Nightwild Rising (The Unsealing #1)

Prologue

CENTURIES AGO

Lord Casric’s horse stamped its hooves beneath him, coat dark with sweat, and nostrils flared, scenting what was coming.

Three hundred fae were gathering in the tree line across the Therison Vale, preparing for one final assault.

Behind Casric, mortal mages chanted words that filled the air with a heaviness that made his teeth ache.

It tasted like copper and salt. Blood and magic.

“How long?” His gaze stayed fixed on the forest ahead.

Maester Vennick knelt in the center of the salt circle, fingers black with iron filings, voice shaking from exhaustion. “Two hours. Maybe three. Don’t let them reach us.”

Casric turned in his saddle. One thousand men lined the ridge behind him.

All that remained of the army he’d once commanded.

Pike squares, archers, cavalry. He’d led them into battle after battle, watched half of them die, and still they fought.

Because the alternative was the fae overtaking the land and turning mortals into nothing more than amusements to be toyed with.

This was the final stand. The mages had to succeed and seal Underhill shut for good. All the raids, the stolen children, the burned villages. It would stop. The fae would be trapped in their realm or stranded in this one, cut off from their power.

More importantly, humanity would win.

Dread stroked up Casric’s spine as the first fae broke from the trees, and came toward him at a run.

There were no war cries or horns. No advance warning.

Just riders on steeds that weren’t horses, moving faster than anything human, closing the distance across the open ground.

At their head, the Hell-Thorn of the Nightwild rode like darkness given form, its black armor chased with silver thorns, twin curved blades held steady.

Its steed was a thing of moonlight and shadows, pale as bone, moving without sound.

Behind it came the Nightwild Guard—twelve warriors on mounts that flickered between solid and smoke, their hooves striking the earth without leaving marks. Mothers used them to frighten children into obedience.

If you heard their hoofbeats, you were already dead—that was the story.

No one outran them. No one hid from them. No one who saw them ride ever saw anything else again.

Casric knew they were more than just stories. He’d seen the proof in the villages they destroyed, and the body counts that marked their passing.

“Archers!” Casric drew his sword. Steel sang as it left its scabbard, the metal gleaming with the blessings placed on it by the mages. Sixteen fae had fallen to this blade. “On my mark!”

The fae warriors were two hundred yards out …

One-fifty …

One hundred …

“Loose!”

Two hundred bowstrings snapped as one, and the air turned black with salt-blessed, iron-tipped arrows. They arced high and fell in a sheet toward the oncoming fae.

Magic rippled through the fae ranks like a heat shimmer.

Arrows veered and tumbled, burying themselves in the grass twenty feet from their targets.

But not all failed. Iron punched through fae wards when the angle was right, and the blessings held.

Casric saw a fae stumble, silver blood bright on her shoulder, but it didn’t stop her.

It didn’t slow her down. She yanked the arrow out and pressed forward.

“Again!”

The archers raised their bows again, and the sky filled with iron. A man behind Casric screamed when the string on his bow snapped and cut his throat. He went down choking, hands grasping at the wound as blood poured over his fingers. The man beside him grabbed his quiver and kept shooting.

The fae hit the pike line at full speed.

Steel shrieked. Men screamed. The first rank disintegrated in seconds, pikes shattered and bodies thrown aside.

The Hell-Thorn’s steed dissolved beneath it mid-stride, moonlight scattering like mist, and the fae hit the ground without breaking stride, already killing.

Its blades moved in arcs too fast to follow, each stroke ending a life.

One pikeman managed to set his weapon and brace. The Hell-Thorn flowed around it and took his head. Another swung a mace, but the fae caught his wrist, snapped it backward, and opened his throat with its blade.

Behind it, the Nightwild Guard tore into the ranks. The earth split and swallowed men whole. Lightning arced between bodies. Screaming was followed by the smell of burning meat.

And the human line broke.

Men ran. Men died. The ones who stood their ground accomplished nothing more than buying seconds for the ranks behind them.

But Casric held his position, shouting at his small band to hold. Behind him, the mages kept chanting, their voices rising and falling, magic building in the air until it made his skull ache.

The Hell-Thorn was forty yards from the ritual circle and moving fast.

“Hold the line,” Casric told Captain Ehren, and spurred his horse forward.

The animal was eight hundred pounds of muscle and fury, bred for war and trained to trample men beneath its hooves.

Wards glimmered along its flanks as it moved.

Casric couched his sword like a lance and aimed for the Hell-Thorn’s throat.

The fae didn’t slow. Its pale gold eyes found Casric’s across the chaos, and a smile curved its mouth—slow, cold, and utterly without mercy.

