The Ascendancy's soldiers limped through the gates of Ebonspire, the capital's obsidian walls towering like jagged teeth against a leaden sky. Their armor, once polished to a merciless gleam, was caked in mud and blood. Citizens scattered from the cobblestone streets, eyes wide as they whispered of defeat—a word foreign to the kingdom's lexicon. At the rear of the column, Scourge slumped in a makeshift litter, her remaining eye glazed with pain, the stump of her left wrist wrapped in filthy linen.
The clinic she was taken to reeked of stale herbs and rotting wood. A lone healer, Sira, worked with hands raw from lye soap, her supplies dwindled to moth-eaten bandages and tinctures watered down by corrupt stewards. "The Emperor's favored hound, reduced to gutter scraps," Sira muttered, stitching Scourge's mangled thigh. "How poetic."
Scourge's laugh was a wet rasp. "Careful, girl. Even half-dead, I could slit your throat."
"You'd bleed out before the blade cleared your sheath," Sira replied, pressing a poultice of bitterroot to the wound. "Rest. Or don't. Either way, you'll haunt these halls a while."
The war council convened in the Hall of Iron Crowns, a vaulted chamber where the air clung thick with the smoke of censers meant to ward off ill omens. Emperor Kyril Voss sat slouched on a throne of fused swords, his youth long devoured by the weight of rule. Flanking him were the Royalsouls—advisors clad in robes of state, their faces sharp as knives.
Lord Varyn, Master of Coin, spoke first, his voice a serpent's hiss. "The northern outpost burned. Our granaries are ash. And now this—a rabble of mutants humiliates the Iron Legion?"
General Draus, a bull of a man with a scarred lip, slammed a gauntleted fist on the table. "We've lost three battalions chasing phantoms in the hinterlands! The Vyrnese sniff weakness. Their emissaries already court the coastal lords."
Lady Elyra, the spymistress, flicked a dagger across her knuckles. "The Devourer's cults multiply in the slums. They preach that Vorath's host is the 'Scourge of the Pure.' Our people starve, and heresy festers. Priorities, my lords."
The Emperor lifted a hand, silencing the room. "The outcasts are a splinter. The Vyrnese are a dagger poised at our throat. We consolidate."
Lord Varyn: "The treasury bleeds. We cannot fund both the border forts and the hunt for Vorath's host. The mercenary companies demand double pay to guard the trade routes."
General Draus: "Recall the eastern legions. Let the savages raid the borderlands—they'll find no glory in dirt and rocks."
Lady Elyra: "And when the clans unite under a warlord? When they march on Ebonspire with Vyrnese steel?"
Emperor Kyril: "We raise new levies. Tax the guilds. The Merchant's Circle hoards enough grain to feed the armies of the dead."
Lord Varyn: "The guilds will revolt. They already mutter of 'tyranny.'"
Emperor Kyril: "Then hang the loudest among them in the Square of Sighs. Let their gold silence their peers."
A pause. The censers hissed.
Lady Elyra: "And Vorath's host? The Devourer's whispers?"
Emperor Kyril: "Let the outcasts rot in the wilds. Vorath's power is a wildfire—it will consume them long before it reaches our gates."
General Draus: "Scourge claims the host has a scholar. One who knows the old rites. If they wake the Devourer—"
Emperor Kyril: "Then we resurrect the Black Edicts. Burn every archive. Execute every mystic. Salt the earth where their words took root."
Lady Elyra: "And the Witch-King's relics? The ones buried beneath the Tower?"
The Emperor's gaze darkened. "Some doors are best left sealed."
In the clinic's dim belly, Scourge stirred. The poultice itched. The walls whispered.
Sira hovered nearby, grinding nightshade into a paste. "You'll walk again. Not well, but enough to limp back to your master."
Scourge's eye narrowed. "You're too sharp-tongued for a backwater sawbones."
Sira smiled faintly. "And you're too curious for a woman who should be dead." She pressed a vial into Scourge's hand—a concoction that smelled of iron and rot. "For the pain. Or the memories. They're the same, in the end."
As Sira left, Scourge uncorked the vial. A note lay coiled inside:
"The Tower's roots are deeper than the Crown knows. Find the scholar. He has what you seek."
