The sharp-featured woman dragged herself through the rubble, her body a symphony of broken parts. Her name was Lyra, and survival had become a mechanical process: pull with the good arm, push with the good leg, ignore the white-hot fire in her ribs. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the psychic scar left by what she'd witnessed. The red mist didn't kill. It erased. It was a violation of reality itself, and the quiet young man at its center was the door through which that violation had entered the world. She was a professional soldier, trained to face death in all its forms, but what she had seen in the library was a new category of horror. It took her a full day, moving under the cover of darkness and through forgotten drainage tunnels, to reach the hidden outpost. The cave entrance was concealed behind a waterfall that stank of sulfur, its waters tainted a poisonous yellow. The guards there, men she had trained with, didn't speak as they hauled her inside. Their silence was more telling than any question.
Deep in the cavern, where the air was cool and carried the scent of damp stone and cold iron, a woman stood over a map carved into a slab of dark slate. Kora. She was built like a drawn blade—lean, sharp, and utterly without ornament. Her iron-grey hair was shorn to a shadow on her scalp. She wore dark, supple leathers that whispered when she moved, not the clanking plate of a frontline soldier, but the uniform of a hunter who lived in the spaces between heartbeats. She didn't look up as Lyra was brought before her, her focus remaining on the topographic lines of the badlands.
"Report," Kora said. The word was flat, a demand for data, not a request for a story.
Lyra's voice was a torn piece of cloth. "The library... the Monarc heir... he's real. He's alive."
Kora's head lifted with a slow, deliberate precision. Her eyes, the pale, chilling blue of a midwinter sky, scanned Lyra's broken form. They cataloged the injuries, but more importantly, they measured the terror vibrating beneath the surface. This wasn't the fear of a lost battle; this was the profound, soul-deep shock of a shattered worldview. "Details. Omit nothing."
"He has the Red Codex," Lyra wheezed, her body trembling uncontrollably. "We had them cornered in an alcove. Six of my best. He didn't even draw his sword. He just... stood there. And then he erupted. A silent wave of red energy. It didn't cut them down. It came apart. Varrin, Tess, Jax... they came apart at a molecular level. One moment they were there, the next... just clouds of grey ash settling on the floor." She held up her injured arm, the leather of the vambrace where the mist had kissed it was now brittle, blackened, and crumbled at the edges. "It touched my armor. The steel rotted in a heartbeat. Commander, he is not just a man. He is the curse given flesh. The old stories... they weren't myths. They were warnings."
Kora's expression remained a mask of impassive granite. There was no flicker of surprise, no widening of the eyes. Her mind was a tactical engine, and new data, no matter how shocking, was simply fed into the machine. The heir's existence was confirmed. The Codex was active. The threat profile was now apocalyptic. This was no longer a political assassination. It was a pest control operation on a metaphysical scale.
"Composition of his group?" Kora asked, her gaze dropping back to the slate, her finger tracing a route from the library ruins northward.
"Three. An older fighter. Moves like old royal guard. Efficient, brutal. And a scholar. Cold fish. Just watched the whole thing, didn't even flinch. Took notes." Lyra coughed, a wet, rattling sound deep in her chest. "They were heading north. Into the fissure lands."
"The outcast territories," Kora murmured, almost to herself. A calculated move. The scum of the plains would see a savior, not a threat. They would hide him, protect him. It made the problem messier, but the solution remained the same: total eradication. She finally looked at the two guards holding Lyra upright. "Get her to the surgeon. Then incinerate her armor and everything she was carrying. Scour the metal. I want no trace of that... residue... near my command." Her attention returned to the map. The heir thought the badlands would hide him. He was mistaken. She had been hunting in those broken lands since the fall. She knew every crack and shadow.
Days later and miles to the north, the atmosphere in the dusty gully was thick with unspoken tensions. Ciski's fierce hope was a beacon that seemed to annoy everyone but herself. Roty's sullen suspicion had curdled into open resentment, his every movement a silent protest. Retour moved through it all like a sleepwalker, the weight of the Codex against his hip a constant, grim reminder. He was learning to build walls inside his own mind, to dam up the river of his emotions before it could overflow. Ile observed the group dynamics as if studying a fascinating new ecosystem, while Dean stood apart, a man torn between a sworn oath and the instinct to run from the walking cataclysm he had promised to serve.
They were preparing to break camp, following Ciski's lead toward a place she called the Ravencleft, when Dean suddenly went rigid. He held up a clenched fist, the universal sign for silence and stop. Everyone froze. For a moment, there was only the dry whisper of the wind. Then they heard it too—a low, rhythmic, mechanical thrumming, growing steadily louder. It was a sound that didn't belong in the natural world.
"Down! Now!" Dean barked, his training overriding his fear. He shoved Retour unceremoniously behind a large, weathered boulder.
They scrambled for cover just as the source of the noise crested the ridge above them. It was a walker, a nightmarish construct of rusted iron, pistons, and grinding gears, moving on six multi-jointed legs that stabbed into the earth with hydraulic force. On its back was a mounted scorpion-like ballista, loaded with a massive bolt whose tip was a glass orb filled with a swirling, malevolent green liquid. A single soldier sat in a saddle, hands on the control levers. And standing beside the machine, her arms crossed over her chest as if she were inspecting a mildly interesting rock formation, was Kora.
Her winter-pale eyes swept the gully below. She didn't need to search; her intelligence was flawless. She had them.
"The scholar mentioned you had a talent for finding trouble, Dean," Kora called down, her voice carrying with cool, unnerving clarity. It held no mockery, no anger. It was a simple, factual recitation. "A pity your loyalty is to a ghost. It will be the death of you."
Dean's jaw tightened, a muscle twitching in his cheek, but he remained silent, his body a shield in front of Retour.
Kora's gaze shifted, passing over Ciski and Roty as if they were statistical anomalies, before locking onto Retour. "Prince Retour. The Usurper is a practical man. He offers you a choice. Surrender yourself and the Codex. Your companions will be stripped of assets and exiled, but they will live. Resist," she paused, her finger tapping once, almost delicately, on the shoulder of the iron walker. The soldier adjusted the ballista with a series of clicks, aiming it not at them, but at the narrow, crumbling entrance to the gully. "And I will seal you in this pathetic hole. We will return in a week to dig your corpses out of the rubble. The choice is yours."
The threat was icily pragmatic. She wasn't offering a battle; she was offering a burial. Retour felt the familiar, treacherous heat awaken in his veins, the mist stirring in its cage. But the gully walls were close, the space confined. Unleashing the mist here would be a suicide pact—he would consume his allies, the very people looking to him for salvation. The cost was too high.
Ciski drew her knife, her face set in a defiant snarl. Roty looked from the walker to Kora, his face pale, clearly weighing the merits of surrender. Dean tightened his grip on his cudgel, planting his feet. Ile was peering around the edge of the boulder, his eyes narrowed, analyzing the walker's leg joints and the composition of the green liquid in the bolt.
Kora watched them, a scientist observing insects in a jar. She had perfectly neutralized their greatest asset. The weapon had been checkmated by its own destructive potential.
"The choice is yours, heir," she repeated, her voice flat and final. "But you have until the count of ten to make it. One."