Chapter 40
Daed
Moonlight spills thinly over the forest canopy as we cut through the night sky, wings whispering against the wind.
Below us, the Legion’s encampment sprawls across the valley, a wound of fire and steel burning in the dark.
It should be a warrior’s moon guiding us, full and bright, the kind that blesses battle and blood.
But it isn’t. It’s the new moon. The Silent Eye.
A night of reflection and restraint. A night when Fae seek clarity, not carnage.
The omen sits wrong in my chest. I should welcome the darkness for the cover it gives us, yet the stag’s words gnaw at me still: Peace cannot be found through victory.
Only through surrender. The memory is a stone lodged in my throat.
What if he was right? What if laying down my blade, staying my hand, would be enough to bring Amara back?
But the thought curdles as quickly as it comes. I look down at the glow of the enemy camp, the shadows shifting like teeth around the fires, and I know there can be no peace while they still breathe. Still march. Still kill.
Death Singer manifests, my fingers tightening around the hilt until the leather creaks. If surrender is the path to peace, then I was never meant for it. Because how can I save her… if I do not fight?
We fold into the ridge and drop like shadows behind the crest. The Blades settle around me, a circle of breathing steel and feathered silence, waiting for the word I haven’t yet decided to give.
Orios lands beside me, breath barely a ghost. He leans close, voice a rasp only I can hear.
“Patrols move the lines. Archers on the walls. Look.” He jabs a thumb toward the encampment and my eyes find them, men pacing with lanterns, heads tilting to the sky, always watching.
“And the ballistas.” He nods toward a ring of gleaming machines near the center, their limbs heavy and cruel, gilded in filigree that catches the torchlight.
Beautiful, deadly, without a doubt crafted by Fae hands
Around the camp, pyres burn in circles, threaded between tents. They carve the dark into pools of fire and shadow. From here we are nearly invisible, but any closer and the flames will bring us into the light. The men at those pyres will see movement long before our blades can silence them.
I weigh the options. Strike the ballistas first and risk exposure to the pyres and patrols.
Slip a small band down to snuff the fires and disable the crew, then collapse the camp in one bite.
Or burn everything to distraction and hope chaos hides us.
None of them are clean. None of them promise Amara at the end.
Finally, I breathe out. “Hold,” I tell them, and the word is a stone that drops into a still pool. “Orios. Take four. Quiet. Void-walk close to those pyres. Find the crews and silence the ballistas. Do it without bells.” He nods once.
“The rest of you, archers on the walls.”
The Blades incline their heads, no hesitation, only the silent promise of obedience.
My gaze sweeps the pyres burning bright across the camp, their flames turning night to false day. “I’ll handle the fires. Even with their numbers, they don’t stand a chance under darkness. We are Mordorin. The shadows bend to us.”
“And then?” Orios asks.
“Then I find Zyphoro,” I answer. “Then we return to the Grove.”
My warriors need no further words. Each takes their helm in both hands and pulls it over their head.
Faces vanish into shadowed hoods, eyes blaze white beneath the veil.
Runes ignite across skin, pulsing like heartbeats, and wings unfurl with a hiss of smoke.
They dissolve into the void one by one, curls of shadow and whispering air, until only Orios and I remain.
A low growl rumbles from his chest. “It has been too long since I’ve let my blade run wild. So many souls down there. So many sweet cries waiting to be ripped from their throats before I sever them.”
“Only if you must,” I cut in sharply.
His head snaps toward me, disbelief flickering in his eyes. “Rook?”
The stag’s voice echoes in my skull, a whisper that gnaws at the edge of my resolve. Peace cannot be found through victory. Only through surrender. I war with the part of me that is born for killing and the part that wants to be worthy of her.
“If you can let them live,” I say slowly, “then let them live.” It’s the closest I can come to mercy.
Orios bares his teeth, gaze flicking toward the encampment. “And if it comes down to my life…” He gestures toward the humans moving through the firelight. “…or theirs?”
I hesitate, only for a breath, before exhaling the answer that feels like a blade to my own chest.
“Then make it quick.”
That earns a wolfish grin. “Yes, Rook.”
He pulls on his helm, the shadows swallowing his face, but I can still hear that grin in his voice when he speaks again. “I always kill clean.”