Casric’s blade cut through the air. One of the Hell-Thorn’s swords came up in a fluid motion, shearing through the horse’s wards as though they weren’t there and opening the beast’s throat.

The horse went down, legs folding, eight hundred pounds of momentum turning into a tumbling mass of flesh and steel.

Casric kicked free, hit the ground rolling, and came up with his sword ready.

But the Hell-Thorn was already moving. Its first strike went high.

Casric got his blade up and blocked, the impact jarring up his arm and cracking something in his shoulder.

The second strike was low and viper-fast. Casric managed to turn it aside with his blade, but the shock of it numbed his wrists.

The third strike came from an angle that shouldn’t exist, defying physics and leverage and everything he’d learned in twenty-five years of swordwork.

It opened his throat.

Hot blood flooded his mouth and filled his lungs. He tried to breathe and choked. He tried to raise his sword and watched in horror as his hand fell away, still gripping the blessed steel, and landed in grass that was already soaked red.

The Hell-Thorn’s blade came for his face, and Lord Casric the Unbroken died, staring at the morning sky.

The Hell-Thorn stepped over him and kept going. It was twenty yards from the circle … fifteen … Men threw themselves in its path, and it cut through them without pause.

Ten yards.

It could see the mages now, kneeling in their salt and iron, their voices building to a crescendo that filled the air. It could feel what they were doing to the barrier between worlds.

Five yards.

It killed the last guard.

Three steps and it could scatter the salt, kill the mages, and stop this for good.

And in that second, the world fell silent.

Every fae on the battlefield froze. The Hell-Thorn stopped midstride, blade raised. Its head turned slowly west, toward where the entrance to Underhill had always been.

A white-haired female fae dropped to her knees, hands clutching her chest. “No! No! They wouldn’t. They couldn’t!”

A silver-eyed warrior stared at his hands, turning them over. “I can’t feel it. Where is it? Where—” His voice broke. “It’s gone. Underhill is gone.”

“The gates.” Another fae, this one with a face twisted with shock. “The gates are sealed.”

“Did we seal them?” The white-haired female looked at the others. “Did the Courts close the gates to save the realm, or did the humans—” She looked at the mages, at the ritual circle still glowing with power. “Did they do it? Did they seal us out?”

No one answered, because no one knew. The fae looked at each other, then toward the west, and finally at the battlefield around them. Hundreds of dead. Human and fae both.

The Hell-Thorn stood surrounded by a field of corpses, black armor sheeted with blood, both blades dripping red. It stared west. Its jaw worked and its hands flexed against its sword hilts.

On the ridge, Captain Ehren raised his blade with shaking hands. Blood ran down his arms and soaked into his sleeves. He didn’t know if it was his or something else’s.

“The ritual worked.” His voice carried across the silent battlefield. “Underhill is sealed. The fae are trapped.”

The Hell-Thorn’s head snapped toward him.

For a heartbeat, nothing moved.

Then the Hell-Thorn screamed. It raised its blades and charged.

The Nightwild Guard followed, full of fury and the desperation of animals backed into a corner. They threw themselves at the humans with everything they had left.

The Hell-Thorn tore through the ranks. Its blades moved faster than thought. Men fell in pieces. But something about its charge was different. It was slower than before. Only a fraction, but enough that when a spearman thrust at it, iron punched through the gap between shoulder and breastplate.

The Hell-Thorn staggered.

Blood ran down its armor. Red blood, not silver. It looked down at the wound, face going slack with shock. Then it took the spearman’s head off and kept moving.

But everyone had seen it. Human and fae both. Something had changed. The fae bled red now. They were still faster and stronger, still deadly, but they were weakening. Vulnerable in a way they’d never been before.

The battle raged until the sun touched the horizon.

By then Therison Vale was more dead than living, with bodies piled so thick in places you couldn’t see grass.

The fae pulled back into the forest—what was left of them.

Maybe a hundred of the three hundred who started. The humans didn’t pursue them.

In the forest, the Hell-Thorn knelt among the dying, the Nightwild Guard at its back, fingers coated in blood that should have been silver, but stained its skin red. Around it, the survivors huddled in small groups.

“What do we do?” one of them asked. “Where do we go?”

No one answered. They all stared west, toward where Underhill should have been.

The Hell-Thorn stood, armor dented and covered in blood. It looked at the survivors, cataloging who remained of the Nightwild Guard among them.

“We move. Before they regroup.”

“Move where? Home is gone.”

“Then we find others and warn them.” The Hell-Thorn sheathed its blades. “And we survive until we find a way to return to Underhill.”