Chapter 28
“I didn’t expect you’d come.”
Ivan crouched in the shadow of a collapsed bastion, iron biting into his wrists where his cuffs sat tight, the chain between them short enough to hinder and long enough to remind him, each time he moved, who held the leash.
Beyond the wall, Fenreach lay silent. What little light remained of the day had curdled to rust across the desert flats.
Distant lightning split the violet sky, flashes glancing off of the sand.
The illusion fields wavered at the far reach of Ivan’s sight, a distortion that bent sound as much as light.
They had been there long enough for the heat to bleed from the stone. Long enough for the light to fail. Long enough to watch the same two torches make their slow, predictable circuit along the eastern parapet—again, and again, and again.
Arwn’s Void.
The name had endured for centuries—long before Fenreach, long before Osin.
Once, this valley had not been a ruin. It had been a city of scholars and artificers—a gathering of every curious, half-mad intellect the old world could spare.
They had called it Arwn’s Reach: a sanctum of quartz and brass, rising on pillars above the desert floor, built where the ley lines of the earth—the places where reality thinned—ran closest to the surface.
The brightest minds had come here chasing theories, murmuring of enlightenment and a new age of travel. That had been the dawn of Latheria’s golden age—and the beginning of every sin that followed. Now the place stood as a monument to its own undoing, the grave marker of humanity’s first atrocity.
Eight of them waited in the dying light—Dominic, Yoni, Dario, and Bryn among them.
Their names had been the first given, and Ivan had not been surprised.
They carried themselves like a close-knit breed, the sort who did not send others to bleed if they could bleed themselves.
Royals, soldiers, healers—it made little difference.
In his experience, conviction was rarer among the highborn than courage, and these four seemed to possess both.
Rolfe, though—that had been a surprise.
He crouched beside Ivan now, silent, scarred hands loose over his knees, his gaze shifting between the compound’s black outline and Ivan’s face—not fearful, but watchful.
Waiting. Ivan did not need to ask what stirred in the man.
Few came this near the grave of their homeland without feeling the itch to unearth something from it.
If not bones, then vengeance.
Farther back, two rebels crouched by the wall—nervous shapes carved from the dark.
One was Athelric, the only one in motion, lips moving in silent counts as he tracked patrol intervals.
Ivan hadn’t bothered to learn the other man’s name.
Names were a kindness reserved for those who lived long enough to keep them.
If they saw the dawn, perhaps then he would ask.
They had come through the Void just before dusk—Athelric opening the gate—and the rebels crossed with veteran ease, stepping through nothing as if it were a road long traveled.
Ivan had not. Something had brushed the inside of his chest as he passed between, as though a rib had been loosened and left to rattle against the rest, the shadow in him restless.
Ivan dragged his bound hands briefly across his sternum, as if he could press it back into place. It didn’t ease.
“I didn’t expect you’d come,” Rolfe had said when they gathered before the crossing.
“Nor did I.”
Ivan was here because ink and parchment had their limits. You could map walls, chart patrols, trace the bones of a fortress—but wards were another matter. Wards shifted; they breathed. They remembered the hands that had made them.
And these were Osin’s.
No notes, however precise, could lead a man through them blind.
Not without waking the whole structure—and every blade inside it.
Eight had been sent to breach a place built to swallow armies.
Two were near-useless. He was one of them: bound, weaponless, still the most dangerous thing in their line—if only because he knew where to cut.
The other was the Druid, Athelric, kept close behind them like a final prayer.
A way home, should there be anything left of them to return.
Six men, then.
Six to do the work of eight.
Across the wall, torchlight dragged in a slow arc along the parapet.
Ivan tracked it without moving his head.
Every twelve minutes, the eastern watch circled the pylons and vanished behind the western tower—out of sight for no more than a handful of breaths.
Long enough, if you knew where to step, or slip through the outer seam before the wardline settled again.
Yoni’s voice cut across his thoughts, rough as gravel. “Reminiscing about the good times, eh, Hunter?”
Ivan shifted his weight but didn’t look at him. The chain between his wrists scraped faintly, then went still as he caught it. Thunder rolled far away, and the wind turned heavy with rain. His gaze lifted to the lantern-lines burning with stolen Draoth-fire. Yoni said something else, unimportant.
