Chapter 26
Dagan
The Last Battlefield, The Rooted Marches
War tastes like metal and ash.
The air outside the Barrow is thick with both—smoke boiling across the sky, earth torn open in jagged wounds.
The Glowworm Moon hangs above us, veined with pale green light, watching like a single unblinking eye.
SoulTakers swarm the slopes.
Not soldiers—hordes. Twisted things in stolen flesh, eyes hollowed out and refilled with cold fire.
Some still wear the faces of people I know—farmers, miners, guards.
My people.
Now puppets.
Idris stands behind them all.
High on a ridge of broken stone, wrapped in robes the color of old bruises, his staff driven into the ground like a spike.
Ember ore shards hover around him in a floating ring, each one black-veined and wrong, pulsing with a sickly green-red light.
The corrupted ore screams in the bones of the world.
I feel every note of it.
To my left, Thorne moves like a storm given legs. My brother of flame is pure inferno—bone-mask snapped over his face, body haloed in red-gold fire.
Every swing of his arm sends a wave of searing heat through the SoulTaker ranks, turning a dozen at a time to smoking cinders.
To my right, Kael answers with water.
Walls of tide rise out of thin air at his command, crashing through enemy lines, quenching dark fire and dragging shrieking bodies beneath churning whirlpools that vanish into the rock.
Above us, Alaric owns the sky.
He is Dragon—massive, silver-scaled, wings blotted with night. He dives and rakes, claws tearing through whole formations, his roar splitting the air. Blue-white flame pours from his jaw, carving glowing scars across the battlefield.
And me?
I am the bones of this place.
I stomp my heel into the ground and feel the Marches answer.
Pillars of stone erupt beneath SoulTaker feet, launching them into the air before crushing them back into the dirt.
Ridges heave and twist at my command, opening into pits that swallow entire squads whole.
A ring of sharpened obsidian spikes surges up to encircle Idris’ position—but his staff flares and my stone shatters, shards flung aside like sand.
“Dagan!” Kael shouts, voice rough over the din. “Center line!”
I feel it before I see it—a surge of corrupted heat, a pressure wave rolling out from Idris’ ridge.
I slam my palms to the ground.
The earth buckles, then rises at my will, folding up into a shield-wall just as a gout of black-green fire slams into us.
The impact reverberates through my teeth, my spine, my skull.
It doesn’t feel like normal magic.
It feels corrupted. Stolen.
I grit my teeth and hold the wall.
Behind it, Thorne curses, his flames faltering for a heartbeat before roaring back.
Kael staggers, then steadies himself, hands cutting sharp patterns in the air to call more water.
Above, Alaric wobbles mid-flight. His wings beat hard, fighting some invisible drag.
I risk a glance over the top of the stone.
Idris lifts his staff.
The ring of corrupted Ember ore around him spins faster.
For a moment, I see them clearly—each shard humming with trapped power, ghostly faces writhing inside the dark glass.
Souls. Dying ones. Dead ones. Taken ones.
Masielle.
The retired Dreamwright from Stone’s Edge.
Others like her.
He’s plugged his ritual straight into the bones of Nightfall and wired it to the corpses of our people.
When we attack, the ritual drinks.
When we push, it pulls.
He smiles—thin, cracked, wild—and slams the butt of his staff down again.
The next wave hits harder.
Pain lances through my chest as the earth under my feet bucks against my will.
For a horrifying second, my power doesn’t answer me—it answers him. A fissure splits the plateau at my back, racing toward the Barrow’s walls before I wrench it away.
“Fuck,” Thorne snarls, staggering to my side. His flames flare, then gutter as if blown by a poisoned wind. “He’s leeching us.”
“I feel it,” Kael grinds out, water dripping from his hands like blood. His usually sharp eyes are shadowed, his skin pale beneath the tattoos that glow along his arms. “We hit him, he drains it. Twists it.”
Alaric slams down on the ground beside us in Dragon form, wings mantling wide to shield us from another volley of black fire.
When the blast clears, he shifts, folding down to his Demon shape in a sweep of silver light.
“I can’t get close enough to rip his head off,” he snarls. “Every time I dive, he turns the air against me. My own currents. My sky.”
SoulTakers press closer, howling.
Behind us, the Barrow looms, wards blazing in visible lines along its walls—roots and stone interwoven into a living bulwark. It’s holding for now, but cracks shimmer at the edges, vein-fine and spreading.
I feel Alina through our bond.
Not clearly—there’s too much interference—but enough to know she’s alive.
Awake. Worried. A steady, stubborn presence in the back of my mind.
Stay inside the inner ring, I told her.
She agreed.
But the bond hums sharper now.
Focused.
Watching.
The next volley from Idris is different.
He lifts both arms this time, corrupted ore whirling overhead, and chants words that make the air taste like burned copper.
Black fire lances out—not toward us, but through us.
It spears the sky, then forks down, striking all four of us at once.
Alaric cries out, staggered to one knee, his Dragon flickering in and out over his skin like a ghost overlay—skeleton, scales, bone, then nothing.
Kael doubles over, choking, water spilling from his mouth as if he’s drowning on dry land.
Thorne’s flames implode, flaring inward so fast I smell scorched skin and hair.
He roars, bone-mask cracking, then reforming.
My knees hit the ground.
Not because my body fails—but because the earth beneath me is ripped out from under my control.
Idris’ ritual claws along the bedrock, a thousand hooks sinking into the same pathways I use, and pulls.
I feel power torn out of me in brutal, wrenching gulps.
The pillars I raised crumble.
The cages I formed around captured SoulTakers shatter, their prisoners spilling free in a snarling tide.
