The gates opened slow — not with creak or call, but with the weight of disbelief.
Valtor did not speak as he passed through them.
He carried the body like a broken banner — one arm slung over his shoulder, the rest of it trailing like cloth soaked in shadow. The thing barely resembled a demon anymore. Limbs wrong. Flesh half-melted. Its form shifted still, twitching as if struggling to choose a shape. But its eyes were shut. And whatever strength it had wielded in the wilds, it had bled it all.
The village saw him.
They stopped what they were doing — smiths with half-lifted hammers, weavers with needles poised mid-air, children frozen mid-run. One by one, their gazes followed him like smoke drawn toward fire.
Angela stepped back instinctively. Her breath caught.
"What is that?" she whispered. Not to anyone. Just to the silence that had replaced the morning.
No one answered.
The blackstone courtyard, still slick from the early wash of sun, mirrored the weight of each step Valtor took. Not loud. Just final.
The villagers recoiled, pulling children behind carts, stepping back beneath awnings and doorframes. Even the foxling, perched half-hidden near the granary roof, narrowed her golden eyes in wary silence.
The demon still lived.
Its chest rose in shallow, stuttering pulls of air, a sound like paper tearing underwater. Limbs hung uselessly from sockets torn by the draconian's fury, and yet — in its stillness, something watched. Waited.
Valtor's gait did not falter. His claws gouged deep ruts into the stone as he hauled the body toward the heart of the village.
Toward the longhouse.
Lilith stood waiting by the threshold, arms folded, cloak heavy with the last coils of mist. Her crimson eyes flicked over the broken thing Valtor dragged, unreadable.
Behind her, Lysanthir rose from his place near the hearth. He had not witnessed the battle. Had not seen what Valtor had seen — the way the demon twisted, the way it bled wrongness into the very mist.
But he saw the aftermath now. And his silence deepened the air.
Valtor stopped a few paces from the longhouse, releasing the demon's body with a dull, wet thud. Dust curled up in lazy spirals where it fell.
Lilith's lips curled into something not quite a smile.
"It bleeds."
Angela hovered near the doorway, wide-eyed but silent. The foxling slinked closer along the beams, her ears sharp, her gaze sharper still.
Lysanthir stepped forward at last, robes whispering against the stone.
His voice was calm. Icy.
"Take it inside."
He looked down at the creature, contempt flashing briefly in his gaze.
"This one… is still useful."
He stepped into the blackstone hall, the light behind him dying in the doorway.
Lysanthir was already seated.
Lilith's gaze narrowed as she circled the creature, lips drawn, fingers twitching just once at her side — a signal. The shadows near the edge of the room recoiled.
"It's breathing," she said softly. "Barely. But enough."
Valtor let the body drop with a thud — not violent, just deliberate. The floor did not shudder, but something else did: the quiet inside the hall.
"You weren't with us," Valtor said then, turning toward Lysanthir. Not accusing. Just asking.
"I knew you would return," the elf replied. "What mattered was what you would return with."
The fire cracked.
Lilith crouched beside the demon, her fingers drifting a hair's width above its warped chest.
"Let me question it," she said.
Lysanthir met her eyes.
"No flames," he said. "Not yet."
She smiled faintly. "I don't need fire to make a soul remember what it fears."
The villagers outside still hadn't moved.
Angela, still frozen at the door, whispered, "What is it?"
Valtor didn't look back.
He only said: "The first crack."
The longhouse had been cleared.
No villagers. No murmuring fire. Only cold walls and a ring of silence. One oil lamp burned atop a low stand, casting more shadow than light. The hearth had been doused.
Lilith stood at the edge of the ink-circle, arms folded, crimson eyes glinting in the gloom.
At its center, the demon crouched.
Not bound by rope — those would have failed. Instead, a circle had been etched into the stone floor. Runes of warding and confinement, drawn in ash and old blood, hummed with faint power. The thing inside shifted often, shape never quite holding: at times skeletal, at times flesh made of smoke.
It breathed. But not like a man.
Valtor stood to the side, arms crossed. He said nothing.
And at the far end, Lysanthir sat upon the stone seat they refused to call a throne. One hand resting beneath his chin. Watching.
Lilith's voice was soft when it came. Too soft. Like silk wrapping a blade.
"You've crawled through wards older than this village. Slipped past spells meant for gods. Yet you were caught here — by instinct, by scent."
The demon grinned, eyes like hollow coals.
