Grit and gray ash hung suspended in the air around the central brazier, swirling slowly through the shafts of orange firelight before settling back onto the stone floor.
For three full seconds after the air beside the wooden pillar stopped shimmering, the main hall of the cavern was quieter than a buried tomb.
Nobody breathed. Nobody shifted a boot. The sixty witches gathered around the fire pits stood locked in place, their ears still ringing from the violent crack of displaced wind and the sickening thud of their founder hitting the far rock wall. The acrid smell of disturbed coals mixed with the dry, chalky scent of crushed stone dust kicked up from the gravel.
Four paces to the left of the timber post, Red Pepper stood completely paralyzed.
Her hands were still half-raised toward the center of the hall where she had been about to applaud Cara's speech a moment earlier, her mouth hanging slightly open as her chest refused to draw in air. Her brain felt as though it had jammed mid-thought, utterly unable to stitch together a sequence of events that had started and ended in less than two heartbeats.
What... what in the name of the gods just happened? Red Pepper thought, a cold tremor starting in her knees and working its way up her spine.
Slowly, mechanically, her wide eyes dropped from the empty wooden pillar down to the dirt at its base.
Scattered across the dark gravel, glittering faintly like dirty shards of broken river ice under the torchlight, lay the shattered remains of the God's Stone of Retaliation.
Red Pepper stared at those dull white fragments until her eyes watered.
Every witch in the Four Kingdoms grew up hearing horror stories about those six-sided amulets. To anyone with magic in her veins, a God's Stone wasn't just a piece of mineral dug out of a Church mine; it was an indestructible iron cage, a piece of divine punishment that turned the strongest combat witch into a helpless lamb waiting for the butcher's knife. Even Cara had treated that stolen medallion like a priceless relic.
Yet right in front of sixty pairs of eyes, something had closed a bare hand around that stone and crushed it into powder as if it were made of dry biscuit.
And right above the scattered dust, the thick loops of hemp shipping rope that had pinned Nightingale to the post hung slack and empty, swaying gently from the timber without a single cut mark on the fibers.
Red Pepper took a shaky, stumbling half-step backward, her boots crunching against the gravel.
What was that thing? she asked herself wildly, cold sweat prickling beneath her ragged wool tunic.
To her eyes, there hadn't even been a person standing by the stake. One second Cara was screaming at Wendy with the glowing poker in her fist; the next second, the air at the mouth of the tunnel had exploded like a thunderclap, and a dark blur had torn across the hall.
It hadn't chanted a spell. It hadn't glowed with Magical Power. It had simply slammed through their untouchable Mentor like a falling boulder, pulverized the Church's stone with one squeeze of its fist, and vanished into thin air along with Nightingale.
Was it a high-ranking demon from the northern peaks? Red Pepper wondered, wrapping her arms tightly around her stomach as nausea churned in her gut. Or did Nightingale sell her soul to some invisible spirit down in that valley?
While Red Pepper trembled on the edge of hysteria, however, a very different pair of eyes six paces away was studying the exact same patch of dirt with icy, analytical clarity.
Standing near the outer ring of the left campfire, Cecilia Selda didn't flinch or step back.
Even dressed in a faded, travel-stained dress beneath a patched wolf-fur cloak, the former second daughter of Count Henry Selda of Valencia carried herself with the straight-backed, unruffled poise of high nobility. Before her magic had awakened and forced her to flee her father's estate, she had been raised to manage a great household; and here in the Witch Cooperation Association—where only Scroll was older than her—Cecilia had never lost the habit of using her head before her emotions.
Where the younger girls saw a demon or a vengeful ghost, Cecilia looked at the floor.
Her narrowed eyes traced a sharp, unmistakable line of scuffed gravel and deep boot prints leading straight from the mouth of the entrance tunnel to the spot beside the brazier where Cara had been standing.
Ghosts don't leave two-hundred-pound heel marks in frozen dirt, Cecilia thought, folding her arms slowly beneath her fur cloak as her mind raced at breakneck speed. And demons don't wear stitched leather boots or heavy winter coats.
That hadn't been a spirit, and it hadn't been a spell.
It had been a man.
A flesh-and-blood man moving with a speed and raw physical violence that made the finest royal knights in her father's guard look like crippled old men.
