26. Chapter 26
DREADSCALE
The wind screamed past my face. The glassed road rushed up to meet us.
Pyrrath hit the ground hard, sliding into position next to Umbra.
I was off his back before the impact settled, axe already drawn.
The cooling glass cracked beneath my boots, radiating the impossible heat of dragon fire.
The air tasted of scorched metal and burning meat.
In the center of the wreckage, the King waited.
Arms at his sides. Watching us surround him with serene patience.
"Eryndor." His voice was warm. Paternal. "You've brought friends."
Eryndor's blade was already sweeping into a lethal arc.
He knew his father's style. Every feint, every counter, every favorite combination. His first strike came in low—a cut the King had taught him to use against armored opponents—and the King blocked it. Barely. Steel shrieked against steel.
Amaria came in from the left. The Fury guided her arm, faster than thought, driving her blade toward the King's exposed ribs.
He twisted. Her edge caught flesh—blood sprayed across the glassed ground.
First blood. The King staggered.
I was already there. No fire but centuries of combat, my axe finding the gash across his shoulder before he could recover. Maxx darted in behind me, quick and vicious, his daggers opening the soft tissue behind the knee.
The King dropped.
One knee on the glass. Blood pooling beneath him. For one impossible moment, he looked almost mortal.
Serenya drove Veyra closer. The dragon snapped her jaws at him. He narrowly missed the teeth and danced straight into Eryndor's sword. The King arched, mouth opening in what should have been a scream.
But he laughed.
Blood poured from his wounds—back, shoulder, knee—but his chest heaved with a wet, rattling mockery. He took three fatal wounds and smiled at us like a victor.
Then his eyes moved past us. Toward the road. Toward the end of the procession. The carriages we hadn't torched. A mile back. They looked small and unimportant. Dead weight, we'd assumed. Servants. Supplies.
The tent flaps opened.
One carriage. Then the next. Then the next.
Figures emerged.
They were not fae soldiers. They moved wrong—jerky, stuttering, like puppets with tangled strings. The air around them shimmered. Bent. The light twisted in directions light shouldn't go, sliding off their forms like water off oil.
Dozens of them. Pouring out of the carriages like smoke given form.
I had seen horrors. I had watched kingdoms fall and dragons die and men unmake themselves for causes that rotted before their bodies cooled.
I had never seen anything move like this.
"What—" Maxx's voice cracked.
The King rose to his feet. His wounds were already closing, flesh knitting, blood drying to nothing. He brushed dust from his shoulder like we'd mildly inconvenienced him.
"You didn't think I'd travel unprotected, did you?" His smile widened. "The caravan was small because it didn't need to be big. I don't need a full army on the road."
He gestured toward the approaching figures.
"I brought something better."
The first void soldier reached Maxx. He moved on instinct—daggers flashing, a strike that should have opened the creature from hip to shoulder. The blades connected.
And dissolved.
The metal turned to dust mid-strike, particles scattering into nothing, as if the weapons had never existed at all.
Maxx stumbled back, staring at his empty hands. "What the fuck—"
Amaria swung at another. Dawnrender passed through empty space.
The soldier had been there. I'd tracked its movement. Timed her strike. But her sword found nothing—just air where flesh should have been.
Then it was behind her. Already striking.
She twisted, barely dodging. A shifting, mangled edge whistled past her ear. The air itself seemed to scream where it passed.
Reality warped.
I tried to find Eryndor—and saw two of him. No, three. Overlapping figures, slightly out of sync, like reflections in broken glass. Which one was real? I couldn't tell. Hundreds of years trusting my Dragonborn eyes, and now they lied.
Time stuttered.
I swung at a void soldier and I'd already lashed out, the motion doubling, my own arm a blur of overlapping moments. Past and present colliding. My axe hit something—nothing—something again.
The King stepped back. Out of the chaos. Out of the fight.
He watched. That smile. That godsdamned smile.
He wasn't fighting anymore. He didn't need to. He'd wanted us on the ground. Wanted us close. Wanted us to meet his new army face to face.
This was never an assassination. It was a field test.
"Beautiful, aren't they?" His voice carried over the chaos, calm and conversational.
