Caspian
An icy spear pressed into my chest. I snapped awake, rolled into a crouch, a growl tearing from my throat before my brain caught up. My wolf surged, hackles raised, every nerve shrieking.
Aelindor and Drakken moved as one. Blankets flew. Aelindor’s longsword drawn before his feet hit the ground. Drakken rose with an ebony broadsword, his gray eyes flooding gold as the dragon pushed through.
“Something happened to Max,” Aelindor said quietly. When the Fae heir went quiet, it was bad. His blue eyes calculated how much violence was needed.
The tent flap ripped open.
“Cadet Max entered the DarkVeil, Highnesses!”
Spartan Corporal Enna stood in the entrance, her chest heaving, her olive face ashen. She was the same woman who’d tried to get Max drunk at the campfire two nights ago, who’d laughed when Max spat the booze. She wasn’t laughing now. Her dark eyes held fear.
Max had entered the fucking DarkVeil without us.
We were out of the tent in a breath. Drakken moved first—his bedroll closest to the entrance—with the explosive speed of a man whose body ran on fire and fury. Aelindor was a step behind, longsword in hand. I came third, stripping my shirt, the shift pulling at my bones.
“She was on her dawn run.” Enna kept pace, words coming in sharp bursts. “Then she jogged toward the Veil and just…walked in. Commander Marco tried to follow, and Major Frost, and four others. The Veil’s sealed.” Her voice cracked. “None of them got through. Marco and Frost have burns.”
My wolf howled inside my skull. I let the shift take me, bones lengthening, muscles torn and rebuilt.
My perspective dropped and widened as I fell to all fours, the world sharpening into the hyper-vivid clarity of wolf senses.
Scent exploded—sulfur and the acrid bite of the Veil, the cold sweat of frightened soldiers, and underneath it all, fading but unmistakable: Max.
A dozen Spartans stood in a ragged line before the DarkVeil, the massive wall of shadow hanging over them like a tsunami frozen mid-break.
One by one, they threw themselves at it.
A sergeant charged shoulder-first and bounced back as if she’d hit steel, a burn blistering up her forearm.
Another took a running leap and was flung ten feet backward, palms red and smoking.
Frost knelt to one side, blood seeping from a gash on his temple.
Marco stood beside him, pressing a burn that ran wrist to elbow.
The vampire had hit the barrier three times. The burns told the rest.
No one who had entered the DarkVeil returned. Yet the Spartans still tried to go after Max out of loyalty.
I howled and charged the shifting shadow.
“Do not follow!” Aelindor barked at our men. “Guard the Veil. That is an order.”
The three of us hit the DarkVeil together.
Darkness crushed against my wolf, thick enough to have weight, cold that burned worse than fire. But we weren’t normal men. Stronger than any Spartan.
Drakken’s roar joined my howl, fire erupting from his skin, shoving the shadows back.
Aelindor’s power hit next, raw force like a glacier grinding stone.
I threw my wolf’s strength into the gap they tore open, claws digging into nothing, shoulders driving forward.
Resistance finally splintered. We tore through.
My paws hit solid ground. Air flooded my lungs, thick and hot and tasting of sulfur and molten metal.
Max stood twenty feet ahead, back to us, her midnight-blue hair drifting upward as if gravity had reversed. She was alive. Relief hit me so hard my front legs buckled.
Beyond her, an endless chasm stretched in both directions, hundreds of feet wide, bottomless—or bottomed in hellfire. Lava churned deep below, slow currents casting a crimson glow that lit the shadows’ undersides like a hellish sunset.
Above and around us, shapes moved in the shadows—vast, darker than darkness itself, circling the chasm like predators orbiting a kill. My wolf’s instincts screamed: whatever lived here was old and powerful enough that looking directly at it was provocation.
Drakken’s eyes had gone wide in a way I’d never seen. He stood on Aelindor’s other side, staring at the chasm with the expression of a man whose every certainty had just been stripped away.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
For once, the dragon and my wolf agreed.
“Max.” Aelindor’s voice was low, measured. “Come to us. We need to return. Now.”
We started inching toward her. Every step felt like wading through a swamp, the air thick and clinging, unwilling to let us go.
Max didn’t answer. She stood facing the chasm, transfixed. Her head tilted, as if listening to something none of us could hear. I couldn’t see her face, but I could picture it: those midnight eyes, dark and enchanting, surely unfocused and glazed.
“Cadet Private Max!” Drakken barked. “I order you to—”
The chasm chose that exact moment to erupt.
Liquid metal from the lava exploded upward in a monstrous wave—a geyser of molten starlight, a column of silver that detonated into a thousand screaming streams. Above us the sky became a canopy of liquid lightning, silver filaments crackling and weaving through the darkness like the nervous system of some half-slain god laid bare.
And that lightning moved with menacing intent, with a dreadful intelligence. Every thread turned toward us. Every single one pointed, paused, then struck.
All three of us lunged for Max, her name ripping from our throats.
The air turned to stone. Whatever force governed this place clamped down on us like an iron fist. My wolf’s legs drove against the ground, claws tearing at rock that pushed back, and I moved in slow motion, the distance between me and Max stretching like taffy.
Drakken roared and tried to shift. His bones cracked—the grinding sound of a dragon trying to emerge and failing. His skin rippled with scales that surfaced and sank back, his jaw elongating for half a second before snapping back to human. The DarkVeil wouldn’t let him change.
Aelindor’s wind lashed out, trying to shield Max while hauling her back to us. The magic hit the air and dissolved.
