Chapter 30
Yoni hit him before Ivan fully understood he’d been grabbed. His skull cracked against the wall, stone biting through his wet hair, and the world flashed white before sound rushed back in—the wind roaring through the broken window, the rift thundering outside, Yoni’s voice tearing itself raw.
“You fucking liar!” Spittle struck his cheek. Yoni’s fist pinned the chain between Ivan’s wrists hard against his chest. “You led us to our deaths!”
Ivan didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The world beyond the window filled every thought. The light from the rift pulsed like a second sun bursting under the skin of the storm. The Legion was moving in it—forming ranks, climbing toward the fortress, their standards cutting black shapes in the glare.
How did they know?
Dominic’s voice split the air behind them, sharp with command. “Enough! Yoni, off him!”
Boots scraped on wet stone; someone grabbed Yoni’s shoulder, but Ivan barely felt the pressure lift. He swayed against the wall, heartbeat slamming in his ears. Dragging a shaking hand down his face, skin slick with spit and rain, he turned from the window.
Godfrey lay crumpled where they’d left him, thin as parchment, every vein and knuckle standing out under the candlelight.
Bryn knelt beside him, her Draoth sparking a faint gold as she sliced through the last of his restraints.
Across the chamber, Athelric braced his hands in a trembling arc in midair, lines of power linking his fingertips. The air tasted of ozone.
Ivan dropped to a crouch before Godfrey. “How?” His voice came out hollow. He didn’t need to clarify. They all knew who he meant.
Godfrey’s throat worked. “He didn’t know for certain you would come.” His chest hitched as Bryn cut the last chain free. “There are traps spread across the realm in places he thought you might go. This is only one of dozens.”
Ivan’s heart lurched. The noise of the army blurred, melting into the distant rush of blood in his ears.
Sybil. Tristan. Then his thoughts went further back.
To the capital. To heat that wasn’t from Draoth—the fire he had set himself, the one that had devoured half his family’s tradehouse down to the foundations.
Sybil’s screams still echoed in his memory, staged, practiced, meant to carry down the street so the neighbors would remember.
By morning, the floor had caved in, and he’d left another woman’s body there in her place.
He had believed it foolproof. He had believed Osin would see the bones and the name struck from records and think her gone.
He’d hidden Sybil after that—buried her in the capital under papers bought with blood and a false totem carved into her wrist, a safe life.
For years, that had been enough to sleep on.
But what if Osin had known all along? What if that patient, smiling beast had let him play out his mercy just to see where she ran?
A tremor rolled between him like a second heartbeat. The chains at his wrists clinked when he clenched his hands. He pressed a fist into his chest as though that could slow the panic clawing through him.
“Give me a weapon.”
Dominic ignored him. “We need to move, now. Yoni—get your head straight.”
The remaining rebels scrambled into action, their movements laced with fear. Athelric drew a breath through his teeth and began widening the flickering lines between his hands.
Bryn saw it first. “You can open one in here?”
Athelric’s jaw locked, sweat cutting lines through the dust on his temples. “It’s possible. The interference doesn’t—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Dominic snapped. “Do it.”
The distortion swelled outward, light licking the benches and chains.
Godfrey staggered upright with Bryn’s help. “Wait.” Athelric’s focus broke; the shimmer faltered. “We can’t leave yet.”
Dominic turned on him. “We’ve got thirty seconds before this whole place goes down. Whatever your reasons—”
“No,” Godfrey said again, shaking his head. “There’s a Sídhe here. In the lower galleries. Osin’s been keeping him alive for study.” He looked between them, eyes hollow but fierce. “We can’t leave him behind.”
Dario took a half step forward, jaw tight. “You want us to march deeper into this hell while an army closes in?”
“I want you to understand,” Godfrey said. “If we don’t save the Sídhe, we’ve already lost.”
His words hung there under the booming thunder, as the rift outside bled more light through the window and the walls began to shake.
Athelric’s hands still burned silver, the threshold half-open and trembling; Bryn’s fingers glowed in time with her pulse; Yoni stood tense beside the door, face streaked with blood and rain.
Dominic ran a rough hand through his hair. “We take him.”
No one argued. There wasn’t time.
Athelric snapped his hands closed. The half-formed rift folded in on itself, the light dying between his palms. Bryn and Yoni had Godfrey under each arm before the echo of Dominic’s order faded. Godfrey’s voice cut between them as they ran.
