# Chapter 588: A Desperate Message
The Triumvirate Council Chamber felt less like a seat of power and more like a tomb. Sunlight, thick with the ever-present grey ash, struggled through the high, arched windows, casting long, skeletal shadows across the polished obsidian floor. Nyra Sableki paced, the soft whisper of her boots the only sound in the cavernous space. The air was cool, smelling of old stone and the faint, metallic tang of the city's forges. Each circuit she made around the central table brought her gaze back to the empty chair where Captain Bren should have been reporting. He was overdue. Three days overdue. The knot of anxiety in her stomach, a feeling she had tried to bury beneath a mountain of policy drafts and political maneuvering, had tightened into a cold, hard stone.
She had made her decision. The echoes of Soren were a liability, a destabilizing miracle she could not afford. It was the pragmatic, the necessary, the only choice for a leader trying to forge a nation from the ruins of the old world. She had told herself this repeatedly, a mantra against the ghost of a smile she could still sometimes see in her mind's eye. But pragmatism did little to soothe the frayed edges of her nerves when her best commander and the last of her veteran soldiers were silent in the blighted lands. She stopped her pacing, resting her hands on the cool, smooth surface of the council table. The map etched into its surface felt like a mockery now, with its neat lines and carved representations of cities that were little more than symbols on a list of potential targets. She traced the route to Old Sable with a fingertip, a desperate, useless gesture. Where are you, Bren?
The heavy oak doors of the chamber, usually opened with stately ceremony by guards, flew inward with a splintering crash. Nyra's head snapped up, her hand instinctively going to the dagger she no longer wore. A figure stumbled through the doorway, collapsing to its knees on the threshold. It was a runner, a young man from the Crownlands' messenger corps, his face a mask of pale, sheer terror. His fine uniform was shredded and caked with grey dust and dried blood that was not his own. He gasped for air, his lungs rattling like a broken bellows, a sound swallowed by the vast, oppressive silence of the chamber.
"Chancellor…" he wheezed, his voice a thin, reedy thing. He tried to stand, to salute, but his legs gave out and he fell forward, catching himself with his hands. A dispatch case, made of hardened leather, fell from his shoulder and skittered across the floor, stopping at Nyra's feet. It was stained dark, almost black, with what looked like a handprint of blood.
Nyra was beside him in three strides, her political detachment evaporating in the face of raw, human panic. She knelt, her hand hovering over his shoulder, afraid to touch him. "Easy. Breathe. What happened? Where is Captain Bren?"
The runner shook his head, a frantic, jerky motion. He couldn't speak. He simply pointed a trembling finger at the case, his eyes wide and fixed on her with an unnerving intensity. "The… the captain…" he managed to choke out before a fit of coughing seized him, his body wracked with violent spasms. "He made me run. Told me not to stop. Told me…" He looked at his own hands, as if seeing them for the first time. "He told me the world was ending."
Nyra's blood ran cold. She left the runner to the guards who came rushing in, her focus narrowing to the single, blood-stained object on the floor. She picked it up. The leather was stiff and cracked, the clasp bent. The metallic scent of blood was sharp and immediate, mingling with the acrid smell of the wastes that clung to it. Her fingers, usually so steady, fumbled with the damaged clasp. It popped open with a dull snap. Inside, nestled in a bed of oilcloth, was a single, tightly rolled sheet of parchment. It was not the formal, multi-page report she had expected. It was a fragment, the bottom edge torn and ragged, as if ripped from a larger document in a desperate hurry. The script was Bren's, but it was not the neat, precise military hand she knew. It was a scrawl, frantic and jagged, the letters slanting sharply across the page, written with a hand that was shaking with pain or terror.
She unrolled it. The ink was smeared in places, blotted by what she prayed was water but knew was not.
*…not a horde. It is an army. They fought with discipline I have only seen in the Synod's Templar guard. Flanking maneuvers, pincer formations, using the ruins for cover with tactical genius. They anticipated every command. My force is… gone. Decimated. This is not corruption. It is evolution. The Withering King is not just awake; he is thinking. And he has a commander.*
Nyra's breath hitched. She read the words again, her mind refusing to process them. An army? Tactical genius? This went against every report, every piece of intelligence they had gathered for months. The Bloomblights were a plague, a force of nature, mindlessly spreading. They were a consequence, not a strategy. Her eyes darted to the final lines of the report, written in a heavier, more desperate hand.
*It appeared after the main engagement. A perfect echo. Not a twisted husk, but graceful, cold. It wears Soren's face. It is him, and yet it is not. Its eyes are… empty. It is a general. The Withering King has forged a weapon from Soren's image. It is leading them. It looked at me, and I knew…*
The sentence ended there, a trailing off of ink and thought. But below it, pressed into the parchment with such force it had almost torn through the fiber, were four final words. They were not part of the report. They were a message. A plea. Written in what looked like the last of the captain's strength.
*It knows. It's hunting him.*
The parchment slipped from Nyra's numb fingers, fluttering silently to the obsidian floor. The words echoed in the sudden, roaring silence of her mind. *It knows. It's hunting him.* The cold dread that had been a stone in her gut now bloomed into an arctic frost, creeping through her veins, freezing her in place. Her pragmatic policy, her hardline decision to contain the echoes, her political maneuvering—it all crumbled into dust. It was a house of cards built on a foundation of catastrophic ignorance.
The Bloomblights were not random. They were not just spreading. They were searching. The echoes, those flickering miracles of hope she had deemed a political threat, were not random phenomena. They were signposts. Beacons. And the Blight was following them, one by one, closing in on the source. The Withering King wasn't just trying to destroy the world; he was trying to destroy Soren Vale. And he had just created the perfect tracker, a general wearing Soren's own face, to lead the hunt.
She looked down at the discarded dispatch, the scrawled words seeming to pulse with a terrible, living light. Her entire world, her new nation, her desperate attempt to bring order to the chaos, had been built on the assumption that the enemy was a mindless disaster. But it wasn't. It was a thinking, feeling, personal malevolence. And it was coming for the one man who might be able to stop it. The one man she had tried to politically bury. The one man she had just, in her own way, abandoned. The silence of the council chamber was no longer empty. It was filled with the sound of a hunt beginning, and the chilling realization that she had just helped the hunter by trying to extinguish its prey.