Every single word Nightingale had spoken ten minutes earlier—right before Cara had tossed that rolled sheet of parchment into the coals—came rushing back into Cecilia's mind with crystal-clear precision.
Nightingale hadn't just talked about warm beds, silver coins, and a cure for the eighteenth birthday. She had told them about Prince Roland Wimbledon's military commander—a warrior named William who possessed spatial magic of his own, who had beaten hybrid demonic beasts to death with his bare fists in front of the town wall, and who had climbed this freezing mountain right beside her to guard their journey back.
He had been waiting outside in the snow the entire time.
And the instant Cara had screamed and raised that white-hot iron to murder Nightingale, he had come through that tunnel like a bolt of lightning to keep his word.
Cecilia's heart skipped a beat against her ribs.
If the man waiting outside the tunnel was real—if a mortal warrior really could move faster than the eye could follow and shatter a God's Stone in his bare palm—then what did that say about the rest of Nightingale's story?
What did it say about the twelve-foot concrete wall, the iron machines that ran on boiling water, the royal prince who paid witches gold, and the seventeen-year-old girl named Anna who had woken up on her eighteenth birthday without shedding a drop of blood?
She wasn't lying, Cecilia realized, a sudden, violent shiver running all the way down her spine. Not a single word of it was a trap. Border Town is real.
Looking from the empty wooden stake over to the smoking brazier where the Prince's drawing had just been burned to ash, Cecilia felt a wave of cold horror wash over her.
For five years, they had starved in the dark, burying girl after girl in the snow while praying for a miracle. Tonight, their best scout had finally walked back into this cave carrying the key to every witch's survival in her hands—and instead of listening to her, they had tied her to a post, hung a Church collar around her neck, and watched their Mentor try to impale her with a red-hot poker!
Before Cecilia could even open her mouth to voice that realization, the stunned silence across the cavern shattered like thin glass.
— "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT THING?!" — Selena shrieked at the top of her lungs from the middle row, her hands flying to her temples as her magic eyes flared open in blind, suffocating terror. — "IT'S THE CHURCH! THE CHURCH TRACKED NIGHTINGALE TO OUR CAVE! THE JUDGMENT ARMY IS OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW!"
That single scream acted like a lit torch tossed into a barrel of dry straw.
Within two seconds, sixty exhausted, traumatized girls who had spent their whole lives waiting for inquisitors to kick down their doors lost their minds at once.
— "I didn't see any magic! My eyes didn't see a single thread of magic!" — Scarlett wailed, dropping to her knees beside the fire pit and clutching her hair with both hands as her pupils dilated in shock. — "How did he break the God's Stone without magic?! Nothing breaks a God's Stone! How did he just vanish into the air?!"
— "We're all going to die in here!" — little Lydia sobbed hysterically, throwing both arms around Soraya Zoen's waist so hard she nearly dragged the older girl down onto the rocks. — "The priests have invisible assassins now! They're going to slit our throats in the dark!"
Near the front of the crowd, Ellen dropped flat onto her stomach on the freezing stone floor, pressing her right ear tightly against the gravel as she tried to use her vibration-sensing magic to track the intruder.
— "Shut up! Everyone shut up for a second and let me listen to the rock!" — Ellen shouted, her voice cracking with panic as she closed her eyes.
Three seconds later, Ellen's eyes snapped back open, her face paler than bone.
— "There's nothing!" — she gasped, scrambling backward on her palms. — "No footsteps in the tunnel, no heartbeat against the stone! Only the wind outside! They didn't even touch the floor when they left!"
Then, from the far right side of the hall where the shadows met the rough granite wall, a shrill, blood-curdling scream cut straight over the crying:
— "THE MENTOR! LOOK AT THE MENTOR!" — Shino pointed a trembling finger toward the base of the rock wall fifteen feet past the brazier. — "HE KILLED HER! THAT MONSTER BROKE HER BACK!"
At the word killed, the panic in the hall threatened to turn into a blind, deadly stampede toward the back tunnels.
Seeing dozens of girls whirling around with wild eyes while stray sparks of defensive magic began to flare dangerously across their fingertips, Scroll knew they were ten seconds away from trampling one another to death.
Stepping straight into the center space beside the brazier, the oldest witch in the camp raised both arms above her head, drew in a deep breath, and projected her voice with every ounce of authority she possessed:
— "SILENCE! ALL OF YOU, STAND STILL RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!"
