They broke from the gate like survivors surfacing from a black sea. Chaghan led with Stormwake at his shoulder, Altan slung across them, armor split and slick with ichor. Behind came Daalo with his mage engineers, faces streaked with soot, hands still trembling from the residue of the blast. A knot of elite Stormguard closed the rear, eyes on every ruined arch and toppled colonnade of Orûn-Mal's central plaza.
The plaza itself was a broken star. Obsidian tiles were heaved and cracked, statues lay face down in the dust, and the old fountain bled only steam. The world felt lighter this side of the gate, yet the air still tasted of metal and ash.
Yezari Val'Kyren stepped from the shadow of a ruined portico with a cadre of Hospitaliers at her back. Whitelight Frostplate caught the gray sun in a pale sheen. Whiteshear rode her hip like a quiet promise. Frost mist breathed at her heels and then thinned as she measured the scene with a single, level glance.
"With me," she said.
She did not look for long at the space where her brother should have walked. The smallest pause flickered in her throat and was gone. One breath before she moved. Then she moved.
They threaded through a web of canvas and warded sigils to the new medicae. The tent was white within, cold as a cellar, lantern light caught in suspended frost. The air had Yezari's fingerprint. Stillness first. Then precision.
"Lay him," she said, and Altan went to the cot. Yezari's palm hovered over his sternum. Frost Qi bloomed in eight petals, each a pale flare that opened and closed with the rhythm of her breath. The Cold Lotus manuals whispered in her hands as if the pages were part of her bones.
"Spiral trauma, internal bruising, rot scorch along the ribs," she said. "Hold him steady."
Frost coalesced into a thin ring that circled Altan's torso. Time inside that ring seemed to lean. Arrows of pain slowed. Breath evened. Blood stopped its hurried leak and remembered its paths. Yezari's eyes narrowed. Beneath her frostwork the wounds closed too quickly and too cleanly, bone setting and flesh knitting as if a deeper engine had already claimed the work.
"He is healing himself," she said, voice low but clear enough for every ear. "Easy now. Give him a moment; he will wake."
A long breath moved through the tent. Shoulders lowered. The clamor of armor softened. For the first time since the blast, relief showed in their faces.
Outside, Daalo stood at the tent flap and stared at the gate.
The stone arch at the plaza's heart had always been the color of old bone. Now a pulse crawled through it like a fever. Red bled into the runes. The gap within the arch shivered, a wound beginning to scar in real time.
"Engines," Daalo said, and the mage engineers left their cups and tools where they fell. They formed a half circle, hands raised, rune bones clicking in their fingers. The air took on a copper ring. The canvas of the medicae crackled.
"Report," Chaghan said without turning from Altan.
"The threshold is spiking," said a young warmage, eyes wide and glass-bright. "Pressure backflow from the blast's wake. It is not stable."
The gate brightened to a deeper red. The plaza's shadows went long and thin, as if stretched by invisible tongs. Yezari's frost lanterns flickered, then steadied under her will.
"Hold the medicae wards," Yezari said. "No stray surges."
They held.
The arch keened. Lines of light crawled along its inner edges and lashed into the air like snapped wires. Daalo swore under his breath in the old tongue and shoved his palms toward the arch.
"Bind the frequency. Take it down a third. No, lower. Anchor to the plaza grid. Move."
The engineers moved. Glyphs flared in counterpoint. For a breath the red dimmed. Then the gate convulsed. The keening pitched higher until teeth ached and eyes watered. A ring of heat rolled across the plaza and rattled the tent poles.
"Down," Chaghan barked, and bodies crouched by instinct.
The light inside the arch collapsed in a single violent breath. Red became a hard, lightless black. The sound cut off so cleanly that for a heartbeat everyone was sure they had gone deaf.
Where the opening had been, there was only stone. Not the old bone of Orûn-Mal. Obsidian. A perfect pane, black as a blind mirror, cool and absolute. The last threads of red swam across it and froze as hairline veins, then faded.
Daalo walked forward until his breath fogged the surface. He raised a hand and stopped an inch away.
"Solid," he said. "Like glass."
"Is it closed," Chaghan said. Not a question. A verdict looking for its name.
"It is sealed," Daalo replied. "Not ours to open. Not now."
Silence fell again, heavier than before, pressed down by the knowledge of what that seal meant. The wind drew through the broken arches and could not find a note to carry.
Then the conversation turned, practical and terrible, as hands and voices tried to name the cost.
Daalo pressed both palms to the black glass and felt nothing answer but cold. He looked up, rune-smudged and raw. "The pulse rebounded," he said. "Aftershock folded into the seam. The threshold braided itself into obsidian, a hard skin. It is not a normal seal. The weave inverted and locked."
