Screams of torture. The sound of blades scraping across stone in an ear splitting screech. Winged demons flew through the sky spitting fireballs at survivors trying to flee. The sky was black with a swirling vortex of red energy above an expansive kingdom carved into the mountaintops.
Draznkal.
I looked around as people screamed for mercy all around me, monsters tearing through them without hesitation. Red lightning struck the ground in violent bursts, shaking it each time. The air smelled like burning metal.
A deep voice rolled through the slaughter like thunder that hadn't decided to stop.
"You reached for magick that is beyond your grasp. The realm of the dead obeys nobody but me."
I turned toward it.
A man on his knees, crying at the sky. A broken crown on his head. Deep wounds covered his body, dark and ragged, the kind that don't close. In front of him stood the largest man I'd ever seen.
His eyes were violet with hints of red burning at the edges like embers that wouldn't go out. Long black hair pulled up, loose strands falling across his face. But none of that was what stopped me. It was the aura. Enormous wasn't the right word for it. It wasn't physical. It was atmospheric. I could feel it pressing against my skin, against my chest, against something deeper than either of those. An aura that felt like it could swallow the world.
"I was only trying to help my kingdom." The man on the ground pressed his forehead to the earth. "Please forgive me. Lord Mavon."
The figure set his sword on his shoulder. The edge of the blade touched the kneeling man's neck and burned a sigil into the skin there, slow and deliberate, glowing like a fire that existed somewhere other than this world.
"Your crimes will not disappear with your death." His voice was patient. Absolute. The voice of something that had never once been told no and didn't expect to start now. "From now until the end of time you will remain in your kingdom as punishment for your cri…"
He stopped.
His head turned. Slowly. Not toward the man on the ground. Not toward the carnage behind me. Toward me.
My chest seized.
He walked forward. The crowd of screaming people parted around him without being asked, the way water moves around something that doesn't negotiate with currents. He stopped in front of me and his sword came up slowly until the flat of the blade hovered an inch from my throat. The heat coming off it was impossible.
"Eavesdropping on conversations isn't polite."
His eyes flared once. Something vast moved behind them.
"Oren." A pause that lasted longer than it should have. "Son of Lucas."
The world went white.
I hit the floor before I registered I'd moved. My hands found the boards beneath me and I stayed there for a moment, breathing, trying to separate what was real from what wasn't. The room was dark. The compound was quiet outside. My heart was slamming against my ribs hard enough to feel in my throat.
That wasn't a dream.
I knew what dreams felt like. That wasn't one.
Layla was already up, sitting at the edge of the bed. Her shoulders were shaking. Not from cold.
"Hey." I pushed myself up slowly and moved toward her. "What's wrong?"
My hand touched her shoulder and her entire body locked. Rigid. Like something had taken hold of her from the inside and pulled taut.
"It's still watching us." Her voice was wrong. Flat and distant, like it was coming from somewhere further away than the room we were standing in. She lifted one hand and pointed toward the corner.
I looked.
No wall. No shadow. Just darkness that had no right to exist in a room with a window. The kind of dark that feels like something rather than the absence of something. It had weight. It had presence. I could feel it the same way I'd felt in the shadow of Draznkal. That vast, patient wrongness pressing against the edges of everything, completely indifferent to whether I was afraid of it.
I stepped toward it anyway.
Something stopped me before I reached it. Not a blow. More like walking into a wall of pressure that had decided it was done being observed. It pushed me back two steps without making contact and the aura behind it pressed down on the room like a held breath. Ancient and immense.
Then it was gone.
The corner was just a corner. Dark because the light didn't reach it. Nothing more.
Layla's body released all at once. She swayed, then lay back down, her eyes closing before her head reached the pillow. Asleep. Instantly. Like a switch had been thrown somewhere inside her that she had no access to.
I stood in the middle of the room and didn't move for a long time.
He had known my name. Had turned toward me in a vision of something that happened before I was born and said it like he'd been expecting to say it eventually. And whatever had just been in that corner had touched Layla without her permission and used her like a hand pointing at something it wanted me to see.
I picked up my swords from the floor and sat on the edge of the bed with them across my lap.
Outside the window the sky had started to shift from black to the dark grey that comes before first light. The compound would begin waking soon.
I looked down at my hands. The shadow was there at the edge of my chest, quiet and patient, the way it always was now. Waiting.
First light wasn't far off.
I didn't go back to sleep, instead I got dressed. The time it took seemed longer than usual as my thoughts were stuck on the dream.
Most of it was already gone. The screaming. The demons. The kingdom burning. All of it fading the way dreams do.
But the name stayed. It sat in my chest like something swallowed.
Mavon.
● ● ●
I walked outside into the early morning. Around me the compound was just waking. A few early risers moved through the training yards, unhurried, their breath visible in the cold air. The magick lanterns were going out one by one down the path as the sky lightened behind the tower.
Rue was sitting in front of our dormitory.
He had a ball of flame in his hand, small and dense, passing it between his fingers the way you'd fidget with a coin. His eyes were on the ground and his face had an expression I hadn't seen on him before.
Concern. Genuine and unguarded.
He looked up when he heard me.
"Was wondering when you'd be out here."
I sat down beside him. "Why are you here?"
"Sensed it. Woke me dead out of sleep." He closed his fist and the flame vanished. "Happens every time it gets close."
I looked at the scars on his arms in the early light. The long one across his face. I'd assumed those were from battles.
Now I wasn't sure.
"What happened to you in there?"
He turned a loose stone over in his fingers once before setting it down.
"Everything and nothing. Your worst fears stop being fears and start being real. Your own emotions press against you until there's nothing left of you that remembers what you were before you walked in." He was quiet for a moment. "I came out a different person. Some of what I lost in there I never found."
The compound moved around us. Swords rang out from the far training yard.
He looked at me directly. "I'm telling you this because you're walking in alone. My entire team died there. I only made it out because I made marks on the way in so I'd know my way out."
He stood and smacked me on the back.
"Come on. Let's get some last minute training in before you leave."
I grabbed my swords and turned to face him. The compound was still waking around us, early morning light cutting flat across the training yard.
He was already swinging before I finished turning. Flames running along his blade, fast and controlled. I broke left and brought my right sword up hard at his ribs.
He dodged without effort but I was ready for that. The shadow tendrils came from the ground before he landed, coiling around his legs and locking him in place.
He looked down at them. Then back up at me with something close to a smile.
He released a pulse of aura. One breath of it. The tendrils shattered and scattered like smoke in wind.
"Come on, you have to do better than that."
I let the shadow take me. One moment I was in front of him, the next I was behind him with my blade moving toward his neck.
His hand caught my wrist before the blade arrived. His knee came up into my chin in the same motion. My teeth clicked together hard and the yard tilted sideways. I caught myself before I went down but only just.
He released my wrist and stepped back.
"Not bad." He looked at me for a moment in a way that wasn't quite assessment and wasn't quite something else. "But you're still no match for me."
He sheathed his sword.
"Don't lose yourself in there. Whatever you see, whatever speaks to you." He met my eyes once. "Remember what you came for."
He walked away without looking back.