"Void essence. Concentrated. Refined. Injected directly into my most loyal soldiers.
" He clasped his hands behind his back like a scholar admiring his own research.
"They're not fully corporeal anymore. Your blades can't find them.
Your eyes can't track them. They exist in the space between moments. "
A void soldier materialized inches from Amaria's face. She threw herself backward, hit the glassed ground, rolled.
The void soldiers swarmed.
They didn't run. They simply arrived. The temperature dropped—my breath ghosted white in front of me. Like the heat was being unmade along with everything else.
One second the space was empty, the next it was filled with irregular, stuttering movement. The air hissed, a sound like water hitting hot iron, as their displaced bodies fought the atmosphere.
We scattered in the chaos. I lost and found Eryndor repeatedly in the stuttering light. Three versions of Serenya phased at the edge of my vision. None of them moved right.
Reality had become a liar.
Maxx's daggers were gone. Dissolved. He'd switched to fists because Maxx would always fight with whatever he had left. He swung at a void soldier—a clean hook that should have cracked bone.
His fist went through.
And his hand started to flicker.
The edges of his fingers blurred. Stuttered. There and gone and there again, like a candle flame guttering in wind. The void soldiers were contagious. Touching them unmade you.
“The inverse of everything solid and true," the King continued. "Reality itself rejects them. Which means reality can't touch them." His eyes found Maxx's dissolving hand. "But touch them—and they reject you right back. Piece by piece."
Maxx pulled back. Stared at his hand.
He reached for a fallen dagger with his flickering hand. His fingers passed through the hilt. Through the ground beneath it. He tried again—watched his own hand sink into solid stone like smoke dissolving into air.
His face went white.
For one second real terror crossed his face. Maxx, who hid behind sarcasm like armor, who had never once let me see him afraid—
Serenya screamed.
I spun. Found her across the battlefield.
She was frozen. Standing completely still, eyes wide, face slack with confusion. She didn't know where she was. Didn't know why there was fighting. Didn't know to run.Why did she get off that gods-damn dragon.
A void soldier moved toward her. It approached in broken frames. Ten feet away. Five feet. Two. Its weapon raised, the edge blurring between solid iron and empty static. Serenya blinked at it, head tilted, clutching her ceremonial dagger like a forgotten toy.
She wasn't fighting the void soldiers.
She was trying to remember what a sword was.
I was thirty feet away. Three void soldiers between us, pulsing in and out of existence, their weapons cutting at angles that shouldn't exist. I couldn't reach her in time. Couldn't burn a path without burning her.
I moved anyway.
The first soldier phased into my path. I swung before it fully materialized—axe biting into texture that felt like frozen smoke. It shrieked, a sound that existed in frequencies my ears shouldn't hear, and I was already past it.
Maxx was only ten feet away from her. Nothing between them but open ground. He didn't hesitate.
He moved without hesitation. Legs pumping, flickering hand forgotten, he crossed the distance in seconds.
He threw himself over her. Wrapped his dissolving arms around her body, pressed her face into his chest, curled himself into a shield. His left arm was oscillating in and out of existence—there, gone, there, half-there—and he held her with it anyway.
Held her with pieces of himself that were actively being unmade.
I had watched warriors die for kings. For glory. For the promise of songs sung after their bones were dust. I had never watched a man let himself be unmade just to be a shield.
A void soldier materialized in front of me. I didn't stop. Dropped my shoulder and barreled through it—the wrongness passed through my chest like ice water as reality stuttered. I kept running.
The cold spread through my sternum. I ignored it.
Twenty feet.
Maxx looked over his shoulder.
Found me across the battlefield.
His eyes were terrified. Raw. Nothing left but a fae holding onto someone he loved while his own body forgot how to exist.
He looked at me. Measured the distance.
Twenty heartbeats. Maybe.
I nodded.
Don't make it twenty-one.
Two more between us. I buried my axe in the first—felt the blade stick in something that wasn't quite flesh, wasn't quite air. Wrenched it free. The second came at my flank. I caught its weapon on my bracer and the metal screamed, frost crackling across the surface, my arm going numb to the elbow.
