Max
We fell through the DarkVeil in a tangle of limbs.
One second, we’d been inside the Veil—sulfur and Coldiron lightning and crushing pressure—and the next, cold earth and gray dawn were splitting my vision.
Aelindor’s arm still locked my waist. Caspian’s wolf pressed against my hip, fur bloody. Drakken’s hand gripped my neck hard enough to bruise. Four bodies, one graceless collision with the dirt.
The Spartans stood in a semicircle, weapons drawn, faces taut. Relief broke across them as we materialized, chased by shock so sharp several stepped back.
We’d gone in. We’d come out. For eighty-one years, no one had done that.
They looked at us like we were legends.
I didn’t want to be a legend. I wanted a cup of coffee and for the world to stop spinning.
Blood dripped from our noses. I’d have been fine if the princes hadn’t followed me in.
Every shred of power I had, every ounce that could command Coldiron, went to shielding them from a sea of sentient lightning.
Alone, I could’ve navigated it, tapped their network, learned the Veil’s interior.
Instead, I spent everything keeping three stubborn princes alive.
Now the weight was gone—the pressure, the pull, holding back a thousand strands—and the absence hit worse than the burden. Gravity slammed me. My muscles went slack. My stomach lurched.
I dropped to all fours and heaved.
Nothing came up. Dry heaves, violent, my body trying to purge something not physical. The Coldiron voices, tens of thousands, still echoed in my skull, fading like the ring after an explosion.
Aelindor knelt beside me, hand moving slowly between my shoulder blades.
On my other side, Caspian—naked, human, shifted the moment we cleared the Veil—gathered my hair, held it back.
His voice murmured soft and low in my ear, words I couldn’t hear over the buzzing in my head but felt in my chest like warmth through cold glass.
The last thing I wanted was to puke in front of the heirs. Especially with Drakken three feet away, cold gray eyes watching, like he couldn’t decide whether to court-martial me or carry me.
What unnerved me wasn’t the nausea. It was that I hadn’t been afraid.
Standing close to the edge of that chasm of hellfire, facing Coldiron lightning, I’d felt no fear. I’d felt alive.
And the familiarity, the ache of recognition, wasn’t mine. My demon passenger had felt the DarkVeil the way a prisoner feels fresh air after years in a cage.
What are you?
I asked the question for the first time without hostility. Whatever lived inside me recognized the Veil like a childhood home.
The creature stayed silent. Not smug. This silence had texture and weight. If I didn’t know better, I’d call it grief.
I let it be.
The heaving subsided. I sat back on my heels, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I was grateful the heirs had come for me. But then, if they hadn’t entered, I wouldn’t have needed to shield them.
I could’ve tapped the Coldiron’s connection, maybe reached the Oracle again, and learned where Missy was.
Instead, all my focus and power went to preventing the Coldiron lightning from striking them dead.
I wouldn’t get another chance. They’d watch me now. They’d never let me near the Veil alone.
You shall not enter the DarkVeil again, girl. Not before you’re ready.
I might not trust the creature coiled inside me, but it had always guarded its own interests with ruthless precision.
And I knew I’d be a fool to ignore its warning.
It understood far more about this world, about the DarkVeil, about all arcane knowledge.
Compared to it, I was a toddler hosting an ancient entity.
“Snap out of it, Cadet Private Max!” Drakken barked. “Calm down.”
Calm? Who could calm down that fast after what I’d just lived through? If I had a shred more energy, I’d have rolled my eyes hard enough to see my own skull.
Did he order his girlfriend around like a soldier too? “Suck my cock, Cadet Private Delia. Suck it with enthusiasm, soldier, or you’re running the death tracks. Twenty laps!”
That image of Delia on her knees for the dragon prince would’ve been hilarious if it didn’t spark something hot in my chest and leave a sour taste on my tongue.
Aelindor, moving with that effortless grace of his, conjured a silken handkerchief and pressed it gently beneath my nose. It came away crimson. The blood was still dripping, a warm, slow crawl over my lips.
They were bleeding too—all three of them, thin red lines tracing from their nostrils—but they ignored it, as if bleeding were as unremarkable as breathing. And it was for warriors who shed blood on battlefields the way other people shed sweat.
“I’m fine,” I managed, the words scraping out of me like gravel.
“You’re not fine,” Caspian shot back, no trace of his usual smoothness in the retort. “Give Max that water, Aelindor.”
Someone had produced a bottle of water—Frost, I think—and passed it to his prince.
Aelindor didn’t hesitate. He handed me the bottle, his fingers brushing mine. “Drink, Max.”
By every rule book of the military hierarchy, the heirs ate and drank first. A first-year cadet was the last mouth to be fed. Yet they kept placing me above themselves, and I still didn’t know if I should feel honored or haunted.
Aelindor treated me as if I were rare and precious, valuable in a way that had nothing to do with my ability.
Caspian looked at me with the shameless hunger of a man who’d never been told no.
