk robes untouched by a single speck of soot. "The city has already been liquidated. The Council's ledger is closed."Cassian did not rise slowly. He exploded off the blood-slick marble like a starved panther, his notched longsword whistling through the freezing vacuum in a horizontal killing arc aimed directly at Vane’s throat.The four-legged iron siege-beast lunged to intercept. Its forged iron jaws snapped shut an inch from Cassian’s face, the force of the collision catching his shoul

​The black water did not fill the lung with fluid; it compressed the chest with the icy weight of five hundred fathoms.​Cassian went under with his right arm locked around Elena’s waist like an iron clamp. The churning, violent currents of the subterranean surge slammed them through the crushed brickwork of the royal escape tunnel, dragging them through pitch-black channels beneath the castle's collapsing foundations. His dead left arm trailed uselessly in the roaring brine, but every remaining muscle in his torso strained to keep her pale face pressed into the tiny pocket of air trapped beneath his leather tunic.​A blinding, violet-white light flared through the murky depths below them.​Through the churning black foam, Cassian saw the High Inquisitor—his iron mask cracked, his robes shredded—still clutching the burning obsidian slate. But the Inquisitor was no longer standing on stone. He was bound in thick, calcified tendrils of ancient, fossilized leviathan bone rising from a va

The sky did not bleed crimson; it turned the dull, suffocating grey of powdered bone.Kaelen’s colossal, salt-crusted form didn't drop from the shattered pillar—it hovered, suspended by thousands of calcified tendrils that pulsated with a violent, unholy crimson light. The single golden iris in his obsidian head was gone, replaced by a blinding, hollow furnace of primordial red fire. Where the solar heart had once hummed, a jagged rift of raw abyssal energy now churned, radiating an absolute, suffocating gravity that flattened the falling debris of the canyon walls before the stone could even hit the riverbed."The margin... is cleared..." Kaelen’s metallic voice rumbled—no longer the volcanic iron rumble of the Obsidian Sovereign, but a terrifying, multi-toned chorus overlaid with the agonizing resonance of five thousand drowned souls.The violent shockwave of his breath hit the flooded gorge, instantly vitrifying the surface of the black water into dark, razor-sharp glass.Cassian l