That night, the Emperor stood alone on the palace balcony, the city sprawling below like a carcass picked clean by crows. A shadow detached from the gloom—a figure in a Royalguard cloak, their face hidden.
"It's done?" Kyril asked.
"The Vyrnese emissary took the bait," the figure replied. "Their armies will march on the clans by midsummer."
"And the outcasts?"
"They head for the Shattered Wastes. Let the sands bury them."
The Emperor nodded. "See that they do."
As the figure vanished, Kyril's hand drifted to the amulet beneath his robes—a shard of black stone, warm and alive. The Devourer's voice coiled in his mind, sweet as poison.
"Soon."
The air in Ebonspire's Hall of Iron Crowns hung thick with the cloying scent of incense, a feeble attempt to mask the rot festering beneath the Ascendancy's gilded facade. Emperor Kyril Voss leaned back on his throne, fingers drumming restlessly against the hilt of a ceremonial dagger. The flickering torchlight carved hollows into his gaunt face, his once-vibrant eyes now dulled by sleepless nights and the weight of the amulet hidden beneath his robes—a shard of obsidian that hummed with a hunger he could no longer ignore.
"The northern clans grow bold," rumbled General Draus, his voice echoing off the chamber's blackened stone walls. He stood like a bear forced into courtly attire, his armor straining against muscles honed on battlefields now lost to memory. "They raid our supply caravans openly. If we divert more legions to chase shadows in the Wastes, the Vyrnese will carve out our spine and leave us crawling."
Lady Elyra, her hooded cloak pooling around her like liquid shadow, flicked a dagger into the table between them. The blade quivered, its edge catching the light like a serpent's grin. "The clans are a splinter. The real dagger is here." She tapped a scroll stamped with the seal of the Merchant's Circle. "Their gold fuels the Vyrnese fleet. Tax them into oblivion, and the clans will starve."
Lord Varyn, Master of Coin, snorted. His silk robes rustled as he leaned forward, rings glinting on fingers stained by ink and greed. "Tax them? They'll bury their coffers in unmarked graves and laugh as we beg for scraps. No—hang the guild masters in the Square of Sighs. Let their heirs learn the price of defiance."
Kyril's drumming fingers stilled. The amulet pulsed against his chest, a slow, insistent rhythm that throbbed in time with his heartbeat. "And if the merchants revolt? If they burn the granaries?"
"Let them," Varyn said, shrugging. "Ash cannot eat gold. We'll strip their vaults and sell their children to the Vyrnese slavers. A lesson in humility."
Elyra's lips curled. "Spoken like a man who's never felt a noose."
Draus slammed his fist on the table, sending wine sloshing from goblets. "Enough! While you vipers hiss, the Ironjaw Battalion rots in the borderlands. Recall them. Let them carve a path through the Wastes and bury the outcasts in their precious ruins."
"And if the Devourer wakes?" Elyra's voice dropped to a whisper. "The scholar they travel with—Garrel—he's no fool. He'll know how to twist the old magic."
Kyril's hand drifted to his chest, the amulet's heat seeping into his palm. Let them wake it, he thought. Let them bleed themselves dry fighting it. Aloud, he said, "The relics in Lorathis are worth the risk. Dispatch the Ironjaw. Let General Gorath lead them."
A beat of silence. Draus' scarred lip twitched. "Gorath is a butcher."
"Precisely," Kyril said, rising. The amulet's whisper coiled in his mind, sweet and venomous. "Dismissed."
" By the way,"Kyril said."what about the outcasts?"
"Gorath's battalion follows. The Wastes will bury them."
Kyril nodded, his grip tightening on the amulet. "See that they do."
In the bowels of the city, where the stench of sewage clung to the air like a curse, Scourge limped through the clinic's dim corridors. Her thigh burned where the healer's stitches pulled taut, but pain was an old companion. The vial Sira had given her weighed heavy in her palm, its contents black as rot.
"You're supposed to be resting."
Scourge turned to find Sira leaning against a doorway, her arms crossed. The healer's hands were raw, her apron stained with remedies and blood.
"Resting is for corpses," Scourge said, tossing the vial. It clinked against the stone floor. "What's your game, girl? Why slip me notes like a lovestruck scribe?"
Sira stepped forward, her gaze unflinching. "You've seen the Emperor's madness. That amulet he wears—it's no trinket. It's a piece of the Devourer's prison. And it's breaking."
