The sun rose, painting the canvas walls of the tent with a bruised summer light.
O'nor's eyes opened to the dim reality of the warm morning. The weight of Naamah rested against his chest, her dark hair spilling across his collarbone. The scent of her—a mix of sweat and desert sand—was intoxicating.
Bedding the enemy general is either a new low or a new high, depending on who you ask, O'nor thought to himself with a grin.
However, today might be his last day walking the earth. Or worse—it might be his last day walking the earth as himself.
His grin faded, but before his mind could spiral into the endless possibilities of failure, Naamah shifted. One finger traced a slow, deliberate line across the center of O'nor's chest.
She lifted her chin, her blue eyes cutting through the dim morning light to see O'nor's mind racing, her gaze catching the flicker of hesitation and doubt in him.
"When you slew the Tan-AH-ee, did you question success?" Naamah asked, her voice thick with sleep but her tone carrying the certainty of a champion.
O'nor looked down at her. "No."
"No, you didn't," she agreed, her blue eyes finally opening to meet his. "I saw it in your eyes. The thrill of combat. You must use that today." Her hand flattened against his chest, right over his beating heart. "Inside the darkness you harness... can you still feel?"
O'nor frowned, thinking of the cold of the Void. "Yes. But it is muted. Depressed. It buries the man to sharpen the blade."
"Yet, you still feel," Naamah said softly, her gaze piercing through him. "The flame of a Tan-AH-ee is a weapon, O'nor... right up until you allow it to consume the wielder. Your Stillness is the same. Do not let the dark snuff out the thrill of the man."
O'nor slowly brought his hand up, covering hers where it rested against his chest. Beneath their intertwined fingers, she felt the thud of his heart.
They dressed in the quiet intimacy of soldiers preparing for the end. Naamah moved with efficiency, her hands tightening the heavy leather straps of O'nor's chestplate before turning to secure her own armor. O'nor welcomed the familiar weight of his steel, yet the reality of the coming stakes still clawed at the edges of his focus. If they failed to break the choke point of the Shadow Sworn and warn Beh-REET today, the world could fall—and worst of all, his own body could be hollowed out and weaponized against his brother. The dread had receded, but the stakes remained too massive to be completely washed away.
By the time the morning sun fully crested the horizon, exposing the geography of the Ne-HE-miah border, the united army of Anai and Dragon-Oath was already on the march.
They moved back toward the Red Canyon, the birthplace of the Shadow Sworn, in silence.
Dragon-Oath marched with rigid necks. They obsessively checked and re-checked the leather straps of their armor. Calloused hands constantly wiped sweaty palms against their clothes, fingers drumming anxious rhythms against the pommels of their swords.
As the vanguard reached the apex of the canyon ridge, the march ground to a halt.
O'nor looked down into the gorge. The math of the apocalypse was laid out in the red dirt below.
There were still only two Shadow Sworn—the twin commanders of the dark, standing perfectly still in their corrupted, black-stained armor. But the horde surrounding them had swelled. Dozens of fallen Anai warriors, commoners, and traders had been stitched back together by the black smoke. They now roamed in silent ranks around the two Shadow Sworn, the Husk numbers outmatching the ranks of the surviving Dragon-Oath.
O'nor turned his back to the canyon, facing his men and the Anai archers taking the high ground behind them. He looked at the resolute faces of his men.
He drew a breath and spoke the words that would echo in the halls of Beh-REET for a hundred millennia.
"We stand at the precipice of a dying age," O'nor's voice boomed, carrying over the whistling wind of the gorge. "Our actions here will determine if the next age ever sees the light. We fight darkness with steel!"
He paced the line, his gaze locking with the men who were about to plunge their minds into the current of the Void.
"I know I ask the impossible of you today. But we are Dragon-Oath!" O'nor roared, filled with the defiant thrill of the man Naamah had seen. "If we can hold the line here, if we can carve our way through this pass... we give the world a chance."
Down in the canyon, the vibrations of his booming voice caught the attention of the dead. A single Husk, wandering too close to the ridge, tilted its head. It sensed the pulsing heat of the mortal army.
In synchronized unison, the entire horde turned. The two Shadow Sworn raised their stolen blades, and the dead began a menacing, silent march up the canyon path toward them.
O'nor turned back to the approaching darkness. He reached over his shoulder and slowly drew his sword. The steel sang a deadly note against the scabbard.
He looked at the horde, his mind finding the truth of a soldier.
"Duty is the mountain," O'nor's voice echoed, the words coming out as a vow. "We are but dust if we fail the stone."
He opened his mind to the Stillness. O'nor's eyes rolled back, washing over in solid, obsidian black. The First of the Dragon-Oath charged down the ridge and threw himself into the abyss.
