Chapter 17
Idris
Hidden SoulTakers Camp Outside the Rooted Marches
I am Idris.
They call me a dozen things now.
Dark Sage. Traitor of the Silver Flame. Grave-Thief. Soul-Breaker.
They whisper my names like curses and warnings, like children hissing monsters around a dying hearth.
They forget who taught them the shape of their wards.
Who held the first lamps in the tunnels when the Ember Vein was nothing but raw, screaming power in the dark.
They forget that once, I bled for this realm.
Typical.
I stand at the edge of the cliff, the wind snapping my cloak about my legs, and watch Stone’s Edge bleed.
The village clings to the face of the escarpment like a barnacle, stacked homes carved into the rock itself, their windows glowing a soft, pathetic gold.
Terraces spiral down, lit by root-lanterns and dream-glass, each step built from generations of miners’ hands.
Pretty, in a mortal way.
Fragile.
Below, my SoulTakers pour through the lower causeways—shadow-clad, blades humming, faces painted with my sigils. They move with purpose. With faith.
My faith.
Once they worshiped the Prime. Once they sang to the Great Flame and called themselves “servants of the multiverse.”
Servants.
No, they were not that.
Slaves.
And no more.
“Master.” A voice behind me is careful, deferential. “The wards nearest the Vein shudder, but they do not fall. The earth fights.”
“Of course it does,” I murmur, eyes on the cliff. “There is nothing more stubborn than stone that thinks it has a purpose.”
The acolyte swallows and says nothing.
They’re learning.
I lift my staff and touch the carved bone tip to the trembling rock beneath my boots.
The escarpment flinches—yes, flinches—as my power threads downward, bleeding into its deepest fractures.
I feel them all.
The scars left by the last great war.
The hollowed tunnels where the Ember Vein’s raw ore was carved out and sent to the forges.
The routes the Dreamwrights carved in secret to ferry their precious dreams and hopes to the sanctums, then out, out, out into the stupid, greedy hands of other worlds.
Other realities.
So they can dream.
So they can hope.
So they can pretend their petty little lives mean something because Nightfall spoons them stories in their sleep.
Disgust curls through me, sharp and clean.
“We mine,” I say, letting my voice carry, letting the cliff feel it. “We bleed. We sacrifice our children to the tunnels. And what do we gain, acolyte?”
He shifts nervously behind me. “Stability. The honor of—”
“Nothing,” I cut in, power cracking through the stone like a whip.
Tiny pebbles skitter over the edge and disappear into the abyss.
“We gain nothing that is ours. Our magic, our ore, our forges—they feed others first. The Lords will tell you it is sacred duty. That Nightfall was created to sustain the multiverse. To give hope where there is none.”
I spit over the edge.
“Hope,” I sneer. “They give it away like water to strangers while we drink dust.”
The acolyte doesn’t dare agree, but I feel his anger pulse through the bond we share. That’s why he’s mine. Why they all are.
Because they have looked into the tunnels and seen their children’s faces reflected in the dark and known, known, that the Lords care more for distant, faceless dreamers than for the people breaking their backs at the Vein.
“I will free Nightfall,” I whisper, more to the rock than to the boy behind me. “From the leash around its throat. From the multiverse’s hunger. No more bleeding our lifeblood into every other plane while our villages burn. No matter how many must perish to accomplish this—I will see it done!”
A tremor answers me.
Ah.
There you are.
I smile.
The earth here is stubborn, yes—but everything breaks if you know where to tap.
The Eyrie. The Marches. The Ember Vein. The Tidal Lands. The Plains.
I have studied them all. I have walked beneath the forges, watched the Dreamwrights bend ore and song into visions, and I have seen what they refuse to admit—they are puppets.
Channels. Instruments of an unseen will.
The Prime knew this. He understood the leash, even if he was too weak to break it. That’s why he hid the Crown like a coward instead of destroying it.
I, at least, have no such illusions.
“Master,” the acolyte ventures, voice shaking now. “We’ve nearly reached the Dreamwright’s sanctuary. Her name is—”
“Masielle,” I finish for him. “Yes. I know.”
She was my teacher once.
Before she clutched her pearls and cried “abomination” when I asked why we couldn’t keep our best dreams for ourselves.
I draw in a breath and the air tastes of smoke and fear and the metallic tang of sliced wards.
Down below, Masielle’s protections flare weakly, old sigils flaring on the rock face before fading.
She’s clever. But old. And alone.
The perfect key.
“They tell themselves I’m mad,” I murmur, tracing idle circles in the air with my staff. “That I seek destruction for its own sake. That I want only power.”
