Yuirwood. Even the name felt wrong in my mouth after what Vesperyx had done to it.
Vesperyx had made a dollhouse out of a people’s minds.
The house Aelthir had led us to sat too still beneath the trees, its windows dark, its walls harmless in the way traps are harmless before they close.
And I was going to tear it down.
I hit the front door hard enough to blow it off its hinges.
Wood splintered inward. My sword was already in my hand.
“Vesperyx!” I roared into the house. “Show yourself.”
Nothing answered me.
At least, nothing real did.
For one strange, ugly second, all I saw was an ordinary little house. A kitchen. A table. A child pacing back and forth in some dull domestic trance. Three elves wandered in slow circles like sleepwalkers, empty-eyed and harmless-looking in a place that should have been a mouth full of teeth.
Behind me, Ilyon said, sharp and confused, “Why is there nothing here but a kitchen and a small child?”
That wasn’t what I was seeing.
Mira swore and said something else entirely. Darian barked out his own version of the room, every word different from Ilyon’s. That was all I needed.
Seraphine confirmed it a heartbeat later, her voice cutting through the confusion with cold precision. “They’re all affected, Lendys. Get them out before they fall any deeper into it.”
So I moved.
Fast.
I shoved Mira and Darian back out through the doorway before either of them could protest properly. They fought me every step of the way, both furious, both convinced I was dragging them from something real. Darian dug his heels in hard enough to split the packed earth outside, and when that didn’t work, he swung at me.
I had been holding my strength back for the sake of the shape I wore. That ended there.
I caught him by the throat and lifted him clean off the ground.
Mira made a sound somewhere between panic and rage and launched herself at me at once, striking my abdomen, my ribs, my wrist, trying to stun me with the force and speed of her monk’s training. In another body, with another man, she might have succeeded. Instead I caught her too, one-handed, snatching her out of mid-swing and holding her suspended while the first thin glow of divine power began leaking out through my mortal skin.
That got their attention.
That always fucking got their attention.
Ilyon shook himself free first, my aura brushing over him like cold water over a fever. He blinked hard, then took in the sight of me holding Darian aloft and Mira by the throat and snapped, “Lendys, put them down so Seraphine can break the enchantment.”
I dropped them in front of her harder than I needed to.
“Take care of them,” I said. “I’ll deal with the elves inside.”
I turned and went back into the house before any of them could argue.
The first elf barely reacted when I grabbed him. The enchantment on him was so deep he offered no resistance at all, just kept trying to walk in a slow circle even while I hauled him bodily toward the door. The other two were the same. They were not people at that moment, not fully. Just minds drowning in someone else’s design.
By the time I dragged the last of them outside, Seraphine was already knee-deep in the work of pulling Darian apart from the illusion. Mira knelt nearby, blinking hard, fury and disorientation fighting behind her eyes. Ilyon had one hand braced on a post, steadying himself.
Seraphine did not look up as she said, “This will take time. Take Ilyon and Mira. I’ll finish with Darian and the villagers, then follow.”
Mira was already moving before she finished speaking.
She shot past me at a dead sprint, muttering enough obscenities under her breath to make a lesser man flinch. Ilyon went after her with his shortsword drawn, throwing one quick look over his shoulder.
“Hurry up.”
That was all he gave me.
Mira hit the back wall of the house hard enough to break it open with her shoulder. The false plaster and rotting wood gave way at once, revealing the truth beneath: a cave system running deep into the earth, every wall inked with shifting enchantment script. Fairies, pixies, and redcaps were mid-work when we burst through—small hands smearing glowing runes over stone, mouths chanting in half-sung nonsense, the whole place humming with glamour thick enough to choke on.
Ilyon moved first.
He crossed the distance in a blur, cutting the heads off the first two redcaps before their knives even came up. He pivoted cleanly into the next strike, silver-gray eyes cold, sacred, and merciless.
Mira sucked in a breath, planted her feet, and loosed her dragon breath straight down the passage.
Lightning tore the tunnel apart.
The script on the walls burst into white ruin. Pixies burned where they hovered. A handful of the little bastards never even had time to scream. The smell afterward was ozone, ash, and cooked magic.
I pushed through the blackened remains and kept going.
The final chamber opened wide and ugly below us, half laboratory and half shrine to madness. Vesperyx stood at its center before a great orb suspended in iron, one hand braced against its surface while they spoke in draconic—fast, low, urgent. Not prayer. Warning.
Warning her children.
“Find Eryndor and Talira,” I barked at Mira and Ilyon. “Kill them before they run.”
Then I moved for Vesperyx.
I came in hard, sword raised, intending to drive Judgment straight through her back before she could turn.
Something sweet hit my senses first.
Floral. Warm. Unmistakably wrong.
My sight went black for one awful instant.
My aim slipped.
The blade bit stone instead of flesh.
I staggered and tore myself sideways, shaking my head hard enough to clear the glamour just as Vesperyx laughed softly and vanished into a fold of false light.
Illusion dragons always thought themselves clever.
I planted myself in the middle of the room and began drawing power into my chest.