Scourge's eye narrowed. "And you care because…?"
"Because when it shatters, Ebonspire will be the first to burn." Sira knelt, retrieving the vial. "The scholar with the outcasts—Garrel—he knows how to destroy it. Find him. Before the Emperor's greed drowns us all."
"Why not go yourself?"
Sira's smile was bitter. "The dead walk freely in the Wastes. I prefer my ghosts quiet."
The Shattered Wastes stretched beyond the horizon, a sea of dunes scarred by jagged obsidian spires that clawed at the sky like skeletal fingers. Legends called it Lorathis, the "City of Echoes," buried millennia ago when the Ascendancy's ancestors sealed the Devourer's first prison. Now, the sands trembled. At dawn, caravans reported mirages of towering gates and shadowed figures pacing the ruins. By night, the wind carried whispers in a dead tongue.
Garrel hunched over a crumbling atlas in the rebels' makeshift camp, his milky eyes tracing faded ink. "Lorathis wasn't just a city. It was an anchor," he rasped, tapping a glyph of a serpent swallowing its tail. "The Ascendancy's founders bound the Devourer here, using its own hunger to fuel their conquests. But the bindings are fraying."
Lira perched on a supply crate, her moth wings twitching. "So it's waking up? Like… alive?"
"Not alive. Hungry," Kaela muttered, sharpening her sword. "And we're walking straight into its jaws."
Ren leaned against a rock, his arms crossed. The Vorath mark pulsed beneath his tunic, a dull ache that had become as constant as his heartbeat. "Then why march into its jaws?"
Garrel looked up, his milky eyes unfocused. "Because the answers are there. How to sever the Emperor's link to the Devourer. How to kill what can't die."
"Or how to wake it faster," Tarek muttered. The smith sat apart from the group, his injured leg stretched stiff. His daughter's laughter haunted him here, carried on winds that reeked of ash.
The crunch of boots on sand silenced them. Mirak emerged from the dunes, her face veiled, her kohl-rimmed eyes sharp as blades. She dropped a burlap sack at Kaela's feet. A severed head rolled free, its Ascendancy helm clattering against stone.
"Your path is known," Mirak said, her voice like sandpaper. "The Ironjaw Battalion camps at the Wastes' edge. Gorath's men drink Vorath's tainted blood. They'll tear you apart before you taste the city's secrets."
Kaela's sword hovered at Mirak's throat. "And you're here to warn us out of kindness?"
Mirak didn't flinch. "I'm here to offer a trade. The Glass Labyrinth guards Lorathis' heart. I can guide you through it—if you bleed for the price."
Ren stepped forward. "How much blood?"
"Not yours." Mirak pointed to Lira. "Hers. The winged one's tears opened the ritual in the cavern. They'll open the Labyrinth too."
Lira stiffened. "Why me?"
"Because the Labyrinth feeds on fear." Mirak's gaze softened, almost pitying. "And your tears… they're sweet. A taste, nothing more."
Kaela's blade pressed closer. "Try again."
"Wait." Lira stood, her wings trembling. "I'll do it."
Tarek lurched to his feet. "Like hells you will—"
"We don't have a choice!" Lira's voice cracked. "If the Ascendancy reaches Lorathis first, everything we've done—everything we've lost—is for nothing."
Garrel placed a hand on her shoulder. "The Labyrinth is memory given form. It will show you things—things that aren't real. Can you endure that?"
Lira swallowed. "I have to."
As dusk painted the Wastes in hues of blood and bronze, the rebels shouldered their packs and followed Mirak into the dunes. The sand shifted beneath their boots, whispering secrets in a language long dead. Symbols glowed faintly underfoot, their meaning lost yet understood.
Welcome home.
Ren lingered at the rear, his hand pressed to his chest. Vorath's voice slithered through his mind, eager and venomous.
You feel it, don't you? the mark purred. This place is ours. It remembers.
Ren didn't answer. Ahead, the Glass Labyrinth rose from the sands, its walls reflecting not their faces—but twisted parodies: rotting flesh, hollow eyes, mouths stretched in silent screams.
Lira hesitated, her fingers brushing the vial of her tears. Mirak's voice cut through the wind.
"The Labyrinth bends for no one. Walk softly. And don't look back."