The snow-tinted pillars of the Red Canyons loomed ahead like the teeth of a dead dragon.
For the army of the Dragon Line, the sight held no victory. Their muscles ached and sweat dripped into the frost-covered sands. The reality of the march had finally caught up to them.
Conscripts collapsed in the sand, their boots worn, their lips cracked and bleeding. Even the Dragon-Oath—men who had thought themselves untouchable just a week prior—were limping. Their armor, usually rendered weightless by the Void, now dragged on their shoulders like cages.
Riding at the head of the column, Darius stared at the mouth of the canyon. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to keep pushing. Mia and Ny'all were just beyond this pass, in the Anai territory of Ne-HE-miah . The ember rings of his irises flashed with a manic heat as his calloused hands curled into tight fists against the reins of his stallion.
He paused to look back over his men, drawing breath to order the advance when a veteran Dragon-Oath stumbled and dropped to one knee, the sweat dripping from his chin steaming against the frost.
Darius raised a single gauntleted fist. If I keep pushing them like this, they won't fall in battle. They'll die of exhaustion. "Halt!" his voice cracked. "We make camp here. We hold for the night."
A collective exhale moved through the ranks. Men dropped where they stood, too tired to even unbuckle their armor.
Dreams and Nightmares
As the meager campfires flickered to life against the cool night, Darius walked the perimeter of the canyon's mouth. The camp wound down into a miserable rhythm. The acrid scent of damp woodsmoke hung low in the air, mingling with the sharp musk of unwashed bodies and sweat-lathered horses.
He moved quietly through the scattered clusters of his men. The agonizing groans of veteran infantrymen echoed in the dark as they tore off rigid leather boots to rub blistered, bleeding feet.
A few yards away, a quartermaster stood with his hand on his sword hilt beside a single barrel of water, refusing the desperate demands of the cavalry. There would be no supply wagons this close to hostile territory or time to resupply from the land. Every drop was being rationed; the exhausted mounts and men had to survive on what little remained for the battles to come.
Leaving the gritty reality of the camp behind, Darius stepped away from the firelight and into the shadows alone. The air here was eerily still. He sat down against a boulder, resting his sword across his knees. He closed his exhausted eyes, immune to fatigue no longer.
The crackling of the nearby campfires grew muted, dissolving seamlessly into a cool, fragrant breeze.
Darius opened his eyes. He was sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in the royal gardens, an unfamiliar lightness in his chest. A few paces away on the manicured grass, Mia and Ny'all stood shoulder-to-shoulder, embroiled in a heated, playful debate over a hunting dagger. Ny'all gripped the hilt with standard Beh-REET rigidity, lecturing the sand-girl on the precise wrist mechanics required for a royal parry.
With a scoff, Mia snatched the blade away. She effortlessly flipped the steel into a reverse grip, fiercely demonstrating the lethal, upward pragmatism of a canyon gut-strike.
A familiar hand clamped onto Darius's shoulder.
King Va'lerius stood towering beside him, bathed in the golden light of the palace. "They are fierce, Darius," his father rumbled, his voice a steady anchor. "A king needs strong queens. Just ensure you do not let their fire distract you too greatly from your true duty. The laws of the Dragon Line demand focus. Your first loyalty must always belong to the Stone."
Darius smiled, leaning into the reassuring weight of his father's hand. A swelling peace settled deep into his bones.
Then, the sun slowly died.
The golden light morphed into a sickly, bruised dark gray. The stone bench shattered beneath him, leaking black frost. Mia and Ny'all froze mid-argument, their skin turning to pale ash before the wind violently scattered them into dust.
The comforting hand on his shoulder turned to ice, the cold piercing through his flesh and straight into the bone.
You are resting on the graves of your forefathers, little prince, a voice whispered from the dark.
Darius's eyes snapped open. The physical world was still there, but a pressure pinned him against his boulder. He struggled to raise his arm to his blade, but his muscles failed against the thickness of the gravity holding him in place. The shadows cast by the campfire stretched and pooled at his feet, forming the vague, shifting silhouette of a massive presence in ancient robes.
"Shadow Sworn," Darius growled through gritted teeth, his mind fighting the paralysis.
I am not the swarm, the voice corrected, sounding tired*. I am the seal that hold them back.*
Darius's eyes opened wide before he forced his composure back into place. "Lies," he countered.
The being of shadows, now encased in ancient armor, looked down at its own formless hands. Perhaps you speak the truth. But the obligation remains. Let me return to the flesh so that I may hold back the coming dark.
"You attacked me," Darius accused, ignoring the phantom's plea. "In the Courtyard. You tried to possess me. You ordered me to relent."
I sought a vessel, the shadow confessed, pooling darker around Darius's boots. In my haste, as the seal continues to fracture, I reached across the dark for the strongest anchor I could find. Your blood is my blood. I needed a connection strong enough to pull myself from the Void, to return to the mortal realm to fight what is coming.
"You think I would hand you my mind?" Darius sneered, his willpower allowing a single finger to twitch against his sword hilt. "I would never surrender my body to a shadow of the Void. I will not be the harbinger of your release upon this world. I am the Prince of the Dragon Line, the sword of this age. I will be the wall you never pass, or the blade that cuts you down at its gates."