That sort of thing hurts, if you’re wondering. Even for me. Especially in those years, when my justice still leaned too easily toward punishment and I built it in my body like a weapon first and a principle second.
Vesperyx struck me from behind before I could fully turn, something sharp skidding across my back.
She was too late.
The scream ripped out of me before the light did.
Judgment tore through the chamber in a blast bright enough to rival noon, pouring from my mouth with all the force of a newborn sun. Vesperyx recoiled, hands flying to her ears, her glamour collapsing in shards all around us as the chamber burned clean under the flood of holy power.
It should have ended there.
It did not.
The memory shifts around me even now, just as the forest shifts around us in the present.
The sun beats through the canopy overhead as we move west through this godsdamned stretch of wilderness, and our ridiculous new pet—Krunk—marches ahead like he owns the path, with Raesh perched on his shoulder looking less like a companion and more like a hostage with opinions. Maire laughs at something they say, and the sound hooks clean through me.
My attention has not left her all morning.
It probably won’t until I die.
A few days ago, meditating with Bahamut gave me the final thread I needed to start restoring what I lost. Whether he knew what he was giving me or not, I’ll deal with later. First I have to survive this more immediate horror: telling Maire the full truth of my first fall without watching that look in her eyes change.
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I hate that thought enough to reach for her.
I move up beside her, lace my fingers through hers, and give her a smile real enough to hide the dread under it. She looks up at me, and my chest tightens so sharply it borders on pain. If I could put memory straight into her mind without speaking a word, I would. It would make my life so much fucking easier.
But her clothes—those colors, that cut, that way the fabric moves on her body—catch on something in me.
For one heartbeat she looks like Mira.
And that is all it takes.
The memory drags me under again.
Eryndor died, proving his loyalty to Vesperyx.
Or his fear.
Sometimes those are the same thing.
His laboratory was smaller than I expected—tight, dense, full of mirrored lenses, dream glass, and volatile enchantments wound together so badly they looked like nerves. Mira reached him first. She always did like getting close enough to make it personal.
Then everything went white.
The first explosion punched the chamber open like a god’s fist. Stone blew outward. I saw Mira take the brunt of it and disappear into smoke and shattered crystal.
I dropped to her immediately.
She was barely breathing when I found her in the wreckage.
I hit the ground beside her hard enough to crack it, hands already glowing as I poured healing through broken flesh and scorched scale. Above us, Ilyon shifted mid-fall, his draconic form tearing free as the second explosion blew the upper chamber out into open air. He caught the blast on one wing, twisted, and slammed down beside me as Seraphine came sliding after him in a shower of dust and stone.
Then chaos.
Too much blood. Too much shouting. Too many fucking variables at once.
Darian was on his knees at Mira’s side almost before I registered he’d moved, clutching her hand so tightly I thought he might break it. He shoved at me once when I adjusted my position, panicked and wild with it, and Seraphine snapped at him to stop being useless or start helping.
We healed her for hours.
Hours.
Everything I had, everything Seraphine had, everything Ilyon could channel into keeping her anchored inside her own body. And still she did not wake.
After the first wave of healing failed to bring her back, Darian broke.
“This is your fucking fault, Lendys!”
He hit me.
I let him.
He hit me again.
He needed somewhere to put the terror, and I understood that better than most men ever would. So I let him swing until my lip split, until my jaw rang, until his grief stopped looking like rage and started looking like collapse.
But when he knocked me to the ground and came at me again, I caught both his fists and held them there.
“You need to be with her,” I told him, blood in my mouth and fury finally rising to meet his. “Or when she wakes up, she’ll wonder why you’re the one unconscious when she took the blow.”
That got through.
He went still above me, tears dropping off his face onto mine.
I pushed him off and dragged myself upright, one knee in the dust at the edge of the crater Eryndor had made of his own laboratory. Then I climbed back up to the lip and searched what was left of Vesperyx’s chambers for anything—notes, fragments, clues, some scrap that would justify the cost of what we had just survived.
There was nothing.
My power, my rage, Eryndor’s sacrifice, the fire—between them, it had all been destroyed.
Everything.
So I went back down.
And I waited.
I worried.
I sat with my head in my hands while the day bled slowly toward evening and Mira lay still between us, and I discovered there are few torments sharper than surviving the choice that hurt someone you love.
Then, at last, with the sunset bleeding red through the broken stone, she woke up.
And all I felt—after the rage, after the blood, after the hours of fear—was relief so strong it nearly dropped me where I stood.
It didn’t last.
Relief rarely does.
Even with all we poured into her, Mira could barely fucking walk. Darian insisted on carrying her back to the Sunglade himself, like if he loosened his grip for even a second the world might decide to take her again just to prove it still could. I let him. There are moments when love needs witness, and moments when it needs privacy. That one was both.
So I watched him go with her in his arms, his face set and hollowed out by the sort of fear that changes a person for a while, maybe forever.
Seraphine stopped me before I followed.
Ilyon lingered at her shoulder, quiet and unreadable as ever, though there was too much intelligence in his gaze for me to pretend he had not been taking my measure since the fight ended.
“It isn’t your fault, Lendys,” Seraphine said.