"Perhaps I wanted to be seen."
Lilith didn't blink. "No. You wanted to be believed. That is different."
She stepped forward — just to the circle's edge — and lifted a hand. Shadows curled along her fingertips, drawn from the seams between light.
"Let's speak of memory. Yours, this time."
The air changed.
From her palm, smoke unfurled — not thick, not choking, but laced with shape. A face. A voice. A battlefield burned into bone. The demon flinched.
"Stop."
Lilith tilted her head.
"Why? You don't scream. But you remember."
Another flick of her hand.
The smoke showed a city. Not Valaris. Another. Older. Falling.
The demon's form blurred. The runes pulsed, holding.
"Enough," it rasped. "You don't want truth. You want confession."
Lysanthir's voice came then. Calm. Cold.
"Confession is only valuable when it's given freely."
Lilith looked back.
He met her eyes and said, "Let it sit in silence awhile."
She hesitated — then let the smoke dissipate.
The room stilled. Only the lamp crackled.
And then the demon spoke again.
"She sent me to test the myth. To see if you were real. Not to kill. To... measure."
"Morveth," Lilith said.
He nodded once.
"But I am not hers. Not truly."
Lilith frowned. "Then whose are you?"
The demon looked past her.
And for the first time since it was dragged from the trees, its voice changed. Lower. Raw.
"The one who fought like ruin given form. He knew I was there. He didn't hesitate."
Valtor's gaze didn't shift. He only stepped forward once.
"You're broken."
The demon bared its teeth. Not in anger. In recognition.
"Not yet."
And then it looked down — at the floor, the ashes, the runes that still held.
But not forever.
The silence returned.
But now it carried weight.
A fracture had formed.
Later, when the torches had burned low and even the whispers had retreated to corners, Lysanthir remained alone with the demon.
The others had left — Lilith to her shadows, Valtor to the outer walls where his presence was needed more than his patience. The foxling had vanished high into the beams again, silent as a thought not yet spoken. And Angela, quiet and pale, had returned home through the winding path near the grain stores — her hands clenched at her sides, mind still spinning. Her mother had been ill again, coughing into cloth she'd sworn not to show. Angela hadn't told anyone. Not yet. But tonight, after what she'd seen — the demon, the stillness in the longhouse, the look in Lysanthir's eyes — she had felt something old and cold settle deep in her chest. A knowing. That nothing would stay untouched.
But The hollow star stayed.
He did not speak. He only watched.
The runes flickered faintly around the demon's limbs, pale gold carved into ash-soaked stone. It had not tried to move again.
It didn't need to.
Lysanthir studied the shape before him — this fracture of something once terrible, now twisted thin and hanging just above the line of defeat.
"Do you know her true name?" he asked at last. "The one who sent you."
The demon stirred. Slowly. Deliberately.
"You and i know what she calls herself. But names like hers are masks. Paper on bone."
"And what does the bone remember?"
The demon's eyes, faintly burning, met his.
"Pain."
The silence stretched. Lysanthir did not flinch. He had heard worse. Been worse.
"She sent you to fracture us," the elf said. "But it is she who will break."
The demon tilted its head.
"You speak like a god. But still wear silence like armor."
"And you wear failure like perfume," Lysanthir replied, not coldly — just true.
Then, without rising, he traced a single rune in the air — not to bind, not to burn, but to open.
Just a whisper.
A window.
And in that breath of magic, the demon gasped — not in agony, but in memory.
Fire. A hall of embers. The scent of blood and copper ink. A woman in black. The shape of a raven watching from stone. Words carved into scrolls no one read anymore.
And at the center — a seal.
A broken circle, ringed in thorns.
The Sigil of Fracture.
Lysanthir saw it too.
And when the vision faded, the elf rose.
"Lilith was right," he said softly. "You're not loyal. Not yet."
He turned.
"But something in you has already begun to rot."
He left the chamber without sound.
Behind him, the demon exhaled, slow and sharp — and smiled.
Not with joy.
But with understanding.
Far away, in the depths of the War Spire, Lady Morveth stirred from her mapwork, a tremor passing across her ink-stained fingers.
She turned to the Prexie of Ash, who had returned to sit beside the embers once more.
"It's begun," Morveth said.
The Prexie did not open her eyes.
"No. It's unraveling."
And somewhere beneath them both — in stone and spell, in whispered names and blood that remembered too much — something ancient began to stir.