The pits I opened begin to close on their own, as if the land no longer cares about my will.
“What is this?” I snarl, forcing myself upright, every muscle shaking. “What have you done, Idris?”
His laughter rolls down the slope like loose rock.
“I have done what none of you weak little elementals ever dared,” he calls, voice amplified by the warped air itself.
“I have removed the leash from Nightfall’s throat. No more Primes. No more crowns. No more duty to lesser worlds that feed on our light and return only rot.”
His staff flares brighter.
He lies.
Gods, please, he must be lying.
My chest burns.
Alina’s face flickers in my mind—eyes fierce, hair mussed, lips swollen from the last kiss we shared.
He’s not taking that from me.
“You aren’t freeing Nightfall,” Alaric shouts back, wiping blood from his mouth. “You’re breaking it.”
“Oh, Alaric.” Idris’ tone is almost fond. “Still so enamored with your own illusions. Do you not feel it? The world wants this. It is sick of serving dreamers who squander what we forge. Sick of being a conduit. I am merely giving it what it begs for—a singular will. One mind. One purpose.”
“Your mind,” Kael hisses.
“Yes.” Idris bares his teeth in something that is not a smile. “Mine.”
The ritual’s pull intensifies.
Every time Thorne throws fire, it bends. Half of it reaches its target; the other half spirals back, bathing him in his own heat until his skin blisters.
Kael calls a tidal shield—the water thickens, darkens, then lashes back at him like a whip, splitting the skin along his forearms.
Alaric launches himself skyward again. The wind drops out from under him like someone cut a string. He crashes back to the ground, hard enough that I feel the impact radiate out in a circle.
I drive my fist into the dirt, trying to call up a ring of stone spikes beneath Idris’ feet.
Instead, a lone spike erupts beneath mine, punching through my thigh.
Pain explodes—a white-hot burst that tears a shout from my throat. I snap the spike off with a snarl, blood running hot down my leg, and force the rest of the stone to heel.
But it’s like wrestling an avalanche.
Every command I give, the ritual tries to hijack.
Every movement we make, it imitates and corrupts.
The SoulTakers surge, sensing weakness.
They throw themselves at our defensive line, uncaring if they burn or drown or shatter—because everyone that dies feeds the ritual more power.
We are bleeding from both ends.
“Dagan!” Thorne roars, half-mask cracked, eyes blazing. “We can’t keep this up!”
“I know,” I grind out.
I feel it.
Our bonds flicker with pain.
I feel them all.
Alaric’s connection to Jules pulses in frantic bursts—her fear, his stubborn refusal to fall.
Kael’s tie to Phoebe hums sharp and tight, his control fraying at the edges.
Thorne’s link to Delia is a storm of rage and worry.
My own bond to Alina… it’s a steady, unyielding line.
Present.
Watching.
Then—suddenly—it flares.
Not with fear this time.
With purpose.
A surge of awareness slams into me, as if someone just jammed a new data stream into an overloaded circuit.
My vision blurs.
The battlefield stutters.
For a heartbeat, I see not just the Barrow’s slopes and Idris’ corrupted ore—but something else.
The crown.
Sitting on its pedestal in the inner chamber of my fortress.
Four female hands reaching for it at once.
Alina’s is one of them.
“What are you doing, Oona?” I whisper, even as I hurl a boulder the size of a wagon down the hill, crushing a SoulTaker pack before they can flank Thorne.
She doesn’t answer in words.
The bond sings back.
Trust me.
Another wave from Idris hits.
My arms shake. Stone splinters. Blood runs down my leg in warm rivers. Behind us, the Barrow’s wards flare and dim, flare and dim, like a heart in fibrillation.
We are losing.
We are going to break—unless whatever Alina is doing works.
I plant my feet, ignoring the pain, and drag more power up from the depths, forcing it through the ritual’s drag, refusing to let Idris own what is mine.
“Brothers,” I rasp, voice rough. “Hold. Whatever happens next—hold.”
Alaric grins through bloody teeth. “For once, I agree with the rock.”
Kael huffs a humorless laugh. “First time for everything.”
Thorne spits a mouthful of blood and flame. “If I fall, I’m taking that self-righteous corpse-worshiper with me.”
Idris raises his staff for the killing blow.
The corrupted Ember shards around him blaze brighter than they ever have, the trapped souls inside them screaming.
The ritual reaches for us—claws hooked into fire, water, air, stone.
Then, abruptly, something else grabs hold.
A different pull.
Deeper.
Older.
Right down the spinal column of Nightfall itself.
The crown wakes.
I feel it like a tectonic shift—an entire mountain range groaning as it changes shape.
The strain on my magic snaps, sending me stumbling.
Idris’ head jerks up, eyes wide, staff stuttering in his grip.
“No,” he breathes, voice suddenly thin. “No, no, no—this should not be happening. What have you done?”
The crown’s voice—silent for so long—pours through every fault line, every ward, every forge, every bone of this realm.
Not a word.
A choice.
Four anchors instead of one—Alina’s voice whispers through the earth.
The bonds to Alina, Delia, Phoebe, and Jules blaze in my chest, searing bright, and power rushes down them like water finally finding the right channels.
I know the other Lords feel it too.
For the first time since this battle began, Idris is not the only one drawing from Nightfall’s core.
We are.
We are one with Nightfall.
And my Oona is at the center of it, hands on the fracture, daring to pull.
I bare my teeth, feel stone answer me like an old friend, and surge to my full height.
“Change of plans,” I snarl, lifting my hands as the ground beneath Idris bucks.
“We’re done letting you steal what was never yours.”