Scroll's sharp command cracked off the stalactites like a whip, freezing the closest girls in their tracks.
— "Put your magic down and get a hold of yourselves!" — Scroll barked, her face tight and pale as she swept her gaze across the chaotic crowd. — "Running blindly into the dark won't save anyone! Nobody moves an inch from their fire pit!"
Right beside her, Wendy hurried forward to back her up. Even though Wendy's own hands were still shaking uncontrollably beneath her sleeves—both from the terror of standing up to Cara two minutes ago and from the shock of watching Nightingale vanish—her maternal instinct kicked in immediately.
— "Listen to Scroll, sisters! Please!" — Wendy called out, her voice loud and urgent as she reached out to steady two sobbing fourteen-year-old girls near the front. — "There is no Church army in the tunnel! Think about it! If that man had come here to slaughter us, half of us would already be on the floor! He didn't draw a blade on a single sister—he only came inside to pull Nightingale off that post! He is already gone, so stay together and breathe!"
Before Wendy's words could fully calm the outer ring, another frantic shout echoed from the far rock wall:
— "HERB! WHAT ARE YOU STANDING THERE FOR?! HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?!" — Catherine screamed, her voice raw with fury and terror as she knelt in the dirt beside Cara's crumpled robes. — "GET OVER HERE RIGHT NOW! SHE'S BLEEDING TO DEATH!"
Near the left fire pit, a slender girl with messy brown hair braided down her back jerked as if she had been slapped.
Herb—whom several of the older sisters also called Leaf—was the quietest soul in the entire Association. She didn't have a combat bone in her body; whenever the camp was on the march, her job was brewing willow-bark tea for night fevers and binding the frostbitten toes of the younger girls.
Hiking up the hem of her rough linen skirt, Herb bolted across the hall toward the wall, nearly tripping over her own boots in her haste before dropping hard onto her knees beside Catherine.
One look at the founder of the Witch Cooperation Association made Herb's breath catch in her throat.
Cara looked like a doll that had been dropped from the top of a cathedral tower.
Even though William had pulled back most of his lethal strength before his shoulder hit her spine, the sheer blunt impact of being launched fifteen feet across the hall and bouncing off solid granite had done brutal damage to her frail body.
A jagged, three-inch gash had split the skin wide open across Cara's pale forehead, pouring thick dark blood into her green hair and over the viper tattoos on her left cheek. Her eyes were rolled halfway back in her head, her ribs rose and fell in shallow, hitching spasms, and every time she tried to draw a breath, a wet, rattling gurgle bubbled up from deep inside her chest, painting flecks of red foam across her lips.
— "Fix her! Use your magic and close the wounds!" — Catherine hissed, grabbing Herb roughly by the shoulder and shaking her.
— "I—I'm trying! Don't shake me, I'm not a flesh healer like that girl Nightingale talked about!" — Herb cried out, tears stinging her eyes as her trembling hands dove into the leather pouch tied at her waist.
Her magic couldn't knit broken bones or mend torn organs directly; she could only accelerate the growth of plant cells and multiply the medicinal properties of natural roots and leaves by a dozen times.
Pulling out a handful of dried winter mint, blood-staunching yarrow, and crushed mountain root, Herb pressed her palms together and poured a steady stream of soft emerald-green light into the dry plants.
Within three seconds, the brittle leaves softened, swelled, and melted inside her grasp, transforming into a thick, glossy green salve that filled the immediate corner of the cave with the sharp, pungent smell of crushed mint and wet forest earth.
Ignoring the blood staining her cuffs, Herb smeared half of the concentrated herbal paste directly across the gaping wound on Cara's forehead to stop the bleeding, then pried the Mentor's slack jaw open with two fingers and forced three thick drops of the bitter sap onto her tongue to keep her internal abrasions from drowning her lungs.
As Catherine, Windseeker, and half a dozen loyalist witches crowded tightly around Herb, weeping and shouting questions over the wet sound of Cara's gurgling breaths, nobody paid any attention to the far left corner of the cavern.
There, twenty paces away in the deepest pocket of shadow behind a damp stalagmite, a young blonde girl stood completely alone.
Lightning hadn't screamed when William burst out of the tunnel, and she hadn't run over to look at Cara either.
