Seven days had passed since Lira's warning, and Nepthuren had become something unrecognizable.
A wall of black stone and fused bone now ringed the nation, forty feet high, its surface etched with runes that drank the moonlight and bled it back as violet fire. Equivalent Exchange had worked without rest: every arrowhead was a tooth pulled from a dead animals and stone shards , every shaft a splinter of the World Tree that once shaded the the elf village. Ten thousand such arrows waited in quivers that had never known peace.
We were at war with the North, the South, and the West.
We had committed no crime except continuing to breathe.
Daniel and Neo had ridden out at dawn the day after the warning, tasked with dragging Mattethis Forn and Meredith Vale back alive if possible, dead if necessary. They returned at dusk on the seventh day with only Forn slung across a saddle—half-conscious, lips split, eyes wild with Chain withdrawal. Meredith was gone. Lira's prophecy held: the girl in the white coat was a prisoner now, somewhere beyond the ash horizon.
While the riders were away, Kai sat in the war-tent with Lira and Xalith around a low fire. They spoke of lighter things—how Xalith once tried to court Lira by offering her a crown of frozen stars, how Lira answered by stabbing him through the hand and calling it "a promising start." Their laughter was thin, but it was laughter all the same. A reminder that some bonds had survived even the cannibal taboo, the eaten eye, the rift seed buried beneath the Academy's ruins. Kai still felt pulsing in his own chest like a second heart.
One day remained.
That morning we caught two scouts wearing the crimson half-cloaks of the Western Coalition. They had slipped past the outer wards by smearing themselves with the rendered fat of a Hollow Howl pup—an old hunter's trick that fooled scent but not the spiders. Webber's children found them dangling upside-down in silk, cursing in three dialects.
By noon we marched them, hooded and shackled, down the spiral stair into Glow Hollow.
Vael's castle waited at the roots of the glowing mountain, a cathedral of living crystal and vampire bone. The air tasted of frost and old blood. Civilians were already streaming in behind us—thousands of mothers clutching infants, old men carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs, children who had never seen true darkness now walking beneath a ceiling of pale green light. The Hollow Howl pack padded alongside them, silver fur brushing ankles, offering what comfort beasts can give.
We left the refugees in the upper galleries and descended deeper.
The torture chamber was not a dungeon of iron maidens and braziers. It was a round room of mirror-smooth obsidian, lit only by a single vein of glowing quartz in the floor. Two men hung from chains bolted into the ceiling, toes barely scraping stone. They were young. Barely older than I had been when I first stepped into the Dead Zone and learned what hunger really meant.
Vael waited in silence, coat unbuttoned, white hair unbound. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
He walked to the first scout—name tag read "Jorik"—and laid two fingers against the man's forehead. The vampire's eyes bled from red to milk-white.
"Tell me why you are here," Vael said, soft as snowfall.
Jorik's mouth opened against his will. "To map the eastern passes… count heads… find the girl with the white coat."
"And after?"
"Burn what's left."
Vael moved to the second scout, a wiry woman named Serna whose left ear had been bitten off by something with too many teeth.
"Numbers," Vael whispered, touching the nape of her neck.
"Forty-two thousand from the West," she gasped, tears cutting clean lines through the dirt on her face. "Twenty-eight thousand from the South under the Iron Saint. The North… the North is sending the Bone Legions. They march with the dead."
A chill moved through the room that had nothing to do with temperature.
I felt Kai shift beside me. His hand brushed the hilt of the blade he had taken from the dragon's hoard—the same blade that still hummed with Azourath's fragment whenever Chain withdrawal clawed at his veins.
Vael released them. The scouts sagged, sobbing quietly.
"What do we do with them?" I asked.
Vael looked at me for a long moment. "We give them truth, and we give them a choice. Same as was given to me once, long ago, beneath a different mountain."
He drew a thin silver dagger, pressed the flat against each scout's cheek, and spoke a word older than Nepthuren. The chains fell away. Jorik and Serna dropped to their knees, suddenly free, suddenly unarmed, suddenly staring at the vampire lord who could have torn their souls out through their eyes.
"Go back," Vael said. "Tell your commanders what you saw. Tell them Nepthuren is ready. Tell them the Hollow Howl remembers the taste of armies. And tell them if they come for our children, we will salt the earth with their marrow for a thousand years."
The scouts crawled up the stairs on hands and knees, weeping.
Night fell like a blade.
Above ground, final preparations moved with the precision of a dying heart.
Kilo—eyes still ringed black from Chain dreams—worked beside the Huntress stringing tripwires of spider silk and dwarf-forged monofilament between the murder holes. Each wire was tied to a rack of crossbows Webber had grown from his own living bone. One twitch, and fifty bolts would sing at once.
Webber himself crouched atop the main gate, eight legs working in eerie unison, vomiting sheets of silk thick as ship sails across the archway. The web shimmered, already hardening into something stronger than steel. When the first siege tower touched it, the entire structure would be yanked forward and crushed like a child's toy.
The Hollow Howl alpha—Ghost, the one who had once carried a dying Kai across the Lawless wastes—stood on the parapet and loosed a single, mournful note that rolled down the valley. Every wolf in Nepthuren answered. The sound was not a battle cry. It was a promise.
Inside the deepest vault, Lira knelt before the rift seed. The black shard—Azourath's fragment—pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She pressed her palm to it and whispered the old words her mother had died speaking. Violet fire crawled up her arms, but she did not flinch.
Daniel found me on the wall just before midnight. His cloak was torn, Forn's blood still crusted under his nails.
"Meredith's alive," he said without greeting. "I felt her. She's south of the Ashen Reach. Chained inside a cage of living iron. They're using her blood to wake something older than the gods."
I closed my eyes and saw again the vision Lira had shown us the week before: a sky split open, wings of bone and shadow, a voice that called my true name—the name I had buried with my first death.
"How long?" I asked.
"Three days after the armies clash, if we lose the field."
I looked out over the dark. Somewhere beyond the ridge, cookfires flickered like angry stars.
Daniel rested his forearms on the battlement beside me. "You remember the Academy roof? When we thought the worst thing in the world was failing a test?"
I laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "We were children."
"We still are," he said. "Just children with sharper teeth."
Far below, the last civilian crossed the threshold into Glow Hollow. The great crystal gates boomed shut. Vael's voice rang out across the nation, carried by blood magic so every soul could hear:
"Tomorrow we do not fight for land.
We do not fight for kings.
We fight so that when our children wake up the day after,
there is still a sky above them worth looking at."
Silence answered. Then a single howl rose—Ghost again—joined by every wolf, every vampire, every hunter, every broken soul who had ever found refuge here.
The sound shook the stars.
I drew the dragon blade. The Azourath fragment in my chest answered with a stab of hunger so fierce I staggered. Kai caught my shoulder, eyes glowing faint violet.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we pay every debt we owe the dark."
I looked at my family on the wall—Daniel, Kai, Kilo, the Huntress, Neo cleaning blood from his claws, Webber descending on a thread of silk like a pale moon.
I looked at the army gathering beyond the ridge, three horizons of torches marching to kill us for the crime of existing.
And I smiled with teeth that were no longer entirely human.
Let them come.
We were ready.
The wall would hold.
The arrows would drink.
The Hollow would howl until the mountains cracked.
And when the sun rose on the eighth day,
Nepthuren would still be standing—
or the world would learn what it means to drown in its own blood.