The descent back into the Soot-Wards was usually a slow, rattling journey in a cargo lift. Tonight, the King took the express route.
Elian rode a disc of condensed solar fire, surfing the air currents down from the Sky Palace. It was a reckless display of power, but urgency clawed at his throat. Beside him, mounted on a nightmare-steed conjured from shadow, Vane rode the vertical winds, his face grim.
They landed in the Drop Zone—the very square where they had first met.
But the square was no longer a place of mud and scavenging. It was a battlefield.
The fires Elian had ordered to be lit for warmth had been scattered, the tents trampled. A massive crater, fifty feet wide, had opened up in the center of the cobblestones. It didn't look like a natural sinkhole; the edges were perfectly smooth, as if the earth had been scooped out by a giant spoon. And from the depths of that pit, a thick, inky smog was pouring out, heavier than the usual slag-fog.
Screams echoed from the surrounding alleys.
"Light it up," Vane barked, dismounting his shadow-horse as it dissolved into smoke. He drew his obsidian dagger—a pathetic weapon compared to the Void-Steel sword he had lost.
Elian didn't hesitate. He thrust his hand upward, releasing a flare of pure white light. It hovered above the square like a miniature star, banishing the shadows.
The light revealed the monsters.
They were wolf-like, but wrong. Their bodies were comprised of shifting, oily darkness that seemed to boil. They had no fur, only slick, carapace-like skin. And their mouths... their mouths split their heads open from ear to ear, filled with rows of needle-sharp teeth that glowed with a pale, violet hunger.
There were dozens of them. They were cornering a group of Ward-dwellers against the wall of a tenement building.
"Void-Stalkers," Vane cursed. "They aren't just shadows. They are predators from the space between worlds. They hunt magic signatures."
As if hearing him, the pack of creatures turned. They ignored the cowering civilians. Their eyeless heads snapped toward Elian—the brightest light in the city.
"They want me," Elian realized.
"Then give them something to choke on," Vane said.
The pack charged. They moved faster than the eye could follow, blurring into streaks of darkness.
Elian reacted on instinct. He swept his arm across his body. A wave of fire crashed into the lead Stalkers.
They didn't burn like normal flesh. They shrieked—a sound like tearing metal—and evaporated into mist. But the ones behind them leaped through the steam, undeterred.
"Watch your left!" Vane shouted.
A Stalker lunged for Elian's flank. Vane intercepted it, tackling the beast mid-air. He drove his obsidian dagger into its neck. The blade sank in, but the creature didn't die. It thrashed, its claws raking across Vane's armor, leaving deep gouges in the black plate.
"Die!" Vane snarled, pumping shadow magic into the wound to freeze the creature's core. It finally shattered into ice shards.
Vane rolled to his feet, breathing hard. "They are resistant to physical damage! We need Void-Steel to sever their connection to the rift!"
"We don't have Void-Steel!" Elian yelled, blasting another creature that was trying to climb the wall toward a window where a child was crying. "We have fire and bad attitudes!"
"Then use the fire to contain them!" Vane ordered. "Drive them back into the hole!"
Elian nodded. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, centering himself. He wasn't the Scavenger anymore. He was the King. And these things were trespassing in his home.
Elian slammed both hands onto the pavement.
Wall.
A ring of fire erupted from the ground, encircling the Stalkers. It wasn't just heat; it was a physical barrier of plasma. Elian pushed, expanding the ring, forcing the monsters backward toward the crater.
The Stalkers paced nervously at the edge of the fire, snapping their jaws at the flames. They hated the light.
"Vane!" Elian called out, sweat dripping down his brow as he held the containment field. "I can't hold this forever! They're draining me just by being close!"
"I'm going to seal it," Vane shouted. He ran to the edge of the crater, ignoring the monsters that hissed at him. He looked down into the abyss.
It wasn't just a hole. It was a tear in the fabric of the realm. He could see the purple swirls of the Void churning below.
"It's too wide!" Vane yelled back. "My shadows aren't strong enough to bridge a gap this size without an anchor!"
Suddenly, a scream cut through the noise of the battle.
One of the Stalkers had leaped over Elian's fire wall. It landed on the roof of a low shed and pounced on a figure hiding there.
It was Bram.