I swung with the dead arm anyway.
The void soldier reached them first.
Its blade swung down—passed through Maxx's flickering shoulder—pieces of him dissolving into nothing, atoms scattering into the void between moments.
But he didn't let go.
His arms tightened around Serenya. He pressed his face into her hair and held on while now his shoulder pulsed and then his back started to blur and his entire left side began to unmake itself.
Fifteen heartbeats.
I surged forward, forcing my speed to the absolute limit.
A void soldier appeared directly in my path. No time to swing. I grabbed it by what should have been its throat—my hand sank into cold static, fingers dissolving at the edges—and I threw it. Hurled the wrongness aside with strength I'd forgotten I still had.
My hand flickered. Once. Twice.
I made a fist. Forced it solid. Kept moving.
Twelve heartbeats.
His right arm solidified around her. His left was barely there—a ghost of a limb, translucent, wrong.
Ten.
Another soldier. I didn't have time to fight it. I breathed a blast of fire, a wall of heat between me and the thing trying to flicker into my chest. It recoiled. Bought me three steps.
Seven heartbeats.
My lungs burned. My dissolving hand ached with wrongness. The void was in me now—I could feel it, cold threads worming through my veins, trying to convince my body it had never existed.
I had watched friends die. Lovers. Dragons. I had learned to let go of everything.
Five.
I was not letting go of this.
The last void soldier stood between me and them. I didn't slow down. I hit it at full speed—brute Dragonborn muscle and centuries of rage—and we went down together. Its blade caught my side. I felt the ice slice into my ribs, felt pieces of me trying to scatter.
I roared. The sound came out half-fire, half-fury.
I threw the creature aside and crawled the last few feet, throwing myself over Maxx and Serenya.
Three heartbeats.
I dragged myself upright, opened my mouth, and roared.
Dragon-Fire.
Not at the soldiers. At the ground. A sweeping ring of flame erupted around the three of us, locking us in and the void out. It burned so hot the glass beneath cracked and reformed.
The fire didn't just burn—it stabilized. Reality locked back into place inside the ring, cauterizing the void's infection with pure Dragonborn heat.
But Maxx's form was still wavering. The void was still fighting for him.
I grabbed him by the collar.
I closed my fist in the fabric and I yanked, dragging him toward my own heat, anchoring him back into solidity. My knuckles went white. The leather creaked. His form stuttered under my grip, and I held harder.
"Stay," I commanded. It came out like a vow I hadn't meant to give away.
The void surrendered him.
He gasped, whole but shaking until his teeth chattered.
I didn't let go.
Serenya lay beneath him, safe, but confused. Her eyes moved between Maxx's face and my hands and the ring of fire still burning around us.
"What—" She blinked. "What happened?"
She didn't understand. Didn't know that the male wrapped around her had been willing to unmake himself rather than let anything touch her. Didn't know how close they'd both come to dissolving into nothing.
But she looked at Maxx's face—at the terror he hadn't managed to mask yet, the raw animal fear still shaking through his body—and something in her recognized it. Even through the fog.
"You're shaking," she whispered.
"Cold." Maxx's voice cracked. "Just cold."
I was still gripping his collar. I hadn't let go. Couldn't seem to make my hand release.
I looked at him. At the places where he'd almost stopped existing. At the arm that had been translucent thirty seconds ago, now solid, now real, now wrapped around a fae who wouldn't remember this by morning.
He'd known that. Known she wouldn't remember.
He'd dissolved himself for her anyway.
Something cracked in my chest. An old fault line I thought had sealed when I buried Veleth. When I stopped letting myself want things that could be taken.
The three of us, inside a ring of fire, holding onto each other like the world was ending. I looked at Maxx, still gasping for air. At Serenya, safely tucked beneath his chest. The world was ending. And I wanted them anyway.
I finally let go of his collar.
My hand stayed close, ready to catch him if he started to fade. He didn't.
But I watched him anyway, filing this exact moment away into the bedrock. Somewhere permanent, where I wouldn't be able to burn it out later even if I tried.
Fool, I thought.
Magnificent, stupid, mortal fool.