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CHAPTER 10: THE VEILWALKER
Garrick recognized the voice before the second word finished.He was on his feet with his sword drawn and his body between Kael and the sound in the same motion. His breathing stayed even. He had trained it to do that years ago because a soldier who panicked at a name was already losing.Vespera the Veilwalker stepped out of the tree line.She was tall and bone-pale with raven hair that moved as if something other than air was disturbing it. Her eyes were dark all the way through, the kind of dark with no depth to read. The smoke-colored marking across her collarbone shifted slowly as she walked into the clearing. She came to a stop ten feet from Garrick's blade and looked at him the way someone looked at a locked door they already had the key to."Stormblade," she said. "You look like five years in exile.""You look like someone who burned down a king's court from the inside," Garrick said.She glanced past him at Kael on the ground. "Bad night?""Do not talk to him," Garrick said."
CHAPTER 9: THE SHADOW WITHIN
In his dream, Kael stood on a throne made of bones.Not sitting. Standing, with both feet planted on the seat and his hands at his sides, looking out across a flat dead landscape that went in every direction without end. The sky was the color of old ash. The ground below the throne was cracked and dry and nothing grew anywhere on it. There were no people. No buildings. No sound of any kind. Just the dead land and the throne and the gray sky pressing down on all of it."You built this," a voice said from behind him.Kael turned. The Shadow Within stood at the back of the throne. It looked exactly like him. Same face, same height, same build. But the eyes were pure black from edge to edge and it stood with a stillness that no living person had."I did not build anything," Kael said."Not yet," it said. "This is what comes after you claim all three relics. This is the world that is left."Kael looked at the dead landscape. "You are showing me a lie.""I am showing you a projection," it s
CHAPTER 8: SHADOW BEASTS
Garrick had fought soldiers, sellswords, assassins, and two types of Void creatures in the past five years.None of them had come out of a lake.The first creature broke the surface twenty feet to Kael's left with no warning, a mass of dark movement that had no consistent shape, pulling itself onto the bank with limbs that reorganized as it moved. A second came up on the right side. The enormous shape beneath the water was still rising, its shadow spreading wide across the lakebed."Kael, bank. Now," Garrick said."I see them," Kael said. He was already moving."Faster than that."Kael reached the shallows and pulled himself out. Garrick stepped past him and drove his sword into the center of the nearest creature. The blade went through it without any resistance and came out the other side and the creature kept moving as if nothing had touched it."Your sword is not doing anything," Kael said."I noticed," Garrick said. He stepped back and tried from a different angle with the same re
CHAPTER 7: THE DROWNED CITY
The ruins of Caer Veyl rose from a black lake like broken teeth.Kael stood at the waterline and looked at what was left above the surface. Stone towers with their tops sheared off. Archways that led into open water. Walls that stopped halfway up and ended in rough jagged edges. Everything below was a gray-green shadow in the depths, the rest of the city taken whole when the last Rift War split the ground and let the lake in over a single night, according to the texts Kael had read in the Archives years ago. He had read the account three times because it was detailed and strange. He had not expected to be standing at the shore looking at it in person."The relic is down there," Garrick said."How far exactly," Kael said."The reliquary hall sat directly below the main temple. Based on the current waterline I estimate forty feet at the center. Maybe forty-five."Kael looked at the water. It was completely still and dark and reflected the sky without distortion. "You want me to swim for
CHAPTER 6: LESSONS IN SURVIVAL
The man teaching him to fight could snap his spine with one hand and they both knew it.Kael knew it every morning when Garrick woke him before dawn by kicking the bottom of his boot. He knew it every time Garrick corrected his grip by squeezing his wrist hard enough to leave marks. He knew it when Garrick threw him to the ground for the ninth time in one session, stood over him with his arms crossed, and said nothing."Get up," Garrick said.Kael got up. His knees were muddy and his right shoulder ached but he got up because not getting up was not something Garrick accepted as an outcome."You are leading with your shoulder again," Garrick said. "Every single time. Before your foot moves your shoulder has already told me where you are going.""I am aware of that," Kael said."Then stop doing it.""I am trying to stop doing it.""Trying is not stopping." Garrick held the practice sword out. "Again."They had been in the northern forest for three weeks. They moved camp every two days,
CHAPTER 5: THE HUNTER AND THE VESSEL
Garrick had protected a king before.King Aldren had been forty years old and suspicious of everyone who came within arm's reach of him, and Garrick had kept him alive through two assassination attempts and a deliberate poisoning over six years. That work had been clean. Identify the threat.Remove it, keep the principal breathing. Aldren had been complicated but he had been human in the ordinary sense of the word, and his enemies had been human in the ordinary sense too.Kael Voss was a different problem from any Garrick had worked before.They stopped in the northern forest when the horses needed water. Garrick found a stream and tied both animals at the bank and let them drink.Kael sat on a flat rock nearby with his right hand resting open on his knee and the rune glowing quietly in the dark between the trees. He had not tried to hide it since they cleared the city gates."Close your hand," Garrick said.Kael closed his fist. "Does it show through?""Less." Garrick sat on a fallen
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