“South galleries—through the right passage, second descent!”
Ivan’s gut twisted. He knew the room. He could see it in his mind: the black vaults beneath the research wing, the iron doors slick, the smell.
They ran.
Water burst from beneath their boots, splashing across the stone. The corridors shuddered as dust drifted from carved lintels. The fortress groaned, the army outside were already pressing down from above.
They cut through an antechamber—rounded walls, half-fallen pillars, sigils carved deep enough to catch the light even in shadow. Athelric slowed, glancing up at the warped geometry overhead where the air bent in faint ribbons of light.
“Distortion’s clean,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’ll have a rift open here by the time you come back.”
Dominic spared him a glance. “Then hold your position. We’ll need it ready.”
The Druid set his satchel down, already pulling Draoth through his fingers.
The others pressed on, following Godfrey’s rasping directions into the lower galleries.
The cell was just as Ivan remembered it—an oval pit lined with basalt, bars fused to the floor.
Inside, a body hunched in rags, skin gray as ash.
Dominic raised his arm, lines of molten gold crawling along his veins.
He drove his fist into the ground. The stone screamed.
Cracks rippled outward, and the bars split from their sockets like splinters.
The Sídhe fell forward when the wall collapsed, hairless skull gleaming, ribs showing through the skin.
Gideon hauled the Sídhe up, wordless, and slung him over his shoulder. “Got him.”
They ran again—up from the grotto, through the dripping arteries of the fortress. The roar outside had become constant, the pounding of drums merging with thunder. The walls shuddered. Lights burst overhead as they broke back into the antechamber.
“Give me a fucking weapon!” Ivan shouted.
Yoni answered before Dominic could. “So you can gut us from both sides? You’ll get a fucking weapon when I’m cold enough to drop it.”
Ivan swore under his breath as Athelric came into view, arms raised, a halo of distorted air swelling before him. The rift pulsed half-open.
Almost there.
The ground shifted beneath his boots, a low vibration crawling up through the stone hard enough to rattle his teeth.
He turned toward it just as the wall ruptured.
Rock tore inward in a blast of heat and dust, and a spear of earth shrieked across the chamber, splitting the air around it.
Athelric looked up as it struck him square in the chest, driving him into the far column, and pinning him there like an insect beneath glass.
For a beat, no one moved.
The rift trembled, silver light guttering in Altheltic’s hands. The air lost its pressure all at once, the half-open threshold folding inward on itself, its pale fire thinning no wider than a blade.
Then Malak stepped through the wreckage.
His onyx armor gleamed beneath the rift’s fading light, fractured dust sliding from his shoulders as dozens of Legionnaires poured in behind him.
Their boots struck the stone in a brutal rhythm, shields locked, mirrored helms turning as one.
The chamber seemed to shrink around them.
Every exit filled with bodies. Every breath tasted of blood, ozone, and burning rock.
“So it’s true,” Malak said, his gaze finding Ivan through the ruin. “The king’s dog learned to bite the hand.”
Ivan barely heard him. He was counting the distance to the rift, the press of shadows against his skin, the reckoning of how quickly a man could die crossing open ground. Dario moved up beside him, blade drawn. A fucking fool, he thought, and a dead one.
Malak’s eyes slid past Ivan then, snagging on someone behind him.
Rolfe.
Malak’s smile widened into something Ivan wanted to cut from his face.
“I remember you,” Malak said, stepping over the broken stones with lazy care. “Sniveling little rat under the stairs. You pissed yourself while your family bled out in the hall.”
Rolfe made a sound so small the room nearly swallowed it.
Malak tilted his head. “One of them begged. Which one was it? The little girl with the braids? I slit her throat last because she kept calling your name.”
Rolfe screamed and lunged before Ivan could reach him, and everything broke at once.
“No—” Dario shouted.
But Ivan moved because standing still was death. He ripped a knife from Dario’s belt as he passed, ignoring the Bravellian’s startled curse, and let the dark current take him.
One moment he stood beside Dario; the next he was behind a Legionnaire, the knife driving up beneath the man’s chin. Hot blood washed his hand. The body dropped, and Ivan was already moving, dragged by the shadows as if some drowned thing had reached through him and taken hold of his bones.