Victory, in the Emberhold, had a specific taste: hot metal, spilled blood, and roaring triumph. What filled Frostveil Spire in the hours after the emperor's murder tasted of cold ash, suspicion, and the metallic tang of drawn steel held in check.
The celebration died in its cradle. The Talons, who moments before had been ready to lift Koronos onto their shoulders, now watched him and his companions with coiled hostility. The news spread through the conquered fortress like a plague: the Emperor was dead, slain by the Blue's witch. The Sky-Fire Nexus Key was gone.
By nightfall, the empire had begun to tear itself apart. Messengers on ash-blackened horses galloped in and out. Distant horns, not of battle but of muster, echoed across the mountains. In the great hall, Red commanders who hours before had shared a common foe now stood in sharp, separate clusters: factions declaring for rival heirs, for themselves, for a purge of the "foreign poison." Koronos's group stood in the eye of this brewing hurricane, stranded. They were the conquerors of Frostveil, and now the prime suspects in the regicide that had rendered the conquest meaningless.
They withdrew to a high, defensible tower chamber, barring the door. The sounds of the fragmenting army below were a constant, low rumble of threat.
Daggeroth stood at the narrow window, not looking at the milling soldiers, but at the vast, star-strewn sky. His voice, when he finally spoke, was hollow, scraped raw by the thin, cold air.
"The old woman in the sea-city," he said, not turning. "The net-mender. She said I carried a deep cold. A cold not of her sea." He finally looked at Koronos, his young eyes aged by a terrible understanding. "We all carry it now. We were never passengers. We were the dagger. The White Queen… she sharpened us. In Bergia, in the deep ocean. She honed the edge. Then she pointed us here."
The words landed in the silent room with the weight of a tombstone. Koronos stood motionless, but his mind was a storm.
The pieces, jagged and lethal, clicked together.
Neri's private audience. Her terror at the vision of Supremus unchained. Her desperate hope when he returned with the Tear. Her gratitude that was too profound, too freighted with despair. "The only clear step I see."
She hadn't just needed the Tear saved. She had needed a weapon, an Everliving weapon ignorant of her plans but capable of surviving them, placed at Ignatius's side. She had needed the obstacle to her cosmic gambit removed. Ignatius, proud and defiant, would never give up the Nexus Key for a scheme that required his own sacrifice. So, he had to die. And who better to kill him than the perfect, disposable tool already in his court? Zeyzey, the cold pragmatist, likely offered a queenship for the act.
The Abyssal Pact, the Sun-Ring, the siege… none of it had been about earning passage. It had been about positioning the blade for the single, terrible cut Neri had foreseen.
"We were the dagger," Koronos repeated, the truth bitter on his tongue.
Ignatius's final warning echoed in his memory. "Without the stabilizer… it's a knife-cut into reality." Koronos reaches out with his Everliving senses, probing. He felt the immense, solar power slumbering within the Shores of Fire, but also the jagged, unfinished edges of its purpose. The calibrator Zeyzey had stolen wasn't just a part; it was the governor, the focus. Without it, activating the Nexus would be like lighting a fuse on a powder keg riddled with cracks. The odds of it tearing a stable portal to Terra Primius were vanishingly small. The odds of it ripping open a gate to the Void, the Nightlands, or simply vaporizing them in a burst of chaotic energy were overwhelming.
It wasn't a way home. It was a suicide run.
He thought of Neri's words in her sanctum, the ones that had seemed like regret at the time. "The only safe vector… the only place with power enough to stabilize such a rift…"
His eyes lifted, not to the door, not to his companions, but upwards, as if he could see through the stone of the tower. He reached out with his senses, beyond the heat and rage of the Red Malataks, beyond the cold of the mountain, into the fabric of the world itself. And there, as it had been every day of his life but unnoticed, he felt it: a faint, distant, inexorable pull. A glimmer of immense, alien power, ancient and terrible, hanging in the cosmic deep like a fixed, hungry star. The Spires.
He hadn't known its name. He had thought it just the strange tug of this world. Now he understood. It was a beacon. A lighthouse in a sea of darkness. A place of pure, raw majik.
"Neri spoke of a safe vector," he said aloud, his voice low. "The only portal left is to the Spires. That is not a coincidence." He looked at the Sword of the First in his hand. "To control an unstable door… you need an anchor. A source of power greater than the instability itself."
Corvannafax had been silent, a statue of crimson and crystal by the hearth. She watched the Red banners through the window, listening to the sounds of her people shattering their own empire. She said nothing. Her silence was her answer. There was nothing for her here.
Daggeroth checked the string of his bow, methodically cleaned his knives, and sheathed them. He was waiting. The cold in him had a purpose now: survive the next thing. Then the next, then what? Home? There is nothing back there for him, all his family is gone.
Koronos looked from Corvannafax's rigid back to Daggeroth's resigned readiness, to Shelove's watchful golden eyes. Warriors stained by betrayal, strangers in every land, farther from home than any of them had ever been.
He sheathed the Sword of the First. The sound of the blade seating home was final. It was the sound of a path chosen.
"We have our way home," he said, his voice carrying the grim certainty of a verdict. "It leads through the prison of the Everliving who wants us all dead, to use the power of his cage to open the door." He met each of their gazes in turn. "We go to the source of all this. We go to the Spires."
They slipped into the Red's most holy site at the Shores of Fire, where this journey had begun, even as the first clashes of the Emberhold civil war ignited in Frostveil's lower bailey: the Scarlet Talon turning on a rival faction in a storm of fire and shouts. No one tried to stop the small group of outsiders as they slipped though the gate and onto the inner sanctuary. They were ghosts already, irrelevant to the blood-feud consuming the empire they had won.
Koronos led them up the stairs, the few holy men there glanced up from their praying, but said nothing.
The device wasn't difficult to find: giant glowing red crystals over the center of the main sanctuary. He holds the Sword of the First over head and begins to channel its power until it activates the ancient device, the holy men cower and prostrate themselves. Before them, the world fell away into endless night and stars.
The path to Terra Primius was now a path into the jaws of the beast.