The fire had burned down to low red embers.Night in the southern ranges was colder than any of them expected. The wind moved differently here — cleaner, emptier, no longer carrying the metallic taste of clean light or the heavy residual pressure that had lived inside the bond for so long. The sky above them was just sky. No white points. No watching formations. Only ordinary stars that looked almost insulting in their indifference.Raizu sat with his remaining blades laid across his knees, methodically checking each edge even though there was nothing left to cut. Three permanent afterimages. That was all. The rest had been spent on the plateau, burned away against erasure and void. He did not complain. He simply kept the blades close, the way a man keeps the last pieces of a life he refuses to surrender.Killy had her knees drawn up, chin resting on them, burned forearms wrapped in clean strips of cloth torn from what used to be a spare shirt. Every few minutes she opened one hand an

The call came on a gray morning three days later.A garrison runner moved through the outer districts with a sealed list, stopping at every household that had registered support-capable residents. When he reached the small room Miko shared with his mother, he did not bother to step inside. He simply read the names aloud from the doorway and left a thin wooden token on the threshold.Miko Veyren.Support designation: Incomplete Bond.Priority pairing: Front-line battery pool.His mother’s name was on the same list.She stood very still after the runner left, staring at the token as if it might change shape if she looked long enough. Then she closed the door, locked it, and sat on the edge of the mattress. For a long time she said nothing. The only sound was the rain still leaking through the cracked roof in slow, dirty drops.Miko waited.Finally she spoke, voice low and carefully controlled.“We leave at dawn the day after tomorrow. They want all incomplete Bonds at the southern stagi

Dusk never properly arrived.The light simply drained out of the sky, replaced by a low, bruised darkness that pressed against the mana lamps and made the shadows between the tents look deeper than they should. The sound that had been rolling down from the northern mountains for days finally resolved into something the staging ground could no longer pretend was thunder.Horns began to sound across the field — short, sharp, rising in urgency.Officers shouted orders. Primary talents were pulled into formation. Incomplete Bonds were ordered to tighten their links and prepare for movement. At marker post seven, the reinforcement officer’s face had gone pale under the dirt.“Forward units are engaging,” he said. “Battery chains will advance to the secondary line and maintain support. If your primary falls, you transfer to the next available talent without waiting for orders. Collapse is not an excuse.”Jorren’s grip on the Bond link tightened until Miko’s knees almost buckled. The older b

The road south of Veyra was already broken by the time Miko reached it.Refugees moved in uneven clusters — families dragging handcarts, wounded soldiers leaning on spears, children younger than him carrying siblings on their backs. No one walked in a straight line. They simply followed the muddy track that still pointed away from the burning northern districts and hoped the next rise would not reveal another wave of demons.Miko stayed at the edge of the flow.He had washed most of the blood from his face in a drainage ditch an hour earlier, but the new Bond still sat in his chest like a live coal. Every few minutes it pulsed, sending thin colorless threads flickering across his fingers whether he wanted them or not. The other refugees noticed. Some stared. Some moved farther away. One woman made a warding sign with two fingers and pulled her child behind her skirts.He did not blame them.A small boy alone on the refugee road was already a problem. A small boy alone whose incomplete

The days began to blur.Miko no longer counted them by numbers. He counted them by how many times the Bond woke him in the dark, by how many times he had to force the colorless threads back under his skin before someone noticed, by how many times his swollen ankle nearly folded and sent him into the mud.The abandoned farmland gave way to low scrubland. The scrubland gave way to a stretch of rocky hills where the refugee trails thinned to almost nothing. Most of the surviving groups had already turned toward the western dynasty roads, hoping the larger cities still had walls that worked. Miko kept going south. He did not know why south felt safer. He only knew that every time he considered turning west, the Bond in his chest tightened like a warning.He stopped trying to understand it.Food became a daily problem. The last of his mother’s dried meat was long gone. He learned to dig for the tough, bitter roots that grew along the irrigation ditches. He learned which abandoned houses st