Then, with a ripple of smoke and a sharp crack of air, Orios steps into the void, leaving only the scent of ash and the promise of blood in his wake.
I watch them ghost through the camp, appear, vanish, reappear, void-walking along walls and through the shadows.
My eyes bolt to the pyres. They are the threat that will betray us first. I must snuff them.
Only if the fires die can we sift through the mess of tents, tear the camp open, find my sister.
If she is not the same as when I last saw her, I take back my mercy.
If they have harmed her, then kill them all, every last one, but leave the Golden Son for me.
I rise, full height to the highest crag.
Smoke washes over me and my leathers unmake themselves into armor, black as starless night, etched with silver, runes seared into the steel until they hum under my skin.
I flex my hands, the gauntlets sigh as the spikes kiss the leather.
Smoke curls around my scaled pauldrons. A long black cloak unfurls behind me, catching the wind, and I settle the helm last, a shrouded hood that turns my face into a void.
The last thing my enemies will see is the white storm of my eyes.
I arch my back and feel the muscles knit.
My shadow-wings burst free, and my head falls back as I soak in their power.
Then I hear him, the demon I keep caged beneath my ribs.
He is always there, a low hunger I rarely feed.
Emranth is a whisper compared to Gygarth, and if I could silence the Father of Below even for a flicker, then this thing is nothing I cannot bind.
When I call the wings, though, his voice comes clearer, slick and ravenous.
“I hunger for blood,” he murmurs in my head. “Is it time? Do we feast?”
I let a smirk cut across my face. “There may be a morsel for you, demon. But not yet. Back to the void.”
He hisses and withdraws, folding into the dark.
My gaze hardens on the outer ring of pyres. They will fall first. That will give my Blades the sliver of shadow they need to move unseen and strike true.
I dangle a boot over the crag, feeling the valley yawn beneath. Few know the sensation of falling forever and never hearing the ground. Of tasting the end and then being hauled up into flight. I do.
It never dulls.
I step off and do exactly as I promised.
Fall. The wind slams into me, hard enough to cut, stinging behind my eyes.
Time fractures, everything accelerates beyond even Fae sight until the rocks below swell into a single, jagged mouth.
For an instant I taste the end, before my wings fling themselves wide.
The air catches me like a hand, hurling me back up.
I pin them, shoulders burning, and drive forward, a shadow turned spear toward the camp.
It never dulls.
On any other night, I would send blades of smoke slicing through the throats of these humans, clean, silent deaths before they even knew I was there. But not tonight.
Tonight, I show restraint.
Coils of living shadow slip from my fingers, twisting like serpents through the air.
They wind around fragile human necks, not to kill, but to silence.
The coils tighten just enough to steal breath, to draw the light from their eyes until they crumple soundlessly to the ground.
The air stirs, the wood creaks beneath me as I land on the wall.
The first pyre blazes below. I stretch out my hands and call to the smoke. It answers, swirling and writhing before me, alive and hungry. With a thought, I send it forth. The smoke lashes around the flames, devouring the fire whole until nothing remains but a bed of cooling embers.
I rise again. East wall. More Legion soldiers fall.
More fires die. Each extinguished blaze paints the camp in deeper shadow, until the darkness itself begins to feel alive beneath my wings.
The Blades strike with precision, but even in the frenzied heat of battle, they obey.
No blood spills. Not yet. We will take this camp through cunning, not slaughter.
Orios and his contingent of Blades reach the ballistas, their forms ghosting through the shadows.
He disarms the crews without a sound, without breaking a sweat, with a skill honed over centuries, and begins dismantling the gilded machines.
Ithranor craftsmanship. Beautiful, terrible things. Like everything the Fae touch.
A parting gift from Anethesis. I snarl, canines sliding free.
If only I had killed him myself. The bliss of feeling his light go out under my hands.
Steel is quick but cold, impersonal. Hands on flesh are different.
To close my fingers around a throat, to watch the fire in someone’s eyes gutter and die. There is no greater satisfaction.
I smother the east wall, then the south. The last of the pyres collapses into smoke and ash. The archers and ballista crews lie still, unconscious, disarmed. Not a drop of blood spilled. The camp is ours.
But where is my sister?