They should have seen it coming.
The mountain pass narrowed into a choke—rock walls clawing the sky, wind that smelled of iron and storm. It was the kind of place Levi had chosen on purpose: tight enough that her wings couldn't sweep the sky into a storm, narrow enough to make a charge manageable for tired feet. She thought she could outthink an army; she had misjudged patience.
Jane moved first, eyes flicking across the stones, the metal fingers of her prosthetic clinking softly as she steadied her pack. Behind her, Levi walked with the quiet confidence of someone who had once worn crowns and commanded legions. The others spread out: Ryn at the rear, Mira checking their tools, Harrow watching the heights. No one spoke; no one wanted to break the fragile thread of calm.
A raven cawed high above. Jane glanced up. For a heartbeat she simply saw a bird against the bruised sky—then the world tilted.
From the cliffs, shapes dropped like spilled ink. Stolas came first: a black blur, feathers dissolving into the lanky form of a shifter, landing with a caw that turned human teeth into a blade-slit grin. Phenex followed, a low, bestial snarl as he shifted between wolf and man. From the shadows along the rim, Forneus's silver hair flashed as her fingers wove dark runes in the air. Pazusax slipped like oil, her smile a thin cut.
"Surrounded," Ryn snapped, drawing his blade.
Levi's wings rose in one fluid motion, black as a thunderhead. Her hair lifted, a halo of red-light edges as power thrummed under her skin. "Stay behind me," she told Jane, voice low and unyielding.
The attack came in a storm of intent. Phenex lunged, claws and teeth aimed to tear the small group apart quickly. Harrow met him, steel ringing on fang; the shifter's teeth flashed, then withdrew as Harrow's blade found a shoulder. Sparks of blue blood smeared stone.
Stolas moved like shadow, darting between blows, dropping feathered snares that uncoiled into writhing cords of darkness. One caught Levi's wing-tip for a heartbeat—enough to throw her off-balance. Forneus's voice rose in a chant; silver sigils bloomed in the air and sank into the earth. The ground trembled with stolen magic.
Jane ran, heart hammering. She braced with her prosthetic arm, feeling the strange comfort of gears under skin. She struck at a shifter with a well-aimed kick, metal heel smashing ribs. She smelled smoke and iron and the sweet tang of fear, then saw Harrow stagger and heard Mira scream as a shadow coil wrapped around her ankle.
"Jane!" Levi bellowed, and everything narrowed—the world became the single, terrible calculus of saving her.
Levi moved like a war-song given flesh. Her wings beat once, a gust that nearly ripped the rocks free. Black fire licked from her palms; it ate cloth and shadow, but Forneus's sigils bent and absorbed some of the flame like drinking from a poisoned cup. The demon queen struck out with claws that could have split armor, and for a moment it seemed the attackers would fall apart under her fury.
Shax's voice cut through that moment—calm, cold, satisfied. He did not need to be in the pass to command the theater; he wanted them to see his hand in it. A glitter of violet lightning traced the stone above; where it struck, a chain of runes erupted and coiled downward into the earth. Forneus's ritual threaded with dragon-energy, a web keyed specifically to demonic essence.
Levi felt it like ice. The power that had fed her wings this night—torn and stolen, doubt and rage—was suddenly constricted. Her hair flashed red to white in a single, violent pulse as ancient bonds tightened around her. She roared. The sound split rock.
Jane's knees buckled as she watched Levi stagger. She moved toward her, arm lashing out, magic humming beneath her skin—healing sparks, a stabilizer, anything to bind the queen's panic. But Stolas was already on her, shadow hands clutching at her shoulders, the world twisting into a quick, suffocating blur. She kicked, metal hand and heel, striking where feathers met flesh; her blow knocked a breath from Stolas but did not free her.
Phenex leapt in and grabbed Jane by the waist, lifting, teeth bared to drag her away. Ryn lunged, voice torn from him in a howl, and the two men crashed together with the thin, sick sound of metal against bone. Jane tasted blood. She had to get free.