A low, vibrating sound echoed in the space between Darius's ears. It took him a second to realize the ancient being was laughing.
You are a child playing with a kite in a hurricane, Darius of the 'Nor, the Shadow whispered.
The name resonated through Darius's chest.
'Nor. The betrayer of the Line?
You are not ready for what is to come, the entity continued. Your steel will not halt it. Only my return provides this world a chance to live.
The being paused, swiveling its faceless head slowly at the landscape of the canyon, as if seeing the physical world for the first time in millennia. I failed to bind the darkness for eternity. I only delayed its return. I merely followed the shadows into the deep. I am nothing but the Last Shadow now.
As the words faded, the pressure snapped.
Darius pitched forward, gasping for air, his eyes blazing wide. The campfires flared bright in his vision, and the late-night air howled through the canyon once more. He looked around wildly.
There was no frost. No lingering black ichor. No physical sign that the Last Shadow had been there at all. Darius wiped a layer of sweat from his brow, his chest heaving. Was it a hallucination brought on by exhaustion, or a true vision leaking through the cracked seal?
It didn't matter. The crushing dread in his gut was real, solidifying one absolute truth: he could not wait any longer.
"My wives cannot face this Last Shadow alone," Darius confessed to the empty air, his tone terrifyingly meek. "They don't know what lurks in the Void now."
Darius pushed himself to his feet and strode back into the center of the camp.
"Commander!" Darius barked, his voice cutting through the exhausted groans of the resting men.
A veteran of the Dragon-Oath scrambled to his feet, saluting sharply despite his visible fatigue. "My Prince."
"Select the ten best men who can still ride," Darius ordered, moving toward his tethered horse and checking his saddle. "We leave immediately. The rest of the army will maintain camp here so the men may recover."
The Commander blinked, his discipline momentarily slipping in the face of the tactical absurdity. "My Prince... you intend to ride into Anai territory with only ten men? It is reckless. We do not know—"
"I cannot risk the bulk of this army while they are unrested," Darius cut him off, swinging himself up into the saddle, the heavy obsidian sword strapped to his back. "And I cannot leave my wives and my unborn heir unguarded for another night." Not with what is waking up, he thought.
The commander stepped closer, gripping the reins of Darius's horse, his face tight with loyal protest. "But you ask this of me, my Prince? To stay behind and leave you unguarded?"
Darius looked down at the veteran, his eyes hard but carrying a quiet gratitude.
"No," Darius said softly, the full weight of the crown settling upon his shoulders. "You allow me to save the future of the throne."
Family Matters
Darius and his ten riders surged through the foothills, pushing their mounts through lush terrain never meant for heavy cavalry.
The transition from the frost-kissed sand of the Red Canyons to the vibrant green of Ne-HE-miah was jarring. Without the unfeeling Void to ease their passage, the jungle fought them for every inch. Branches whipped their faces, and the heavy mud sucked at their horses' hooves.
They finally halted near a riverbank where the thick undergrowth gave way to damp earth. The commander dismounted, kneeling to examine a set of tracks left behind by two women moving through the wild.
He traced the indentations with a scarred finger. "The stride of the Oath Blade is light, my Prince," the veteran murmured. He shifted to the second set of prints. "But this pair..." The veteran brushed a deeper impression in the mud. "The heel strike is heavier. The gait is shifted to balance the center of gravity. It is the footprint of a woman carrying child."
"This has to be them," Darius breathed, a desperate excitement rising in his chest. The heir... they all still live.
The roar of a waterfall ahead began to drown out the gasping of their horses. Darius hauled on his reins, bursting through a thick barrier of willows and moss-draped pines.
His horse reared, screaming in protest as Darius pulled up short in a massive clearing.
They hadn't just found the trail. They had ridden straight into the jaws of an army.
Hundreds of Anai warriors lined the terraced cliffs, the riverbanks, and the edges of the tree line. Every single face was covered by a veil. The silence of the Anai army made the odds even more catastrophic.
The metallic shing of heavy tachi swords being drawn echoed over the rushing water. The ten elite Dragon-Oath formed a tight, defensive circle around their Prince without a word being spoken. Darius drew his own blade—the black obsidian sword etched with the old tongue of the Dragon Line.
"Hold your ground," he commanded, his voice tight.
But the Anai didn't nock arrows. They didn't charge.
Instead, the dense wall of veiled warriors slowly shifted. They parted like a living sea, stepping aside in perfect unison to open a narrow corridor of sight into the center of the village.
Darius spurred his horse a half-step forward, his eyes narrowing to see through the parting crowd.
In the middle of a wide dirt circle, a desperate, brutal dance of steel was unfolding. He saw Ny'all first. She was fighting with a ferocity he hadn't seen since the fighting pits of the Kal-Kal'nor, her dragon-etched blade moving in a frantic blur to parry a relentless storm of strikes from two Anai warriors wielding curved tachi.
But it was the figure beside Ny'all that made the blood freeze in Darius's veins.
Mia.
She wore only light desert leathers, completely unsuited for the brutal physics of elite melee combat against heavily trained champions. The slight swell of her stomach was barely visible beneath the straps of her leathers.
Darius felt the air leave his lungs. He was watching his pregnant wife and his Oath Blade fight the deadliest warriors in the valley without access to the Void.