The ink on Lady Vivienne’s reports hadn't even dried in the capital before the Dragon Vanguard moved. Kaelen had no intention of waiting for his brothers to decide how to frame his execution.
Instead of marching on the border outposts or attacking the neighboring baronies, he turned his army completely upside down. Literally.
Deep within the Jagged Pass lay a tectonic anomaly known to the ash-nomics as **The Maw of Valia**—a miles-wide, bottomless fissure that plunged straight into the world's crust. For centuries, the surface kingdoms ignored it, leaving it to the rumors of ancient, forbidden magic and forgotten ecosystems. But Kaelen didn't want the land everyone else was fighting over. He wanted the power no one else dared to touch.
"The air changes down here," Sylvia murmured, her voice barely a whisper as she walked half a step behind Kaelen.
The Vanguard—now numbering over five hundred heavy vanguard infantry and beast-tamers—marched down a colossal, winding spiral path carved into the sheer obsidian walls of the abyss. The light from the surface had vanished hours ago, replaced by a thick, oppressive violet luminescent fog that drifted up from the depths.
It was freezing, yet the air tasted faintly of brimstone and wet copper.
"My shadows are acting strange, Captain," Sylvia continued, her hand resting tightly on her daggers. The matted dark mana caked onto her cloak seemed to violently ripple, stretching away from the center of the pit as if something down there was pulling at it. "They are being drawn downward. Whatever is at the bottom... it drinks magic."
"Good," Kaelen said, his boots clicking rhythmically against the stone.
He was wearing his sleek, form-fitting dragon-hide brigandine, the black obsidian chest-plates gleaming in the violet fog. At his hip, the master-forged sword rested silently, though the amber vein running down the fuller was pulsing a deep, erratic blue. His core was humming.
"If it drinks magic, it means it’s full of it," Kaelen grinned, his rebellious confidence entirely unaffected by the miles of rock hanging over their heads. "And I’m getting hungry."
"You are a maniac, Kai," Jax grumbled from the row behind them, shivering violently despite his insulated scale-mail. He was clutching a glowing fire-stone to his chest like a child holding a blanket. "We conquered the wastes! We have iron mines! We have a forge! Why are we walking into the literal bowels of the world?"
"Because the surface is crowded, Jax," Kaelen shot back over his shoulder, his smirk cutting through the gloom. "And the things at the bottom don't have tax collectors."
A massive, echoing *THUD* from the front of the line cut the banter short.
Goran had stopped his march, his massive six-foot drake-bone axe slammed head-first into the stone path. The northern giant was staring down into the violet mist where the spiral path finally flattened out into a massive, cavernous underworld.
The cavern was so vast its ceiling was lost in darkness. But it wasn't empty.
Rising from the floor of the subterranean world were colossal structures—not built by hands, but grown from solid, translucent purple crystal. The crystals pulsed with an ancient, heavy frequency, casting long, jagged shadows across a landscape of calcified bone and petrified forests.
And at the center of the crystal forest, the violet fog was swirling into a massive, violent vortex.
*Hssssssss.*
The sound wasn't a roar. It was a inhalation. A slow, chilling breath that pulled the ambient mana straight out of the air. Kaelen felt the lightning static on his skin instantly dampening, his core experiencing a sudden, heavy drag.
From the center of the vortex, a shape began to unfurl.
It didn't have the heavy, metallic armor of the Earth Dragon. It was long, serpentine, and fluid—a massive entity made of shifting violet scales that seemed to absorb the light around it like a living void. Six bat-like wings, webbed with raw shadow-mana, uncoiled from its back, stretching nearly eighty feet across the cavern.
Its face was skeletal, devoid of traditional eyes. Instead, three pairs of glowing, burning violet slits cut through its dark skull, locked squarely onto the intruders.
This was the **Calamity of the Abyss**—the ancient Shadow Dragon that the old texts claimed had swallowed an entire magical empire before the world was mapped.
"The magic..." Sylvia gasped, her knees buckling as her shadow-chains instantly disintegrated into nothingness. "It’s... it's eating my core."
The five hundred soldiers of the Vanguard panicked, their weapons shaking as the immense, invisible pressure of the void-mana slammed into their minds, projecting raw, unadulterated terror straight into their thoughts.
Kaelen stepped past Goran, his boots stepping onto the calcified floor of the underworld. He reached down, his fingers wrapping around the hilt of his obsidian blade.
The dragon shifted its six burning eyes toward the tiny prince. It let out a low, vibrating hum that caused the giant purple crystals around them to crack, a wave of absolute silence washing over the cavern as it prepared to erase his existence.
Kaelen didn't take a defensive stance. He didn't look at his panicked army. He just looked up at the skeletal face of the void-beast, his dark hair lifting in the pressure, his lips tearing open into a wild, maniacal, and beautiful grin.
"You like drinking magic, huh?" Kaelen whispered, the blue static in his eyes violently fighting the violet dark.
He drew the black blade.
*SHING.*
"Let’s see if you can stomach a storm."