24. Drokhar
TWENTY-FOUR
DROKHAR
The King’s response is immediate.
Dawn has barely broken over Blackreach—the sky bruised purple and orange above the permanent haze of the Ash Pits—when the first wave of revenants pours through the streets.
I hear them before I see them: the clatter of rusted armor, the drag of dead feet across cobblestones, the wet rasp of throats that shouldn’t be breathing.
Not random corpses this time.
Soldiers.
They emerge from the lower districts in organized ranks, wearing the rusted armor of a dozen different wars.
Uniforms I recognize—border skirmishers in leather and mail, heavy infantry in plate so corroded it looks like dried blood, cavalry without horses but still carrying lances that should have rotted to splinters generations ago.
They move with purpose, with coordination, with the kind of discipline that requires a guiding intelligence.
They’re heading toward the Ash Pits.
Toward me.
The mark throbs beneath my armor, a pulse of heat that has nothing to do with the approaching threat.
Aradya is still in the Mausoleum Prison—I can feel her presence, that pull at the edge of my awareness telling me exactly where she is.
Underground. Caged. Waiting for the guards to discover that her suppression wards shattered hours ago.
I have to end this quickly.
“Gates!” I roar the command as I stride toward the compound’s entrance, snatching my curved blade from the rack beside the door.
The enchanted iron sings as it clears the sheath—hungry, eager, ready to sever the threads that bind the dead to animation.
“Form up at the gates! Nobody gets past the ward line!”
Death wardens scramble from the barracks, pulling on armor, grabbing weapons, their faces pale with the kind of fear that comes from facing what they’ve spent their careers preventing. Varn reaches my side first, her scarred face grim, a corpse-iron brand clutched in her off hand.
“How many?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I reach the gate and plant my boots on the blackite soil—ground so saturated with cremated remains that nothing will ever grow here again. The revenants are three hundred yards out and closing. Two hundred. “We hold until they stop coming.”
The first wave hits like a tide of rusted steel and rotting flesh.
My blade carves through the lead revenant’s throat, severing the animation at its source.
The corpse crumples, dead weight now instead of dead weapon, and I’m already moving to the next.
The enchanted iron cuts through ancient armor like it’s paper, spraying ichor that steams where it hits the warm ground. Three down. Six. Ten.
More keep coming.
I fight the way I’ve trained myself to fight—efficient, brutal, thoughtless.
Blade singing through dead flesh. Boots steady on ground slick with the fluids of the truly dead.
Commands roaring from my throat to the wardens who form up behind me, covering my flanks, filling the gaps I leave when I push forward.
But I’m not fighting thoughtlessly. Not anymore.
I see the faces now.
A boy in armor too big for him, his hollow sockets fixed on my blade as I sever his spine. He can’t be older than sixteen—wasn’t older than sixteen when he died, whenever that was. His mouth opens as he falls, and I swear I see it form the shape of a word.
Mother.
I’ve killed this boy before. Burned him without letting him speak.
Another revenant lunges—a woman in captain’s insignia, her rank still visible beneath the rust. My blade takes her arm at the shoulder, then her head at the neck. She crumples, but not before her remaining hand reaches toward me. Not to attack. To plead.
I’ve killed her too. Scattered her ashes without recording her name.
They keep coming. Wave after wave of soldiers I’ve burned, corpses I’ve consigned to the pyres without rites or farewells or the chance to speak their final truths.
The Gravetide King has sent its army, and every face I cut down is a face I recognize from nightmares I’ve been having since I first lit a torch.
The mark flares beneath my armor. Hot. Urgent.
She’s moving.
I can feel Aradya’s presence shifting—no longer underground, no longer in the prison.
She’s above ground now, moving toward the Ash Pits, moving toward me.
The suppression wards must have failed completely, because the pull between us is stronger than it’s ever been, a chain around my chest dragging me toward her even as I fight for my life.
“Drokhar!”
Varn’s voice cuts through the chaos. She’s at my left, her brand searing through a revenant’s face, her eyes wide with alarm that has nothing to do with the dead.
“The prisoner—she’s broken out of containment!”
I turn.
And there she is.