With her short, messy blonde hair tucked beneath a worn leather aviator's cap and her small hands shoved deep into the pockets of her patched jacket, the young flyer leaned her back against the cold stone pillar, her bright blue eyes wide open as her heart hammered like a drum against her ribs.
She wasn't afraid of the Church, and she certainly wasn't crying for her fallen Mentor.
Instead, the last ten minutes had hit Lightning like a bucket of freezing water, washing away the last scrap of illusion she had held about this place.
Ever since she had fled her hometown and joined the Association months ago, Lightning had hated living in this dark, suffocating hole in the ground. For a girl whose power let her soar freely through the clouds beside the eagles, being buried under thousands of tons of black rock while eating watery gruel and listening to Cara's endless, gloomy sermons felt like being locked in a coffin. Still, she had put up with it because Wendy was kind, and because she thought the camp was the only place where witches stood up for one another.
Tonight had ripped that lie to shreds.
Watching Cara tie Nightingale to a wooden post with a Church collar around her neck—watching their supposed protector hold a white-hot iron poker three inches from a sister's eye just because Nightingale had brought back news of a better life—had turned Lightning's stomach inside out.
This isn't a sanctuary, Lightning thought, her small jaw clenching as she watched Catherine scream at Herb across the hall. It's a prison camp run by a crazy old dictator.
Even worse, Lightning had grown up around enough dock brawls and street gangs back home to know exactly what was going to happen the moment Herb's medicine worked and Cara woke up.
A proud, paranoid tyrant like Cara had just been swatted across her own hall like a fly in front of sixty subordinates. Her priceless God's Stone had been crushed into dust, and her prisoner had walked right out the front door.
Once Cara regained consciousness, she wouldn't be able to take her humiliation out on Nightingale or that terrifying man—so she would take it out on everyone left inside this cave.
Anyone who had looked too interested in the steam engine drawing, anyone who had hesitated when Wendy asked who wanted to leave, and anyone who didn't kiss Cara's boots hard enough would be interrogated, starved, or tied to that same wooden pillar.
No way. Not a chance in hell, Lightning decided on the spot, her blue eyes hardening with fierce determination. If I stay in this cave until tomorrow morning, that crazy snake woman will clip my wings for good.
Besides, there was one massive fact that none of the screaming girls around the fire seemed to be putting together:
Nightingale had told the truth.
Earlier, when Stone and Cara had mocked the idea of a mortal commander beating hybrid beasts to death with his bare hands, Lightning had thought it sounded a bit exaggerated too. Then that exact man had come rocketing out of the tunnel, crossed thirty yards in the blink of an eye, and shattered an indestructible Church stone with his bare fingers!
If Commander William was real, then Prince Roland was real, the warm bedrooms were real, and Border Town really was waiting down in the valley!
Lightning glanced quickly across the chaotic hall.
Right now, Scroll and Wendy had their backs completely turned to the entrance, trying to calm down Selena and the younger girls near the rear fires. To the right, Catherine, Windseeker, and the older combat witches were huddled in a tight knot around Cara's bleeding head.
Nobody was watching the outer tunnel.
If she waited five more minutes, Scroll would post guards at the gorge entrance again, and the door would slam shut forever.
It's now or never, Lightning told herself.
Careful not to activate her flying magic—knowing that even a tiny ripple of Magical Power or a sudden draft of wind might alert Windseeker or Scarlett—Lightning kept both boots planted on the ground.
Ducking her head low, she slipped silently out from behind the stalagmite.
Keeping her small frame pressed flat against the jagged, unlit perimeter wall where the orange glow of the campfires couldn't reach, she moved like a cat from shadow to shadow, skirting the outer edge of the hall toward the dark throat of the exit corridor.
The storm outside was brutal, and she didn't know the exact mountain trail to Border Town. However, Nightingale and that Commander had left less than two minutes ago, and they would have to walk through the snow once Nightingale's stamina ran low. Once Lightning cleared the gorge, she could fly straight up above the snowdrifts, spot their tracks from the air in ten minutes flat, and catch up with them before they even cleared the first ridge!
Ten paces from the tunnel mouth.
Five paces.
Three paces.
The freezing draft blowing in from the outer gorge brushed against Lightning's cheeks. Letting out a silent breath of relief, she tensed her legs to dive straight into the pitch-black mouth of the corridor—
Grab!
