The horses bolted.

It happened in a heartbeat — Maximus's mare, Lyra's gelding, Seraphina's horse, all three wheeling in terror, tearing free, plunging off the road into the trees.

But Devastator planted his feet.

Brave, stupid, loyal Devastator — the pony who had stood his ground in the dark under the mountain — refused to run. He turned to face the beast, ears flat, and screamed a challenge at three hundred pounds of demon.

"DEVASTATOR, RUN!" Pip shrieked, already diving —

The right head opened its maw, and hellfire took him.

It was fast. That was the only mercy. One moment the shaggy pony stood defiant on the road — the next, fire, and then only scorched earth where he'd been, and the smell of burnt grass.

Pip's scream cut off like a severed string.

For a heartbeat, nobody moved.

The smell of burnt grass. A single ember drifting sideways on the wind. Lyra's hand found her sword hilt without her telling it to. Seraphina's breath caught — half sob, half prayer. And Maximus — Maximus went very, very still, the stillness that meant someone was about to die.

Then, raw: "Pip. Pip. Eyes on me —"

She was already rising. Her light came up wild — grief and fury, too bright, burning white at the edges — and she went up like a second sun, but wrong, a sun going nova.

"Pip, hold—" Lyra started.

"Let her burn," Maximus said grimly, armor slamming into place around him. "We need it."

He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second and breathed in. Across his skin, the Ancient markings ignited — deep violet light, liquid and humming. Shadows coiled around his arms and boots. With a resonant chime, dark mana condensed around him: plates of obsidian dragon-scale armor over his chest and shoulders, horned pauldrons flaring at his neck, a cape of living shadow rippling behind him.

He drew Abyssalfang. The blade cleared its sheath in a hiss, steel flaming blue — and the runes sang. Hungry. The sword had smelled demon.

"Not yet," Maximus told it. "Soon."

The beast lunged.

"Scatter!" Maximus shouted.

The center head crashed down like a siege engine, shattering the road where they'd stood a second before — stone erupting, a crater opening where Pip had been singing an hour ago. The left head swung toward Seraphina, jaws flaring with absolute-zero frost. The right head opened its maw on Maximus — and breathed hellfire.

Lyra moved. Vaulting off a slab of shattered road, she threw up a shield of crimson magic in the fire-head's path, taking the brunt of it, her dark elven sword flashing in a blinding upward slash across the monster's jaw. The head recoiled, its breath going wide, scorching pines instead of Maximus — but the shield flickered, and Lyra gritted her teeth, pouring more of herself into it. Crimson light bled from her nose. She didn't stop.

Seraphina was already there, golden staff raised, slamming a radiant barrier into the frost-head's blast. Freezing vapor washed around them, harmless — but her hands were shaking, and not from the cold. Ice crept up the barrier's edges, spiderwebbing. She kept glancing at the treeline. At the doll in the dirt.

"Sera!" Lyra shouted. "With me!"

Seraphina tore her eyes away. The barrier held — barely, crackling, light flaring where the frost bit deepest.

The beast wasn't stupid. The center head — the one with the crown of horns — pulled back, studying them with burning crimson eyes. Then it moved, fast for something so massive, the left head sweeping low while the right head spat a fan of hellfire across the road, cutting Lyra off from Seraphina.

"They're herding us!" Lyra shouted, rolling under the flames, her cloak smoking.

Maximus charged the center head.

He went in low and fast, Abyssalfang trailing blue fire, and the horned head struck at him like a snake — jaws wide, iron teeth gleaming. He met it head-on, blade sweeping up, and the teeth closed on empty air as he slid beneath the jaw, driving the sword deep into the soft throat-flesh. Black blood hissed on the blue steel.

The beast recoiled — and the left head whipped around, claws raking across Maximus's armored shoulder. The obsidian plates held, but the force lifted him off his feet and hurled him into a pine. The trunk cracked like a bone. He hit the ground rolling, came up spitting blood, and grinned — a terrible grin.

"Good," he said. "Bleed."

But the heads were learning. The frost-head breathed low across the ground, flash-freezing the road into black ice — and the fire-head followed a heartbeat later, melting it into a choking wall of scalding steam. The battlefield vanished into white.

"Can't see!" Seraphina coughed, her barrier flaring blindly into the fog.

"Left!" Lyra shouted — guessing, swinging — her crimson shield catching a claw that had been meant for Seraphina's back. Red sparks and gold.

Above the steam, Pip burned — too bright, white at the edges, grief made visible. She wasn't aiming. She was just burning. And burning, and burning — until the steam itself began to glow, and through the glare, in the light of her own fury, she saw it: a crest of bone over the beast's chest, pulsing with necrotic light, right where the heads joined the body.

"There!" she shrieked, her voice thin with effort. "The chest! Under the bone! Hit it there!"

The center head snapped toward her voice, jaws opening —

"Pip, move!" Maximus hurled Abyssalfang — not at the beast, but past it, the blade screaming through the air — and the center head flinched sideways, jaws snapping shut on empty air where Pip had been. She dropped like a stone, wings folding, landing hard behind a boulder.

Maximus caught the returning sword out of the air without looking. "Thanks for the opening."