Do I want power? Of course.
What leader doesn’t?
But this?
This is something else.
“Nightfall is being harvested,” I say calmly. “The Lords posture like kings, yet they bow to the idea of service. They bend their necks to a Crown that was forged to siphon them.”
The Prime’s Crown.
Its pulse is faint even from here, damped by distance and wards. Locked away like some holy relic in The Barrow now, if my spies are to be believed. The last foolish place Dagan would think to hide it—the heart of his precious lands.
“You think the Prime ruled?” I laugh softly. “He was ruled. A focal point, a mouthpiece for a design older than Nightfall.”
“Master—” the acolyte starts.
I flick my fingers and silence him. Not with magic. With a look.
“They do not see the chains,” I continue.
“But I do. Chains that run from the Crown through the Lords and into every sanctum. Every forge. Every blade and dream. They let the multiverse dictate the flow of power. Little worlds that burn their own homes and children and then whimper in their sleep for comfort.”
I grin, teeth flashing in the dark.
“What if we stop answering?” I ask the cliff. “What if Nightfall keeps its fire? Its ore? Its dreams? What if we are the ones to decide who is worthy of hope?”
The stone is silent.
But it trembles.
Good.
“Master.” Another voice, this one drifting up from below, carried by spell and smoke. “We are at her door. The wards are weakening.”
“Very well,” I say, feeling my heart begin to beat faster. Not with fear. With anticipation.
Finally.
“Hold, then retreat once I have what I need. Do not kill her. Do not damage her hands or her eyes. If she breaks before I am done, I will make a tapestry of your insides.”
Their chorus of acknowledgments is immediate. Breathless.
They believe in me.
They should.
I raise my free hand and curl my fingers into a fist. Power gathers at my call, dark and bright all at once, threads of stolen ward-magic and repurposed sanctum spells weaving together into something new.
Something… liberated.
I reach through the puppet.
The body I’ve chosen this time is a Broken Plains Demon—Thorne’s kinsman.
Flame-marked, broad-shouldered, eyes already hollowed by grief and rage.
The perfect vessel.
He stiffens where he stands in the street below, head jerking back as I slide into place behind his eyes, beneath his skin. The mark at his throat burns my sigil bright.
“Let me in,” I whisper, and the magic obeys.
His vision roars to life in my mind.
Stone’s Edge, from the ground.
Narrow, twisting paths. Doors carved into rock. Wards like spiderwebs across thresholds, glowing faint blue where they still hold.
The Dreamwright’s sanctuary is ahead—its entrance a simple archway of etched stone, heavy with old power.
The air around it tastes like ash and sleep and a thousand unborn dreams.
“You’ve grown lazy, Masielle,” I say through my puppet’s mouth, voice warped and echoing. “You used to veil your doors better than this.”
The wards flicker.
She hears me.
“Idris.”
Her voice drifts from within like smoke—hoarse, tired, but still threaded with the same stern patience she used on me when I was a young monk at the Silver Flame.
“Who else?” I smile. We smile. This borrowed body grins, lips pulled back over teeth that have bitten through too many lies.
“You should have stayed dead,” she says. “Or stayed gone, at least.”
“Oh, Masielle.” I step closer, lay my puppet’s hand flat against the archway. The etched runes flare angry red. My power lances through them. They shriek as they fail. “You know better than anyone that nothing truly dies in Nightfall. Not dreams. Not mistakes.”
“Some mistakes should,” she snaps.
There. A spark. She isn’t all resignation and fear.
Good.
“I am not a mistake,” I reply, letting the words rumble through the stone. “I am the course correction. The answer to the question none of you had the courage to ask.”
“And what question is that?” she spits.
“Why,” I say simply, “are we doing this at all?”
Silence.
“Why,” I continue, leaning my borrowed shoulder into the door as it begins to crack under the pressure, “are we breaking ourselves to feed those who never lift a hand in return? Why does Nightfall bear the burden of the multiverse’s healing while we are denied our own?”
The last ward shatters like glass.
The door swings open.
Masielle stands in the center of the chamber, staff in hand, gray hair wild around her face, eyes blazing. Dream-crystals hang from the ceiling like pale stars, dimmed but not extinguished.
Behind her, shelves of etched bone and stone tablets line the walls—patterns, maps, conduits, secrets. Routes into the sanctums only a Dreamwright of her rank would know.
Perfect.
“You were not denied,” she says, voice shaking with effort as she raises her staff. “You walked away.”
“I walked away from servitude,” I correct. “Not from Nightfall.”
I step inside. My SoulTakers hang back at the threshold, obedient. This is not their work.