His reputation preceded him by several miles, and I was probably one of the few women in the Covenant he hadn’t bedded.
I’d have to make it clear to him eventually that if he thought of me as a conquest, he’d be wasting his fucking time.
And Drakken. The softening was marginal at best. His jaw stayed locked whenever his eyes found me, and those cold eyes still held the suspicion of a man waiting for me to prove him right about something terrible.
But he’d learned that I would never bow to him.
The water hit my cracked throat, and I drank in small, careful sips—a miner’s habit—and felt my breathing ease for the first time in what felt like hours.
“The lightning you saw, sirs—that’s Coldiron. A network of it,” I said, lowering the bottle. Emotion later. Intel now. “The DarkVeil contains a vast deposit of the sentient metal. Hundreds of times more than Crimson Ridge.”
A sharp breath moved through the three heirs.
“That’s why no one survived crossing the DarkVeil,” Aelindor murmured. His blue eyes had gone distant, the look he wore when a century of unanswered questions rearranged themselves into devastating truth. “The Coldiron attacks anything that enters.”
“No one stood a fucking chance.” Caspian’s voice was stripped of all its usual careless purrs. A Spartan had handed him trousers, but he made no move to put them on. “If Max hadn’t held them back, we’d be dead.” He let out a ragged breath. “All three of us. Gone in seconds.”
I bit my lip, tasting copper where the blood had dried. The next part was harder—not simply to reveal, but to confess. Some truths pressed against your ribs like a knife you weren’t ready to pull.
“There’s something else.”
“Speak up, cadet.” Drakken’s voice had settled back into its default register: command. No surprise there. I’d wager the dragon prince’s softer tones had fossilized a decade ago, assuming they’d ever existed at all.
“I told the Coldiron to guard the Veil. To stop anything from coming out. They agreed, but—” I swallowed, the motion scraping. “They can’t hold indefinitely. Not without me stationed here to reinforce the barrier.”
I held Drakken’s gaze. “There’s an heir who can command Coldiron as well.”
The Coldiron had named someone the False Heir—nothing more. No name, no history, only that cold metallic whisper of a title. This heir could bend Coldiron, force it to obey through brutal will. His command was pain.
Aelindor’s gaze turned sharp. A blade wrapped in silk.
“Is that archdemon—the one who fired Coldiron arrows at me on the train—is he the heir?” His voice might have sounded calm, but it was the calm of a frozen lake.
I shook my head, careful to offer nothing more.
I had no intention of diving deeper into what the Coldiron had said about a true heir and a false one.
That path led to questions I couldn’t answer, to truths squirming inside me that I refused to let anyone touch.
Revealing more than I already had would only heap doubt and suspicion onto my shoulders, and Drakken’s were already bowed under the weight of his own.
“Coldiron called that being the false heir,” I said.
“I don’t know why that title, and I have no more information than that.
But I believe the false heir is more powerful than the archdemon on the train.
That one shot you with Coldiron arrows, but he couldn’t truly command the metal.
That’s why I beat him. I believe the two arrows were forged by this heir.
But Coldiron doesn’t belong to him. He forced the metal to obey.
It’s a violation, sirs.” My voice roughened, anger bleeding through.
“I can counter him. I can beat him, as far as Coldiron is concerned.”
I drew a breath and felt the ache behind my ribs sharpen.
“If I stay here, I can reinforce the defense at this border.” The thought of being separated from them dug into me like a hook.
Their posts were at the fortress, thousands of miles away.
But this was war. My personal needs didn’t matter.
I set my jaw until it hurt. “But I need to get my sister back first. Missy’s safety is my priority.
When my little sister is safe, I’ll station here permanently if that’s what’s required of me. ”
The three princes traded a glance, silent conversation passing between them as they weighed everything I’d spewed out.
“Your place is with us, Max,” Caspian said, his voice fierce. “And we will get Missy back to you.”
“You will not dive headfirst into any situation without permission, Cadet Max.” Drakken stepped forward. “You’re a soldier first. Do you understand me?”
I understood that he was making my head spin.
“And you will not pull a stunt like this again,” he continued. “Charging into an unknown hostile environment without backup, without clearance, without so much as a—”
“Will you stop barking at her?” Caspian shot to his feet, his green eyes blazing. “Give her a fucking break. We just walked out of Hell.”
“Coddling her will only get her killed,” Drakken snapped, not backing down an inch.
“Enough.” Aelindor raised a hand. One word, one lifted palm, and both of them fell silent. “We’ll debrief this properly. But right now—”
The ground trembled, a deep, rolling shudder I knew all too well. A decade underground in the mines of Crimson Ridge had carved that particular terror into my bones: the lurch of stone beneath your feet, the brief, sickening weightlessness before everything came crashing down.
But there were no mines here. No shafts, no tunnels, no honeycomb of hollowed earth waiting to swallow us whole.
A heartbeat later, the realization hit, colder and sharper than any cave-in.
This wasn’t a quake.
It was violence.