32. Chapter 32
AMARIA
The mountain changed overnight. I woke to the hammers—not the rhythmic ring of craft I’d grown used to, but a chorus that was faster, more urgent. A dozen anvils worked in discord, metal screaming against metal, until the air itself seemed to vibrate with their purpose.
I spent the day walking the corridors, barely recognizing the world I’d woken up to.
The training grounds had been repurposed.
Where warriors once sparred in orderly rotations, now they drilled in formation—tight clusters moving as single units, practicing maneuvers I'd never seen.
Kill formations. The dragonborn who'd taught philosophy last week stood at the center, barking commands, his voice sharp as a blade.
The great hall had emptied of feasting tables. In their place: weapon racks. Armor stands. Maps spread across every surface, weighted with stones, marked with routes and positions and contingencies.
I passed a group of younglings—children, really, barely old enough to hold steel—learning to strap on chest plates. An elder guided their hands, patient but grim. No one pretended this was a game.
The dragon roosts hummed with activity. I climbed to an overlook and watched the armorsmiths work—fitting Umbra's kin with plates of reinforced scale-metal, testing the joints, checking the weight distribution.
The dragons submitted to it with a quiet, iron-bound composure.
They knew. They'd always known, maybe. That this was coming.
Pyrrath stood apart from the others, Dreadscale at his side. Neither moved. Both watched. Two creatures older than most civilizations, reading the shape of what approached.
The sounds followed me everywhere.
Hammers. Orders. The hiss of quenching steel. The scrape of whetstone on blade. The heavy beat of wings as scout parties launched, returning hours later with reports that made faces go pale.
The singing had stopped. I hadn't noticed until it was gone—the low hum that used to thread through the corridors, the old songs warriors sang while working, the children's rhymes that echoed up from the lower levels. All silent now. Replaced by the language of preparation.
Two days passed like this. I moved through them in fragments.
Checking supplies. Reviewing patrol routes.
Sitting with Caden while his Mirror-Fire continued its slow work of burning away the King's poison.
He looked better. Clearer. But he watched me with eyes that knew too much, and neither of us spoke about what was coming.
Serenya drifted through the preparations like a ghost wearing her own face.
Maxx stayed close—always close now, a shadow that couldn't stop talking, filling every silence before it could swallow her.
Dreadscale remained their silent gravity, steadying Maxx with a hand to the shoulder the moment the performance faltered, dragging him back before he could shatter.
Eryndor and I existed in parallel.
Same rooms. Same meetings. Same war tables spread with the same impossible problems. We moved around each other with the careful choreography of people who'd learned to function without touching. The armor stayed on. The relentless ache stayed right where we'd left it.
On the third morning, we stood at the central war table.
Maps of the lowlands spread before us. Markers showing the void's spread—grey eating green, village after village erased. The King's movements tracked in red: heading back to the palace, his harvest complete, his army of impossible soldiers waiting to be deployed.
Thyra stood across from us. Dreadscale at her side.
"We need a new plan," she said. "The old one is a death warrant."
I looked at the map. At the spreading grey. At the mountain we stood on, no longer hidden, no longer safe.
"Yes," I said. "We do."
"The palace is a fortress," Thyra pressed.
Eryndor leaned forward, the leather of his gear creaking in the quiet room. He bypassed the spreading grey entirely, his eyes locking onto the center of the board.
Eryndor's finger traced the outline on the map. "Warded walls. Oathbound guards. Checkpoints every fifty feet in the inner corridors."
"So we don't go through the corridors," I said.
"The throne room has a service entrance—"
"—from the kitchens. I know. But it's guarded by—"
"—two rotating shifts. Four men each. Except during state dinners, when they pull the kitchen guard to—"
"—bolster the ballroom security." I tapped a position on the eastern wing. "Which leaves a window here."
Thyra's eyes moved between us. Her brow furrowed.
"How long have you two been planning palace infiltrations?"
"We haven't." Eryndor didn't look up from the map. "I grew up in that palace. She—"
"—studied every guard rotation while planning to kill him the first time." I shifted a marker. "The servant quarters connect to the lower levels through a passage that isn't on official schematics."
"Why not?"
"Because my father had it built for his mistresses." Eryndor's voice stayed flat. "No one discusses it. Everyone knows."
Dreadscale stood at the table's edge. Silent. Watching. His eyes tracked our movements—the way I leaned left as Eryndor leaned right, the way our hands moved across the map in coordinated sweeps, never colliding, always complementing.
"The void soldiers will be inside," a dragonborn commander said. "We saw what they did on open ground. In enclosed spaces—"
"The Fury burns through their distortion." I moved another marker. "If I can get close enough to the King, I can anchor reality for everyone in my radius."
"And if you can't?"
"Then we need a secondary anchor point." Eryndor's hand reached for a marker at the same moment mine did.
Our fingers almost touched.
We both pulled back. Reflexive. Trained by weeks of careful distance. The movement was small—invisible to anyone not watching for it.
I registered the absence. The space where his hand should have been. The silence where the bond should have hummed with recognition.
Eryndor continued. "Here. The throne room's eastern balcony overlooks the main floor. If we position a strike team with line of sight, they can draw the void soldiers upward."
"Leaving the floor clear," I said. "And the King isolated on the dais."
Thyra stared at the map. "Isolated or not, you heard Dreadscale. Dragon fire doesn't kill him. He regenerates. How do you assassinate a man who can't bleed out?"
Eryndor's eyes flicked to me. We hadn't discussed this part out loud, but as he looked at me, I knew we had reached the exact same conclusion.
"You don't burn him from the outside," I said, my voice eerily calm in the quiet room. I picked up the red marker representing the King.
"The Fury anchors reality," Eryndor explained, his voice falling into the same deadly cadence as mine. "It burns through distortions. If Amaria gets close enough to flood him with it—"
"It shuts down the regeneration. For exactly one heartbeat, he won't be an immortal Dragonborn. He'll just be a fae." I finished.
Thyra looked at the red marker in my hand. "And in that heartbeat?"
"I take his head." Eryndor placed his own marker directly beside mine on the map.
The council chamber went dead silent.
It was a suicide run. A needle-thread of a plan that required perfect timing, impossible luck, and the two of us standing toe-to-toe with a god. But it was a plan.
Thyra exhaled a slow, ragged breath. She looked at Dreadscale, then back to the map. "Alright. Show me how we get you to that balcony."