I almost laughed.
Not because it was funny. Because it was the sort of kindness that makes a man want to bare his teeth.
“So why,” she asked, “did you let him hit you like that?”
She posed it like I should already know.
At the time, I didn’t.
Or maybe I did and lacked the language to admit it.
“It felt like what I had to do, Sera,” I said.
That was the only answer I gave her then.
Now, with Maire in my blood and my chest and all the softest parts of me I once thought had died, I know better. Darian loved Mira. Truly. Stupidly. Entirely. And I had sent her forward. I had made the call that put her alone with Eryndor first. If Maire had been hurt like that because of a choice I made—if she had been broken open in front of me while someone else stood there trying to explain why it was necessary—I am not sure anyone nearby would have survived the shape of my rage.
So yes.
I let him strike me because some part of me understood that love like his needed blood for a moment, and I was the nearest thing to hand it.
Seraphine did not look convinced.
Neither did Ilyon.
The silence between the three of us stretched just long enough to become its own answer.
Then I shoved past them and started for the Sunglade.
The place met us with beauty so deliberate it almost felt offensive after what we had walked out of. White bark. silver leaves. green light spilling through branches like something holy had chosen to live there permanently. The air was clean in a way the world rarely is. Too clean for the state I was in.
Aelthir greeted us before we reached the heart of it.
This time he came forward with open arms and that infuriating look mortals get when they think they are standing near revelation instead of danger. “When the dragon passed,” he said, “we felt the charm lift from our kin. We knew you had been sent here for a righteous reason.”
Righteous.
I was too tired, too angry, and too raw for that word.
He knew something. Or thought he did.
Before he could say another godsdamned thing, my temper snapped.
I grabbed him by the collar and drove upward so fast the earth vanished beneath us in a rush of white branches and panicked shouting. Wings flared behind me—not fully real in that moment, more ghost than flesh, the shape of what I was bleeding through what I wore—and I carried him hundreds of feet into the air.
“Who told you what I am, elf?”
He screamed.
I waited.
He kept screaming.
For one ugly second I considered dropping him just far enough to make the answer come cleaner.
Then his panic broke into breath instead of noise.
“I had a revelation,” he gasped. “Days before you arrived. A woman in white—pure white. Her hair shone like metal, like nothing I had ever seen—”
Tamara.
Of course it was Tamara.
The name hit me like a fresh wound under the ribs.
“Did she tell you why I was coming?”
His eyes widened, and I knew before he answered.
“No,” he choked. “I thought—you were meant to save us.”
I stared at him for a long moment, high above the Sunglade, with the wind trying to cool a fury it had no hope of touching.
Tamara had sent a warning.
Tamara had spoken to him.
Tamara, whose mercy I had spent years resenting when it stood in the way of what I called justice. Tamara, whose presence I had begun to suspect in the holy trace threaded through Caelovar’s lair. Tamara, who apparently still found ways to put herself between me and the blood I was trying to spill.
Why?
The question is a bit deep enough to stay.
When I brought Aelthir back down, the elves of the Sunglade looked ready to put arrows through me on principle. Aelthir stopped them with a raised hand and a few hoarse words about respect, though I was in no mood to appreciate the effort.
Respect. Reverence. Trust. Mortals are forever trying to offer holy words to the wrong man.
Aelthir gathered the elder druids around Mira that night, and they worked beside Seraphine with the patience of people who still believed healing was a form of prayer. Rites. Poultices. Moonlit water. Old forest magic braided with divine light until the room itself seemed to breathe with it.
Darian never left her side.
Not once.
He held her hand through every spell, every shaking breath, every small sign of life returning. The rest of us were shown to a guest house used for the friends of the glade. It was simple, but after too many nights on stone and dirt and bloodstained ground, it felt almost luxurious.
Seraphine and Ilyon did not sleep much. They checked on the druid circle throughout the night, taking turns moving between the guest house and the rites, quiet as ghosts.
I stayed where I was.
Not because I did not want to see Mira.
Because Darian still had murder in his eyes when he looked at me, and I had no desire to force him to choose between grief and loyalty before he was ready.
So I lay awake instead.
And thought about Tamara.
The questions would not let me rest.
Was she the holy presence I had felt in Caelovar’s lair?
Had she touched that place before I ever arrived?
Was she guiding me toward Liliana’s line—or slowing my hand when it came time to close around their throats?
I had thought I knew Tamara once. Better than anyone, perhaps. Mercy made flesh. Patience given a voice. The one being in all the heavens who could look at the worst parts of the world and still ask whether anything in them might be saved.
But this?
This was different.
Liliana’s brood was not wayward. They were not merely cruel, or lost, or wounded into monstrosity. They took children and used them up. They treated mortal lives like ingredients, like tools, like stepping stones toward some blasphemous new design. Even Tamara—gentle, radiant, infuriating Tamara—could not look at that and offer mercy.
Could she?
That question sat with me in the dark until dawn started graying the windows.
And for the first time since the hunt began, I wondered if the bloodline I was culling might not be the only thing standing between me and whatever terrible truth waited at the center of all this.