Chapter 20
Dagan
Stone’s Edge
Stone’s Edge should be quiet by now.
Instead, the village hums with the raw, broken noise that comes after battle—low moans, distant sobbing, the scrape of boots over shattered stone.
Smoke stings my throat. The air tastes of ash and old blood.
The earth here is wrong.
Too loose.
Too hollow.
Like it’s been scooped out from the inside.
And at the center of it all lies Masielle.
Once, she was a Dreamwright of renown—silver hair braided with lumen-thread, hands stained with ink and star fire, laugh like a bell over stone.
She retired to Stone’s Edge to die surrounded by the cliffs she loved.
Idris did not grant her that mercy.
She sits propped against a cracked wall now, breathing.
Heart beating. Flesh alive.
But her eyes… devoid of life.
They are completely empty.
Not even a flicker of recognition as I kneel in front of her.
“She was drained by the time we arrived,” Kael murmurs behind me, voice hoarse. “We felt it—a backlash of power. But he was already inside her mind.”
Thorne stands a few paces away, arms folded tight across his broad chest, flames weaving slow and sickly around his fingers.
He watches Masielle like he’s daring her to move, daring Idris to still be here so he can burn something he can actually hit.
“He hollowed her out,” I say quietly.
It’s not a guess.
I feel it, too.
The well of magic inside her—the place where ideas once gathered and spun into shape—is a gaping void.
A tunnel bored straight through her soul and out into the dark.
He took everything she knew.
Stole every secret route.
Every hidden path.
And left her trapped in a body that remembers how to breathe but not how to live.
He raped her mind.
Left her like this to die slow and painfully.
Her lips move.
For one wild, desperate moment, I think she might be coming back.
“Da…gan?” she whispers.
It’s not her voice.
It’s Idris, echoing through borrowed flesh.
My vision goes red.
“Enough,” I snarl, power surging. Stone around us trembles, lines fracturing outward from my boots. “You will not use her mouth to speak to me.”
She twitches. Her gaze skitters past my shoulder, unfocused, catching on things that aren’t there.
A laugh bubbles out of her that is not hers.
“Too late,” the voice croons. “I already have what I need. The paths. The patterns. The cracks between the worlds. The marrow of the forges and the bones of your precious Nightfall—”
Fire flares.
Thorne’s flames lick across my vision as he steps in close, eyes blazing.
“You have signed your death warrant,” he growls. “I swear it on the Ember Vein.”
Water slams down a heartbeat later.
Kael’s tides crash up from the cistern beneath the village, flooding the ruined courtyard, dousing phantom embers and washing away traces of Idris’ magic.
Masielle shudders.
The presence recedes.
For a heartbeat, she is herself again.
Her eyes, milky with age yet clear with something else, lock on mine.
“Please,” she rasps. “Don’t let him keep me.”
My throat closes.
The ground under her body whispers memories—years of walking these paths, tending small dreams for small people, weaving gentle hopes into the fabric of the multiverse.
I bow my head.
“Forgive me,” I murmur, placing my hand over her heart. “For being too late.”
She smiles. It is faint, but it is hers.
“Make… it count,” she whispers.
“I will,” I promise.
Then I loose a roar so loud it could shake the heavens, and I let the stone take her.
The earth opens beneath her body without a sound, soft as a sigh, accepting her gently into its depths.
Flowers of pale quartz bloom along the edges of the new seam, then fade as the crack seals itself, leaving only a faint, luminous spiral in the rock.
A marker.
A grave.
A vow.
I stand slowly.
My hands are shaking.
I do not tremble.
Not in front of my brothers.
Not in front of my people.
But grief is a tectonic thing, and right now it is shifting everything inside me.
“Dagan,” Thorne says, quieter now.
“I know,” I answer.
Because that’s the worst part.
I do.
I know exactly what Idris has done.
He has taken one of our brightest mapmakers of the dream paths and turned her into a key.
He now knows routes even we have forgotten, hidden veins that wind through sanctums and forges and old places that should never be touched.
This will not go unanswered.
“Report,” I bark, turning from the glowing spiral to the captives we’ve already gathered.
They’re penned in a circle of stone not far from the rubble of the village square—two dozen SoulTakers and sympathizers left behind as Idris’ main force retreated.
Their eyes are glassy, movements jerky, strings dangling from unseen fingers.
Not all of them are enemies.
Some are mine.
Farmers. Quarrymen. Wanderers taken by promises of easy power, twisted by rituals they did not understand.
