31. Sabine
SABINE
Athin, dark line splits the far cavern wall from floor to ceiling, so clean and precise it looks almost intentional. I frown at it, my mind reaches for an explanation, then the fissure in the far cavern wall simply opens with a crack, and they pour through it like smoke given teeth.
"Tovian—"
His name barely clears my throat before an iron weight slams into my back, driving me away from Tovian and into the stone floor face-first. I taste blood instantly.
The drakestone chain hits my wrists like frozen iron. My limbs go sluggish. My thoughts blur at the edges. I claw at the nearest gargoyle and get a fist to the side of my head for it, and the world tilts hard to the left.
A crash. A snarl. I twist against my captor's grip and catch one clear image through the chaos: Tovian mid-lunge, wings half-spread, fury blazing off him like heat off forge-stone. He stops dead when he sees the chains already locked around my wrists.
Then he sees who's standing at the back of the fissure, directing the operation and whispers a word: "Rael?"
The name comes out as though torn from a wound. Low and hollow and utterly destroyed.
The gargoyle in question—slate-skinned, lean-faced—meets Tovian's eyes without flinching. "My Alpha."
Tovian moves. He actually moves, throwing off two of the vanguard with pure force, nearly reaching this Rael before the third chain drops across his shoulders and the drakestone does what drakestone does. His knees hit the cavern floor.
Vorgrym's roar tears through the caves somewhere behind us. Too late. All of it, too late.
They drag us up through the mountain in the pre-dawn dark.
The old cathedral emerges from the fog the way a nightmare does—slowly, then all at once. Gothic arches stand broken against the pale sky like cracked ribs, their stone blackened by age and fire.
And watching from every crag, every broken parapet, every ridge of snow-laden stone—thousands of rival gargoyles. Still as statues. Waiting.
Vultures, I think. Every last one of them.
Tharros stands at the altar.
He is enormous. Larger than I remembered. His pale granite skin catches the first grey light of dawn and his broken horns cast jagged shadows across the fractured floor.
"Bring them forward."
I am shoved to my knees on the altar stone. The cold bites through my trousers immediately. Tovian is forced down beside me, still straining against the drakestone chains, and the sound he makes low in his chest when he sees me kneeling sends a chill through me.
Tharros begins to speak. His voice carries—projected, deliberate, meant to reach every clan watching from the crags.
"Centuries ago," he says, spreading his arms wide, "you were told a story. Humans betrayed the Ashwing. A corrupt commander sold his Alpha to the enemy. Two treacheries colliding by accident." He pauses. Smiles.
The silence from the assembled clans is absolute.
Beside Tharros, Tovian remains anchored in a heavy, ancient stillness—a landslide held in place.
He does not roar; he sediments his rage, his claws leaving jagged furrows in the altar’s stone as he anchors himself against the urge to shatter the world.
"I built this war," Tharros says, the pride in his voice almost obscene.
"I have always looked down on you, Tovian.
You were the blight on our lineage—an Alpha who taints our culture by treating cattle as equals.
Humans are not partners. They are subservient property, tools to be siphoned and discarded as we see fit. "
Tharros flicks a wrist.
Flora moves with the blurring speed of a striking viper. She drives a serrated blade into Rael’s back. The commander gasps, the sound of a lung collapsing, and drops to his knees. Before his blood can even hit the floor, Flora’s blade sweeps in a cold, silver arc.
Rael’s head separates from his shoulders with a heavy thud.
He gestures to what is left of Rael, the Ashwing commander who had once stood at Tovian’s side. "Rael was gullible. He believed the fantasy of owning this valley unchallenged.”
"I made Rael whisper our 'true' intentions to Sevrik Mourne," Tharros continues, stepping over the cooling corpse.
"The foolish priest helped us seal the cavern, never realizing the blade swings both ways.
While Tovian slept, I ravaged Blackstone Valley.
I imprisoned the young, dragging them away in chains to keep the Stone Sleep at bay while I harvested other settlements.
My goal was never just a coup. It was the restoration of gargoyle supremacy.
The absolute dominance of our blood over their breath. "
I look down.
The stone beneath my knees is old. Ancient. In the cracks of it, the dark, ground-in staining is not a shadow or a trick of the light. It is a century of frost and wind failing to erase the evidence of a slaughter.
So much blood that the mountain itself seems to hold the scent of it, a copper-heavy confession rising from the granite.
It was never humans against gargoyles. It was never fear against power. The true monster has always been the unchecked, parasitic ambition festering within the elite of both races. A common rot wearing different faces in different rooms.
"The Ashwing Alpha stands before you mate-bonded to a human." Tharros gestures toward me. "Weakened. Compromised. Everything we built this world to prevent."
He looks directly at Tovian. "Today you all watch him prove it."
They drag me to the center of the altar alone. My wrists ache where the silver markings itch with a sudden, cold tension, but I don't give Tharros the satisfaction of a flinch.
Tovian lunges forward so hard the chains groan. Two gargoyles throw their full weight against him from behind and he still moves them half a foot before the drakestone bites and he staggers, choking against the collar.
"Let go of her! Sabine—!"
The drakestone blade Tharros produces is small. Black-veined stone with an edge that catches the pale dawn light like a sliver of mirror.
He is not in a hurry. I realise as he steps back from Tovian with composed, deliberate ease.
He could kill me in seconds and be done with it.
But that isn't the point. The point is the thousands of eyes watching — every clan he needs to convince, every watching Alpha seeing exactly how long it takes a mate-bonded ruler to come apart over a human woman's blood.
The first cut he makes opens across my left shoulder and I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to bleed rather than make a sound. The drakestone edge disrupts some warmth the mate bond has settled in my bones, and the cold rushes in to fill the space.
Don't scream. Don't give him anything.
The second cut crosses the first. Blood hits the frost-rimed stone in a dark scatter.
I lock my eyes on Tovian.
He is shaking. His entire body is trembling with the effort of staying still. His eyes have gone fully molten, no longer gold but hotter. Every muscle in his face is rigid. His hands—where the chains allow them to curl—are clenched so hard I can see cracks forming beneath his knuckles.
Hold on, I beg him silently. Please. Hold on.
The third cut is the deepest. The mountain air hits the wound before I'm ready and I can't help the sound that tears out of me—half-gasp, half-cry, swallowed almost immediately. My vision whites at the edges. The stone floor sways.
Tharros leans close and says, quiet enough that only I can hear, "All I need is thirty more seconds."
I look past him.
I find Tovian's eyes.
And I watch him look at the stone floor beneath me.
I watch him see the blood.
His blood. Old blood. Their blood—his people, his family, his clan. And now mine on top of it.
The chains explode, fragmenting into shrapnel that scatters across the altar in a ringing, shrieking burst. The gargoyles holding him stumble backward. One is simply thrown.
Tovian rises.
His stone skin has gone dark. An absence of color so complete it looks like a wound cut into the world.
His eyes blaze with a cold, blinding slate-fire, ancient and terrible.
The ground beneath the cathedral splinters—deep, resonant fractures tearing outward from his feet like the stone itself is afraid, the mountain groaning beneath as though recoiling from the force that has just been unleashed.