The boy had been trying to help, throwing rocks at the monsters. Now, the beast had him pinned.
"No!" Elian's focus shattered. The fire wall flickered and died.
Elian sprinted toward the shed. He was too far away. He couldn't shoot without hitting Bram.
The Stalker opened its maw, ready to bite.
A blur of black and silver slammed into the creature.
It wasn't Vane.
It was Lysander.
The former Prince had followed them down, riding a standard palace skiff. He leaped from the moving deck, crashing into the monster with a reckless disregard for his own life. He didn't have a weapon. He had a torch—a mundane, pitch-soaked torch.
He jammed the burning wood directly into the Stalker's mouth.
The creature recoiled, screeching, shaking Lysander off. It swiped a massive claw, catching Lysander across the chest and throwing him into the mud.
But the distraction gave Elian the second he needed.
Elian extended a hand. He didn't blast; he pulled. He used telekinesis to grab the Stalker by its shadowy throat and yanked it backward. He slammed it into the ground with enough force to crack the cobblestones, then incinerated it with a precise beam of heat.
Elian rushed to Bram. "Are you okay?"
"I... I wanted to fight," Bram sobbed, clutching a bag of stones.
"You did good," Elian said, his voice shaking. He looked over at Lysander.
The fallen Prince was trying to sit up. His fine clothes were ruined, and blood was seeping from three deep claw marks on his chest.
"You idiot," Elian hissed, running to Lysander and placing his glowing hands on the wound. "You don't have magic! What were you thinking?"
"I was thinking..." Lysander wheezed, wincing as the skin knit together under Elian's touch, "...that I owed you one."
Vane landed beside them, covered in black ichor. "We can't keep doing this. The rift is widening. More are coming."
Elian looked at the crater. The smog was getting thicker.
"We need a lid," Elian said. He looked at the wreckage of the tenements around them. He looked at the massive iron beams of a collapsed factory tower nearby.
"Vane," Elian said, standing up. "Can you lift that beam?"
Vane looked at the rusted girder. It weighed at least five tons. "With shadow-bind? Yes. But why?"
"Lift it," Elian ordered. "Move it over the hole."
Vane didn't ask questions. He thrust his hands out. tendrils of darkness wrapped around the iron beam, groaning as they lifted it into the air. He swung it over the crater.
"Drop it!" Elian shouted.
Vane released the magic. The beam fell.
As it fell, Elian blasted it.
He hit the iron with a sustained, high-intensity beam of solar fire. He didn't melt it; he heated it until it was white-hot, malleable, and glowing like a miniature sun.
The beam slammed into the mouth of the crater. It didn't seal it completely, but the sheer heat of the iron cauterized the edges of the shadow-rift. The Stalkers trying to climb out screeched as they touched the burning metal and fell back into the void.
The smog stopped pouring out. The remaining Stalkers in the square, cut off from their source, began to dissolve, fading into harmless puddles of oil.
Silence returned to the Wards.
Elian stood panting, his hands smoking. He looked at the glowing iron bar blocking the hell-mouth.
"That won't hold forever," Vane said, walking up to him. "Once the iron cools, they will come back."
"I know," Elian said. He wiped soot from his forehead. "But it buys us time."
He turned to Vane. His eyes were hard. The playful lover from the afternoon was gone; the War King had returned.
"You were right," Elian said. "We can't fight these things with torches and daggers. We need the Eclipse Blade."
Vane looked at the cooling iron. "To forge it, we need raw Void-Steel. And the only place to get that is the Silent Spire."
"We just left there," Elian groaned.
"No," Lysander spoke up. He was leaning against a wall, holding his healed chest. "There is another way. The Royal Treasury."
Elian and Vane turned to him.
"My mother..." Lysander swallowed hard. "She kept trophies. From the mages she killed. There is a vault in the sub-basement. I saw it once. She has a stockpile of Void-Steel ingots. She was hoarding them."
Elian looked at Vane. Vane looked at Elian.
"A heist," Vane said, a slow smile spreading across his face. "In our own palace."
"It's sealed with blood magic," Lysander warned. "Her blood. Or mine."
Elian walked over and offered Lysander a hand to stand up.
"Well then, cousin," Elian said. "It looks like you're finally going to be useful."