“We’ve confined those we can save,” Kael says. “Bound their limbs. Suppressed their access to the deepest currents.”
A general in my legions enters—still half-armored from the fight—steps from the shadows, his eyes tired.
“The worst of them are… gone,” he says. “Mindless. Masielle’s not the only one he hollowed out.”
He doesn’t need to say what that means.
There are pyres already being built on the far ridge.
The air tastes like endings.
I drag a hand down my face and force myself to focus.
“We’ll do as we did at the Eyrie,” I say. “Contain them. Give the healers and remaining Dreamwrights something to study. If there is any way to unwind what Idris has done, we will find it.”
“And if there isn’t?” Thorne asks, voice tight.
“Then we make sure their deaths mean something,” I answer. “Just as Masielle’s will.”
My heart—this new, tender thing Alina keeps touching with her hands and her words—feels like it might crack.
He does not get to do this.
Idris does not get to carve through my lands, hollow out my people, and walk away laughing.
I will bury him so deep in the bones of Nightfall that not even memory will find him.
The three of us—fire, water, stone—turn our attention to the main battlefield one last time.
The worst of this battle is over.
But there will be more, I can feel it.
The village stands, though wounded.
Walls cracked, roofs fallen, streets torn and buckled where the ground fought back against the invaders.
We’ve already set crews to work—raising temporary shelters from shaped stone, funneling clean water into shattered cisterns.
I’ve sent word down the root-ways to The Barrow.
Reinforcements will arrive before nightfall. Food. Blankets. Medics from the Marches’ outlying posts.
“Lord Dagan!”
Varen—Stone’s Edge’s headman—approaches, bowing low. His beard is singed at the ends, but his eyes are clear.
“Speak,” I say.
“We’ve taken count,” he reports. “Most of the villagers are accounted for. Some injured, a few dead, but those you already know.” His jaw flexes. “We mourn Masielle. But we thank you for granting her rest.”
My chest tightens.
“You send word along the root lines if anything shifts,” I tell him. “If anyone shows signs of tampering. We answer immediately.”
“We will, my Lord,” Varen promises. “The Marches stand with you.”
I incline my head.
The earth beneath us settles, just a fraction.
For now.
Thorne claps a hand on my shoulder.
“We need to regroup,” Kael says. “Get back to the Barrow. Plan our next move.”
“I’m not leaving the Vein unprotected. I must go back to the Broken Plains,” Thorne growls instinctively.
“You’re not leaving it,” Kael says. “I’ve already anchored a tidal ward through the lower caverns. It will flare if anything breaches. Dagan, you’ve layered the stone with your own protections. Alaric has air scouts circling. We’ve done all we can here.”
“Fie. Fuck, I need to see Delia,” Thorne growls and I get it.
He’s right.
I know he’s right. Our viyellas own us in ways our magic does not, and we need to return to them.
I’m turning that over in my mind when it hits me.
A shiver.
Not through Stone’s Edge.
Through home.
The Marches quake—soft, barely there, like the land is trying not to startle me and failing.
Alina.
My heart lurches.
“What is it?” Thorne asks, eyes narrowing.
I tilt my head, listening with everything I am.
There’s no screaming fracture, no catastrophic collapse. Just a deep, insistent tug.
The same way the earth called to me the night Aurel fell.
Only now, the call has her voice braided through it.
“I don’t know,” I admit, which I hate. “But something is wrong at The Barrow.”
Kael stiffens. “Do you sense an attack?”
“Not yet,” I say. “But the roots are restless. The wards are… shifting. And Alina—” I break off, jaw clenching.
The bond hums.
Not in panic. Not in agony.
In warning.
“We go back,” I say, decision crystallizing like quartz in my gut. “Now.”
Kael nods once, sharp. “We’ll leave trusted commanders in our stead,” he says. “Varen can coordinate on the ground. Your riders will patrol the skies. The Rooted Marches will hold until we return.”
“Then move,” Thorne snaps, already summoning fire to carve a portal. “I do not like my viyella being out of my sight when the realm feels like this.”
“You’re not the only one,” I mutter.
The three of us—Lords of Nightfall, scarred and furious and far from done—step into the circle of scorched ground where battle raged just hours ago.
Water roars.
Fire flares.
Stone rises.
For a heartbeat, everything is light and heat and pressure—and then the world twists.
I feel the Marches reach for me.
Feel The Barrow’s roots coil like fingers.
Feel Alina, bright and stubborn and mine, like a beacon in the dark.
“Hold on, Oona,” I whisper as the portal clamps shut around us.
“I’m coming home.”