"Now!" a voice shouted—Shax's, close enough now to be a blade against her ear. The shadow-net tightened. Forneus's vials cracked, sending sickly fumes into the air. Pazusax's illusions folded like mirrors, splitting sight and memory until the pass spun like a fevered dream.
Levi's wings beat, a desperate, enormous motion that flung attackers back. She reached for Jane—one motion, two—then a spear of light struck at her flank. The runes coiled deeper, and something heavy and cold wrapped around her limbs: a binding, wrought of dragon-metal and witchcraft, humming with punitive magic. Her wings were pinned; when she tried to beat them, sparks arced and lanced her skin. She howled, and the sound broke Jane's heart.
"Take them!" Shax's order cracked like thunder.
Hands—many hands—seized Levi. Chains, forged with purple fire, bit into her wrists and horns. Even bound, she burned; black flame seethed along the links and ate at the sealing runes. It was the queen's scream that made Jane move with a new kind of clarity.
She threw herself at the nearest shifter, metal fingers clawing through fur and flesh. Phenex spun, fangs sinking close—Jane grabbed his jaw with her remaining hand and jerked, metal and will straining. Ryn, bleeding, threw himself into the fray, and Harrow hacked at the cords that held Mira until one snapped and she fell free, coughing.
For a sliver of a moment, hope flared. Levi lashed out—claws tearing, wings whipping, the very air around her boiling with rage. Two of Shax's men fell back, and the chains smoked as if burned by the queen's fury.
Then Shax stepped forward.
He did not rush. He did not need to. He walked like thunder cloaked in velvet, violet lightning tasting the air with every step. He took in the scene—Jane flailing, blood on her lip, Harrow struggling, Levi bloodied but unbowed despite the bindings—and his mouth stretched into that smile of his.
"You are tenacious," he said softly, to no one and yet to everyone. "Admirable. Foolish."
He lifted a hand. The bindings at Levi's wrists flowed like living things toward him, compelled as if by their maker. Levi's eyes met his—gold turned to molten anger—and for a terrible moment it looked as if she might break the chains by force of will alone.
But the combined ritual shored the links. Forneus chanted, Forneus watched, and the dragon's presence steadied the spell like a keel under a ship. Levi's struggles began to slow; pain and exhaustion crept under the fire of her defiance. Shax reached out and pressed one gloved fingertip to the demon queen's brow.
"Yield," he said. "Yield, and watch the witch spared."
The words were a knife. Levi's lips peeled back in a snarl so full of contempt it might have been a laugh. "You cut her once," she spat. "You will not break me with promises."
Shax's smile sharpened. He stepped back and lifted Jane like an offering.
"No," Jane said, voice ragged. She spat blood at his boot. "You won't—" Her knees went out. She did not have the strength to stand against him.
Shax's hand closed on her shoulder with the gentle insistence of a trap. "I will keep her alive," he said softly, and it was the promise that froze Jane more than any blade. "For now. For when Levi comes begging."
Levi thrashed as they hauled Jane away—caught and dragged through the mess of bodies and smoke—her wings beating blindly, slamming into stone. Every beat was a lashing, a curse. The last thing Jane saw before men in dark cloaks carried her head and chest-first into the shadows was Levi, larger than life, lifted by chains and forced to look on as they took the witch who had saved her.
They left scratches of black blood on the stones. They left echoes of screams. The pass closed as if it had never opened.
When the fight dimmed into silence, the mountain wind swept through the stones and took the sound of Levi's fury with it. Shax stood in the midst of the ruin, purple lightning coiling along his wings like a crown.
He watched the retreating forms vanish into the folds of the valley and, with cold deliberation, spoke into the dark as if issuing the last and final verdict.
"Bring them both to me," he said. "Let the queen learn what chains taste like."
Far below, in the black belly of the night, the hunters carried Jane—the witch with steel fingers—into a fate she could not yet imagine. Above them, a bound queen seethed, every fiber of her being a promise of retribution and ruin.
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