He could guess the subject—the old rumors.
That he’d brought men here before: script-keepers, smugglers, rebels trafficking shards of Tírrísh scripture across the Vredian border as if words could keep a culture alive.
Osin had called them heretics. To Ivan, they’d only been names pressed beneath a wax seal.
He had marched them through this gate once, bound by an oath tighter than their ropes.
He still saw their eyes, heard their screams—pleading for mercy he could not provide.
Now he crouched outside that same gate—wrists bound, weaponless—led there in chains by the countrymen of those he’d once hunted. The gods did love their little jokes.
A fresh gust swept the ridge, carrying sheets of rain that hissed across the rock, cooling the air to steel.
Droplets gathered along Ivan’ jaw, his hair plastering to his temples, the cuffs at his wrists gone slick and red-brown with running rust. The others hunched into their cloaks. Bryn’s braid hung wet against her back.
A flicker of light drew Ivan’s gaze back to the parapet.
Right on time.
The eastern watch.
Ivan flattened against the broken wall, hand lifting in a tight motion down the line: be ready.
Torchlight flared—two men finishing their circuit.
One yawned mid-turn. The other swung the torch wide, its flame catching the ward sigil carved into the stone.
Sweat gathered at Ivan’s temple, though rain slicked it away at once.
Lightning broke again, blue-white, throwing the parapet into stark relief.
He fixed on the pulse of light, counting. Three, four, pause.
The guard moved on, torch dimming. The land swallowed their glow until it was a faint smudge behind the curtain of rain. Beyond them, at the base of the tower, another blaze stirred to life. The next watch stepping out. A brief overlap. A gap.
Dominic exhaled once—the barest sound. “Move.”
They rose, eight shifting bodies weaving between piles of broken masonry.
Rain drummed steadily now, running in dark rivers down the rubble.
They moved quickly, low in the shadow of the outer wall, the storm hiding their sound.
Every flash of lightning burned their shadows long across the stone; every roar of thunder devoured the noise of their breath.
Fenreach loomed larger with each stride.
Up close, the walls were worse than they had seemed from afar—wet, dark stone dripping silver water, streaked with the white ghosts of old runoff.
Iron rods ran like veins between the blocks, humming faintly with ward sigils that glowed when lightning strobed over them.
Ivan reached the outer line first and stopped.
The barrier shimmered across the corridor like drawn silk in a high wind. The air warped around it; light bowed low and refused to straighten. Raindrops struck the invisible surface and skidded sideways.
“Bryn.”
She came forward, quiet, sleeves rolled to the elbow, her Draoth already glinting along her fingertips—a fine, sharp filament of gold.
“Look for interference,” he told her. “See how the distortion shifts—those loops are nodes. You want the dead space between them.”
“I see it.”
Of all of them, she was the only one he’d trust here. “Good. The displacement zone runs edge to edge. You can’t break through it; you have to redirect it. Match its oscillation frequency.”
Athelric adjusted his brass device, measuring the hum. “Frequency decay three-point—” he began, but one look from Ivan’s look stopped the rest.
Thunder pealed again—closer now. The vibration crawled down the wall, rattling the iron rods. The barrier fluttered—a faint quiver.
“Angle to the plane,” Ivan whispered. “Shallow as you can manage.”
Her first touch drew a coil of pale color from the surface.
Rainwater dripped from her chin into the glow, scattering tiny sparks where it met the energy’s surface.
The light along her hand thinned, then the hum changed pitch: lower, warping into something closer to speech.
The barrier flexed like muscle under strain.
“That’s it,” Ivan said, and a narrow breach shimmered before them—dark and fluid, only discernible by the way sound warped as it passed through. Rain curved around the opening, bending away like it feared the heat inside.
“Go,” he ordered.
Dominic slipped through first, Yoni following close behind, his hand brushing Bryn’s shoulder before the distortion erased them both. One by one, the others crossed—boots soundless on the stone, rain streaming from their coats as the barrier’s light skimmed over them.
Ivan stepped through with Bryn close behind. The air thickened at once—cold, viscous—gripping his skin and locking his breath. The barrier clung as he forced his way through, a vibration running up his ribs, alive and angry. Then—release.
Ivan caught Bryn’s wrist. “Bleed it off. Now.”