Chaghan stayed by Altan's cot, voice low and steady as flint. "Nyzekh and Bruga took the line," he said without preamble. "When Malthuurn surged, Altan struck the heart-node. He fell under the blow. We carried him toward the gate."
He let the sentence rest, letting the tent draw it in.
"They held. Bruga and Nyzekh and the hundred, they formed the last wall. Said they would not follow. Said they would buy us time. They drove the reinforcements back so Altan could be carried through."
A warmage tried a hesitant probe and the air pushed like a palm. "The field rejected the thread. Aftershock backflow reversed the flow. Whatever stood in the seam when the flux collapsed was drawn inward as the arch reknit."
Yezari's voice was quiet but cut clean through the tent. "I felt their echoes when the mirror blinked. Nyzekh's void-scent answered once, Bruga's molten qi answered once, then nothing. The ward-resonance snapped shut like a throat."
Daalo's jaw tightened. "Obsidian over braid. You cannot brute it. You must untwine the anchor on both sides or the pane will hold. We have no foothold there now."
Chaghan's hand went white on the haft of his falcata. "So they are inside. We carried Altan. They stayed so the rest could come through. They did their duty."
The young warmage swallowed. "We cannot tell if they stand or lie. The mirror eats sound. The keening is not life. It is the after-echo."
Yezari laid a cool finger on Altan's pulse and did not look away from the black surface. "Then we watch the mirror. We bind our side until we can open a braiding. We gather threads and patience. Pray we can pull them back."
A hush settled, heavy as the glass. Outside the obsidian pane, the Red Realm kept its secrets. The question no one wanted to name hung between them: what waits on the other side, and will those who stayed answer when the mirror loosens?
Night would come, or something like night. The wards would harden. Watchfires would ladder the broken streets. Orders would be written, and names would be counted, and silence would say what speech could not.
For now, the Red Realm was a black mirror, and all their questions looked back from the other side.
Aftermath and Orders
Chaghan moved like a man with an account to settle. He set down his falcata and began naming duties aloud, voice carrying clean and ironbound through the plaza.
"Stormguard units will sweep the eastern ruins at first light," he said. "Combine patrols with the Therani Moorfire units. Grid the island. No nook left unchecked. Remnant Nerathil will not regrow to strength if we bleed them out now."
He turned to Daalo. "I want Orûn-Mal repaired where it stands. Make it a base. The arch must be guarded as if the world hinged on that watch alone. Patch broken wards. Rebuild watchfires. Set engineers to the gate at once."
Daalo's reply was a short nod. "We will clear the rubble, shore the wards, and coil new braids where we can. Forge sentries and sigil-walls. The gate will be a vault and a spear."
Chaghan continued, hands carving the map of action in the air. "Combined patrols of Stormguard and Therani Moorfire will comb Orûn-Mal. Forward scouts, tethered warmage probes, and nightly watch rotations. The Flame Maidens will hold the high passes. Hospitaliers augment the medicae. We count the dead and tend the living. We bury the rest."
Orders fell into place, terse as folding blades. Men and women moved to carry them out. Engineers unfurled canvas and set rune-frames. Foragers scoured for fuel. The Hospitaliers set up triage and shored the tent walls with frost-laced wards. Watchfires were raised in crooked rows across the shattered plaza, a stair of small suns.
By dawn the pattern of occupation would be drawn: two legions dedicated to island sweeps, garrisoning the restored colonnades and patrolling the serrated ridges; Moorfire columns moving as wildfire to flush deeper warrens; Flame Maidens staging from vantage points to strike anything that dared to mass.
Toll of Orûn-Mal
The tally was blunt, as a ledger should be. Names would take longer. For now the numbers were the truth they could not look away from:
Stormguard, two legions mobilized. 3,500 dead.
Therani Moorfire, two legions committed to the island. 5,000 dead.
Flame Maidens, 140 women warriors in the field. 75 dead.
The air tasted of losses counted and of courage paid. Those figures slid along the plaza like a cold tide and then pooled at their feet.
Chaghan watched the men and women move to their tasks. He met Yezari's steady, frost-rimmed gaze for a single instant. No words were necessary. The price had been paid. The island was theirs at terrible cost.
As they set about rebuilding watch and ward, the obsidian mirror in the arch remained a black, unreadable eye. The wards hummed; the watchfires burned; the engineers hammered and braided; the Hospitaliers mended. But the question of the hundred who had stayed hung like a shadow in every work.
Outside the temporary camp, Orûn-Mal simmered in the afterglow of the blast. Smoke curled from broken roofs. Sigils glowed dim as buried coals. The Red Realm waited on the other side of the glass.
For now, the Stormguard held what they could. They had rebuilt a bastion out of ruin. They had bought a moment. They had given bodies for a chance.
And the mirror watched from the plaza's heart, black and absolute.