Drakken couldn’t shift. Aelindor’s magic was dead. I was in wolf form only because I’d shifted outside the Veil, before its rules could clamp down.
And the lightning was less than three seconds from hitting Max.
My heart shattered. We’d just found her. After decades of searching for the One, after pulling her from the Scorched Wastes half-dead and watching her start to bloom, we were going to watch her die.
“No!” Max’s voice split the air like a thunderclap.
“STOP!”
She spun and faced the lightning. Her hair whipped upward in a wild, gravity-defying corona, darkest midnight blue with a shot of glowing white.
Max Morning threw her hands up.
A thousand strands of liquid silver fire froze a dozen feet away, crackling, writhing against her will, straining against a leash held by Max.
“THEY. ARE. MINE,” she roared. “Do not harm what’s mine!”
The lightning recoiled. The entire canopy pulled back, the strands retreating like a pack cowering from a dominant alpha wolf’s snarl. They didn’t disperse. They hovered, vibrating and waiting. Obeying.
My wolf’s legs nearly gave out. Not from weakness but from awe.
I’d seen Aelindor shatter a mountain. I’d seen Drakken burn a city to cinders and Nikolai drain warlords dry in seconds.
I had never seen anything like Max Morning standing in front of a hellfire chasm, holding back thousands of strands of liquid fire with her bare hands and will of steel, claiming three princes of the Zodiac Covenant as hers in a voice that made the darkness flinch.
The sulfur burned my nose, but underneath it was her scent. My girl. My dominant star. And she smelled like home.
Max turned her head and looked at us over her shoulder.
“Leave,” she said, her eyes ablaze, so deep they were almost black, glowing with an inhuman light. In them I saw terror and power and a desperate, furious love that made my wolf whimper. “You need to leave. Now!”
“Not without you!” Aelindor roared.
My heart cracked again, but differently this time. I had never heard Aelindor roar. The Fae heir didn’t raise his voice. He commanded with silence and the quiet authority of the most powerful immortal in the realm.
Until now.
“I’m not their target. You are,” she snarled.
“Even so, never without you, love.”
The word—love—hit like a detonation. It was a vow. Spoken in the belly of the DarkVeil with liquid lightning overhead, because Aelindor had decided: if this was where he died, Max would know what she was to him.
I saw the shock on her face. Her glowing eyes flickered. Her lower lip trembled.
“I can’t hold them long.” Her voice broke. The layered quality was fading. Max—exhausted, terrified, hands shaking—holding back a force that could level a kingdom. “There are too many. So many.”
“We leave together,” Aelindor said. No roar now, but the steady voice of a man who’d break physics to enforce a decision. “We’re coming to you.”
We pushed forward. The air fought like lead water. We moved anyway.
The lightning shifted, poised to strike. Max was right—we were the target.
“Back off!” Max shouted at the lightning—or the thing inside it.
She retreated toward us, arms raised, palms facing the canopy. The lightning tracked her like predators tracking prey—buzzing, crackling, pitch rising. But it held at the boundary she’d set.
“It’s Coldiron.” Blood trickled from her nose. “They don’t want me to leave. You should go first. I’ll follow.”
“Not a chance, cadet!” Drakken snarled. Gold eyes, dragon scales flickering across his jaw, his body still clawing for a shift that wouldn’t come. “We. Leave. Together.”
I howled a warning at him—sharp, pointed, shut up in every canine language that ever existed.
The dragon prince was not built for gentle touch or delicate negotiations.
He communicated through orders, insults, controlled explosions.
My wolf was learning that the lightning was reactive—answering Max’s mood like tide to the moon.
If he pissed her off, the whole canopy might incinerate us on principle.
Max reached us, arms raised, steps careful.
“Hold on to me,” she said, voice thin with exhaustion. “Physical contact, please. If the Coldiron senses your connection to me, it won’t strike you. That’s how I pulled my friends through the Coldiron tunnel.”
Aelindor’s arm locked around her waist, pulling her against him with a grip that meant he had no intention of letting go.
I pressed my furred shoulder to her thigh, muzzle nudging her hand. Her fingers threaded into my scruff, and heat shot through me—recognition, the wolf’s bond locking tight.
Drakken hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then his hand found the back of her neck, rough and large, cradling her skull with an awkwardness that might’ve been funny anywhere else. He looked like a man asked to hold something precious who’d never had practice.
“Wait.” Max halted, head turning back toward the sheet of lightning. “I need to take some Coldiron.”
The chanting rose before she moved. My wolf heard it this time: faint, eager, tiny voices from the lightning like children calling from a schoolyard. Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!
She rolled back her sleeve, baring the armguard. “Come. In order.”
A single strand detached and arced toward her, flowing, a ribbon of molten silver. It poured into the armguard. Then another. And another. The dark iron brightened—black to steel to silver to captured starlight, humming louder with each strand that joined.
“Enough.” Max flicked her wrist at the flow. “The rest of you go back.”
The stream resisted, metal arguing like a child begging for five more minutes before bed.
“I’ll come back,” Max said, voice softening. “I promise. Now go back. Don’t follow me.”
The lightning retreated. Strand by strand, the silver fire withdrew, arcing back to the chasm, dipping into the lava.
“Well done,” Max whispered.
The remaining Coldiron swam above the lava in lazy ribbons, and I swore they moved faster at her praise—circling, looping, liquid metal wagging its tail.
“Guard the Veil. Don’t let anything out.”
The Coldiron pulsed once, a bright silver flare across the chasm. Acknowledgment.
Together, we turned toward the wall of shadow and pushed through the DarkVeil.