He ran — and the runes screamed along the blade, feed me, feed me, pulling toward the exposed core like a hound on a scent. Maximus gritted his teeth and ran past it, past the easiest meal, because the angle was wrong and a half-fed sword was worse than a hungry one.

"Not yet," he snarled at it. "Mine first."

He surged forward like a dark comet — Lyra pinning the fire-head, Seraphina smothering the frost, Pip blinding the center — and drove Abyssalfang straight through the cracked crest, into the pulsing core.

The sword drank. Blue fire detonated outward, severing the beast's connection to the earth, and Maximus felt the blade's hunger surge — more, more, MORE — and wrenched it free with an effort that left his arms shaking. Not from the weight. From the wanting.

The Cerberus shrieked — a sound that shook the pines to their roots — bucking, its massive tail sweeping around toward Lyra and Seraphina —

Maximus slammed Abyssalfang into the earth.

And stopped time.

The thrashing beast, the falling embers, the swirling dust — all of it settled into a sluggish, ocean-like drag. Through the slowed world, Maximus walked — up the monster's back, his markings blazing, unhurried as a man out for a stroll. He could see the individual embers hanging in the air. He could see Lyra's hair, frozen mid-whip. He could see Pip, on the ground behind the boulder, her mouth open in a shout that hadn't finished.

Every second I steal has to come from somewhere.

He could feel them leaving — not passing, leaving, torn out of him like pages from a book. His heart hammered against the theft. Somewhere behind his eyes, something small and essential frayed at the edges.

He raised the blade high.

"You're in my way, Morikk," he whispered.

He released time.

A single arc of blue flame tore cleanly through all three necks.

The Cerberus froze. Lines of brilliant light fractured across its body — and then it collapsed inward, disintegrating into black ash that dissolved on the wind.

Silence.

Maximus landed hard, caught himself on one knee — and stayed there, breathing heavier than he should have. A sharp tremor ran through his right hand. He clenched it into a fist.

It didn't stop.

A thin line of blood trickled from his nostril.

"Maximus?" Lyra was beside him instantly.

"I'm fine." His voice was steady. His body disagreed.

Lyra put her hand on his shoulder. The tremor traveled up through her fingers, and she felt how hard he was working to keep himself from coming apart — the sheer effort of holding his own body together by will. She didn't say anything. She just kept her hand there.

Pip dropped out of the sky, her light guttering out, and landed hard on the scorched earth where Devastator had stood. She stood there, swaying, looking at the blackened grass.

She sat down, suddenly, like her legs had given out. Very quietly, almost to herself, she hummed — hush now, Annabelle, the brave and the small. Then she stopped, and put her face in her hands.

A long time passed. The wind moved through the pines.

Then Pip stood up. She wiped her face with her sleeve, and started gathering stones.

Nobody told her to. Nobody asked what she was doing. Lyra just knelt and started handing her stones. Then Seraphina. Maximus, his right hand still trembling, carried the big ones.

They built a cairn by the side of the road — stone on stone, as tall as Pip could reach. When it was done, Pip dug through her pack and pulled out an apple, a little bruised, saved from the town. She set it carefully on top of the stones.

"He eats only apples," she said. Her voice was steady in the way that meant it wasn't. "And does noble deeds."

She was quiet for a moment. Then, softly — not performing, not projecting, just remembering — she sang:

"Oh, Sir Devastator, the bravest of steeds..."

Her voice broke on brave. She stopped. Swallowed. Started again. She sang the whole verse to the stones and the apple and the indifferent pines, and the others stood witness, and nobody looked away.

When she finished, Maximus knelt — the great warrior, the Ancient, kneeling in the dirt — and put his hand on the cairn.

"He stood his ground," Maximus said quietly. "When the others ran, he stood. He was a warrior."

Pip nodded, tears cutting clean lines through the soot on her face. "Sir Devastator," she whispered. "Bane of Trolls."

"Bane of Trolls," Lyra echoed.

"Bane of Trolls," Seraphina said.

Seraphina walked to the treeline. She bent down and picked up the rag doll — button eyes, yarn hair — and held it against her chest. She stood there a long time, looking into the pines where Annabelle had gone.

Lyra watched Maximus wipe the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. She thought of the morning on the road: How much has it taken from you? And his answer: Enough.

"How much was that?" she asked quietly. "Just now."

He looked at her. "A moment."

"That was more than a moment."

"Queen," he said, with the ghost of a smile, "are you keeping track?"

"I am now."

He rose, the armor dissolving off him in coils of dark mist, and looked down the empty road — north, toward the Old King's Fall. Then back the way they'd come, where the horses had fled.

"Then we walk," he said.

Beneath the Old King's Fall, in the dark that had never known a sun, Morikk stood among his captains — dead men in rusted armor, their eyes like coals.

The girl stood beside him. Small. Still. Empty.

"They disobeyed," Morikk said, in a voice that was not the girl's. "The queen kept her commander from me. She thought to protect her city by defying me."

He turned to the largest of the captains — a thing that had once been a knight, a black sword at its hip that drank the light.

"March on Veyloria," Morikk said. "Leave nothing."

The legion began to move.