Chapter 23
Dagan
The Barrow
Morning comes too fast.
We gather in Jules and Alaric’s chambers—the most defensible rooms in the inner ring, deep in the Barrow’s heart.
The air smells like milk and tea, stone and steam.
Marcel sleeps in Jules’ arms, a scrap of dark hair plastered to his tiny head, while the others cluster close.
My brothers argue strategy in low voices.
“Idris will push again,” Thorne rumbles, fire licking at his fingertips. “He took Stone’s Edge for a reason. He was testing our response time.”
“And the weakness of our people,” Kael adds, eyes hard. “He always goes for the places that dream the brightest.”
Alaric stands at the foot of the bed, wings half out, just enough to shadow his viyella and their son. His face is carved in granite.
“We can’t keep splitting our forces,” he says. “If he hits the Vein again while we’re—”
The thought does not finish.
The world moves.
Not a tremor.
Not a simple quake.
A massive blow.
The first blast slams through the Barrow’s outer wards like a hammer into the bones of the realm.
I feel it before anyone else—the shock rippling through the foundations, cracking along fault lines only I and the earth can see.
The floor bucks beneath our feet.
Stone groans, a low, grinding roar that rattles my teeth. Dust sifts from the joints in the ceiling.
A deep BOOM rolls in from outside, followed by another, layered sound—avalanche, earthquake, siege.
Alina’s hand clamps around my arm.
“Dagan?” she demands over the din. “What was that?”
I lift my head, listening.
Not with my ears.
With the Marches.
The outer ring of wards shivers, flares, fights. Impact after impact crashes against the Barrow’s defenses, each one setting off a chain reaction of strain and resistance through the stone.
Roots tear free of their resting places to reinforce weak points. Cracks birth themselves along the outer walls only to seal again beneath a flood of green.
The castle shivers.
Not in fear.
In fury.
“The wards,” I say, and my voice does not sound like my own. It is lower. Rougher. “Someone just slammed straight into the outer ring.”
Lightning—root-light, not sky-fire—lances along the ceiling, tracing bright fractures that mend almost as quickly as they appear.
Dust starts to fall, then stops midair as vines punch through from above, catching the debris and knitting it back into the stone.
The Barrow is awake.
The next blast is closer.
The floor lurches. A cabinet slides an inch before the wall swallows its base to keep it steady.
Jules cries out, curling around Marcel, who wakes and wails, his outrage thin and fierce.
Clarisse stumbles and clutches the wall, words of old prayers spilling from her lips.
Thorne’s flames roar higher, wreathing his hands. Kael’s pupils slit, sea-bright eyes darkening as water rattles in the air around him.
Alaric moves in front of the bed on instinct, putting himself between his family and the door, wings flaring wide.
All of them turn to me.
The Lord of Earth.
The one whose home is being attacked.
“I need to see the outer wards,” I say. The decision lands in me like a falling stone. “Now.”
Alina’s fingers tighten on my arm. I glance down.
Her eyes are wide, but not with panic.
With focus.
With fury.
An echo of the Marches hums in her—through the zareth and the bond we created between us. The fault lines whisper through her bones, now, too.
“Stay with them,” I tell her, clasping her hand in both of mine for a heartbeat. “The Barrow will shield you.”
Her jaw flexes. She nods once. “Okay. Go. Do what you have to do.”
Behind her, Delia slides an arm around Jules’ shoulders, murmuring calming nonsense as she rocks Marcel.
Phoebe moves toward the narrow window slits the Barrow has allowed in this room, peering out, her shoulders tense.
“Stay inside the inner ring,” I say, pitching my voice so all three viyellas hear. “Do not cross any threshold that feels… wrong. If the stone pushes back, you listen.”
“How will we know?” Phoebe asks, glancing over her shoulder.
“You’ll know,” I answer quietly before Alina can ask. “Trust me.”
“I do,” she replies easily.
But I know none of this is easy.
Another shock hits the wards, sharp and hard enough that I feel one of the older sigils on the outermost wall crack down the middle. The castle growls, deep and offended, and reroutes power to a secondary ring.
“He’s probing,” Thorne mutters, eyes gone full ember. “Looking for a weakness.”
“Then we do not give him one,” Alaric says. He leans down, presses a kiss to Jules’ brow and another to the top of Marcel’s head. “Stay inside. All of you. No arguments.”
Jules glares at him but nods.
Kael brushes his fingers over Phoebe’s hair as he passes. Thorne does the same to Delia’s shoulder.
I cup Alina’s cheek with my free hand, letting my thumb rest just at the corner of her mouth.
“Heed me. If something feels wrong, listen,” I repeat. “The Barrow has claimed you. It will fight for you.”
Her throat works. “Okay. Just come back to me,” she whispers.
“I will,” I say.
I have to.
The four of us move—out of the room, into the corridor, down toward the nearest junction where the sigils feed into the Barrow’s heart.
Magic crackles in our wake, ward-lines lighting at our approach. The door seals shut behind us with a heavy, echoing thud, roots threading across the threshold like a barred gate.
Another blast hits.
This one I feel in my spine.
The outermost wall on the north side takes a direct strike. For a heartbeat, the stone there liquefies under the force—only to harden again as the ward-anchors dig deeper.
The castle is not just enduring.
It is answering.
We reach the junction chamber, where the carved channels of the ward network converge into a raised platform of stone shot through with glowing veins. I spread my hands against it.
Close my eyes.
Breathe.
The world outside the Barrow slams into my awareness—darkness, fire, a pressure like a storm front rolling in.
Foul magic gnaws at the edges of my wards, trying to twist them, subvert them, turn my own protections inward.
The taste of it is rancid.
Cold metal.
Rotten sweetness.
Grave dirt.
Idris.
I do not need to see him to know he is here.
He moves at the edge of the wards like a shadow with too many limbs, threads of soul-magic digging into the broken minds of the puppets he’s brought to the assault.
SoulTakers cluster at his back, their presence like pits in the land, each a void where hope used to be.
“They’re at the north face,” I grind out.
“I feel them,” Kael says, anger in his voice like a rising tide. “They’ve brought blight with them. The streams are fouling as they advance.”
“Air tastes wrong,” Alaric adds, nostrils flaring. “Thick. Used. Like a grave that’s been opened and left to rot.”
Thorne’s flames snap higher, answering my fury and the wards’ pain.
“Idris,” he growls. “Show yourself, coward.”
He already has.
If not to their eyes, then to mine.
The pulse of his magic slams against my defenses again, harder.
Testing. Taunting.
I dig my fingers into the stone until flakes crumble under my nails.
“He is here,” I say, opening my eyes, letting the glow of the ward-stone reflect in them. “At our door. At my door.”
Alina’s fear flickers through the bond—sharp, bright, quickly leashed.
I wrap my power around it. Around her. Around the Barrow and everyone inside it.
“He wants what the Barrow protects,” I snarl. “The crown. The knowledge. Our people.”
“And he will get none of it,” Alaric says.
“For Nightfall,” Kael murmurs, rolling his shoulders, water coiling around his fists.
“For all the worlds,” Thorne adds, his fire burning white-hot.
I straighten, wings unfurling to their full span, stone dust cascading from their edges.
“For our viyellas,” I say, voice like thunder rolling over mountains. “And for every dream he’s already stolen.”
We move.
The Lords of Nightfall, together.
Into the dark.
Where Idris waits.