Out of a recessed cleft in the dark rock right beside the tunnel entrance, a pale, slender hand shot forward without a sound and clamped five firm fingers around Lightning's right forearm!
Lightning's heart leaped straight into her throat.
Every muscle in her small body locked up at once. Whirling halfway around on her heel, she instinctively raised her free hand, a surge of Magical Power rushing to her skin to blast herself backward into the air—convinced that one of Cara's fanatical perimeter guards had been lurking in the dark to ambush anyone trying to desert.
Before she could release the wind blast, however, the person holding her arm stepped half an inch forward so the faint, dying reflection of the distant campfire caught her profile.
Lightning blinked, freezing mid-motion.
It wasn't Windseeker, and it wasn't one of the combat scouts.
Standing pressed into the crevice of the rock wall, wearing a tattered wool shawl wrapped tightly over a threadbare dress and carrying a small bundle of tied cloth under her other arm, was Diana Argus.
In the Association, twenty-four-year-old Diana had always kept quietly to the background. Her magic was completely useless for fighting or foraging—all she could do was change the dye color of cloth or leather to different shades of blue by touching it. Because of that, Cara and the combat witches had always treated her like an extra mouth to feed.
What Cara had overlooked, however, was the blood running through Diana's veins.
As the eldest daughter of Baron Argus, Diana hadn't spent her youth living in a mud hut; she had been tutored alongside her brothers in estate management, mathematics, and mechanical architecture.
Earlier that evening, when Nightingale had held up the charcoal blueprint of the steam engine toward the firelight, most of the illiterate girls in the cave had only seen a confusing mess of black lines.
Diana had seen a masterpiece.
Even from ten paces back, she had recognized the proportional scale of the high-pressure boiler, the precision of the double-acting piston rod, and the exact mathematical ratios of the flywheel gears. No medieval blacksmith could have faked that drawing, and no Church inquisitor on earth possessed the engineering genius required to invent a machine like that just to trick runaway girls.
From the very second Cara had thrown that priceless blueprint into the fire, Diana had known two things with absolute certainty: Prince Roland's sanctuary was real, and staying in this cave meant dying beside a madwoman.
She Didn't have combat magic or flying power to survive the Impassable Mountain Range alone. So when William had smashed through the hall and vanished with Nightingale, Diana hadn't screamed; instead, she had quietly grabbed her shawl, slipped to the mouth of the tunnel, and watched the crowd like a hawk—waiting to see which of the fast scouts had the brains and the guts to bolt.
Seeing that Lightning wasn't going to shout or throw a punch, Diana leaned in until her lips were an inch from the younger girl's ear.
— "You're going after them, aren't you?" — Diana whispered, her voice barely audible over the howling wind in the tunnel behind them and the distant crying around Cara. — "After Nightingale and the man who broke the stone."
Lightning stared up into the older woman's honey-colored eyes.
There was no trace of malice, loyalty to Cara, or deception on Diana's refined, hollow-cheeked face—only raw terror of the cave behind them and a fierce, desperate determination to live.
Swallowing her heartbeat back down into her chest, Lightning let the magic fade from her palm and gave a single, sharp nod.
A wave of pure, overwhelming relief washed across Diana's pale face, her fingers tightening around Lightning's sleeve as if she were a drowning sailor grabbing the side of the last lifeboat in a storm.
— "Take me with you, Lightning. Please," — Diana breathed out, her voice trembling with an irrevocable plea as her eyes shone in the dark. — "I want to see that machine with my own eyes. Don't leave me in this hell."
Lightning looked at the thin, shivering noblewoman for half a second. Taking a non-combat witch on her back through a sub-zero blizzard was going to slow her down and burn through her stamina twice as fast.
Yet leaving a sister behind after she had just asked for help went against everything Lightning believed in.
Grinning fiercely in the dark, the young aviator flipped her hand over, grabbed Diana firmly by the wrist, and jerked her chin toward the pitch-black throat of the mountain tunnel.
— "Hold onto my jacket and don't make a sound, Lady Diana!" — Lightning whispered back. — "We're getting out of here right now!"
Without looking back once at the smoky fires or the weeping cult they were leaving behind, the two witches turned and plunged straight into the freezing darkness of the tunnel.