The red dust of the canyon instantly churned into a blinding mist as the two lines collided. The Dragon-Oath struck like lightning hitting a stagnant pond. Their swords carved through the husks with efficiency, severing limbs and shattering ribcages. But the victory was hollow; as soon as a corpse hit the ground, the black smoke began to stitch the ragged flesh back together. Behind them, the Anai infantry moved like caracals native to the heat of the Red Canyons. As the Dragon-Oath carved the path, the Anai followed, their long tachi stabbing into the hearts and throats of the regenerating husks to keep them pinned to the earth. The horde fought like a mindless wave, which lent itself perfectly to the effectiveness of the Dragon-Oath.
Suddenly, the air itself seemed to stagnate. The two Shadow Sworn—the commanders of the dark—leaped a staggering thirty paces from the rear of the horde to place themselves directly on top of the advancing forces of the Anai and Dragon-Oath. One descended directly upon O'nor. He caught the blackened fiend's steel, his own sword buckling under the weight of darkness given flesh. O'nor's heart thundered against his ribs, but beneath the muted stillness of the Void, he focused his mind, pushing the panic down. He slanted his blade at a sharp angle, catching the Shadow Sworn off-balance and forcing the shadow to slide forward. O'nor countered instantly, pivoting into Dragon's Breath Uncoiled. The horizontal cut whistled through the air, dropping the fiend into the dirt in two severed pieces. Simultaneously, another Dragon-Oath parried the second shadow's initial strike, creating an opening that cost the entity its head in a spray of black ichor from another of the Vanguard.
There was hope, but it drained away as the husks that had been cut down washed over the Dragon-Oath ranks again. The chaotic rush of the husks made cutting them down incredibly difficult a second time, and in the center of the swarm, the two Shadow Sworn had already risen again.
O'nor, having dispatched the surrounding husks with a wide, one-handed sweep of his sword, advanced on the two shadow commanders. He lunged with the aggressive strike of The Hawk Rises to the Sun, attempting to decapitate the first shadow, but the entity within the man drew on the knowledge of its host's training. It moved with perfect grace, parrying O'nor's strike with Beh-REET Defends the Stone.
The second Shadow Sworn, as if reading the exact thoughts of the first, attacked with Panther in the Canyon. Its blade danced through O'nor's exposed guard, severing a tendon in the shoulder of his sword arm, causing the limb to go limp even as his hand remained stubbornly clenched around the hilt.
Defenseless, O'nor watched as the first Shadow Sworn transitioned from defense to the killing strike of Dragon Pierces the Veil. Before the steel could meet flesh, a Dragon-Oath threw himself into the gap, deflecting the blade with a jarring crash. "To me! O'nor is hurt!" Noli'lx roared. The other Dragon-Oath immediately abandoned their offensive, pulling back to form a tight, bristling defensive circle around their commander. O'nor dropped to one knee, gritting his teeth as his ruined shoulder began to stitch itself back together.
"Hold this line for the First of the Dragon-Oath!" Noli'lx bellowed, raising his steel against the tide.
Hearing those words, pride and anxiety intertwined tightly in O'nor's chest. His men struck down husks and deflected the blurring blades of the Shadow Sworn with masterful precision, but they were surrounded, fighting while down their best warrior as he healed. They needed time—just a moment to allow O'nor to rejoin the fight—but the Shadow Sworn would not oblige.
They struck the northern flank with a terrifying synchronization. The first Shadow Sworn feinted a heavy, two-handed overhead strike, forcing a Dragon-Oath to raise his guard. In a flash of unnatural speed, the shadow dropped its weight entirely, sweeping the elite warrior's legs. Before the Dragon-Oath hit the ground, the second Shadow Sworn stepped squarely onto the falling man's chest plate. The steel collapsed, blood erupting from the man's lungs as the shadow used him as a springboard to vault into the air. The airborne shadow drove its blade straight down through the collarbone of a second man defending this flank.
Witnessing the impossible maneuver, Noli'lx thrust his sword directly at the first shadow's chest. The entity didn't even attempt to parry; it simply stepped into the thrust, letting the mortal steel impale it. With the man's weapon trapped securely in the undead Sworn's chest cavity, the shadow grabbed Noli'lx by the throat, pulling him back as both Shadow Sworn and Dragon-Oath fell to the sands. The endless swarm of crawling husks dragged the downed man into the red mud behind the infestation of other advancing husks.
Three Dragon-Oath lay broken in the red mud, dismantled in seconds.
"Hold the Dragon Line!" another Dragon-Oath yelled, his voice cracking with desperation as the flank started to collapse. O'nor's shoulder was still a useless mass of twitching muscle, and his men were dying in front of him. As another killing strike began to materialize from the second Shadow Sworn, the sky above the canyon suddenly darkened. A massive volley of black-fletched arrows whistled through the air, raining down upon the horde. The heavy shafts dropped dozens of the husks and forced the Shadow Sworn to spin toward the Anai attackers.
The distraction was all O'nor needed. His shoulder, though still bleeding, had regrown the severed tendons. He lunged forward, running his blade straight through the back of the distracted Shadow Sworn before pulling up in a vertical slash, splitting the fiend in two.
"Retreat!" O'nor ordered, his voice a ragged bark as he saw the remaining Anai infantry had made it out of the Red Canyons.
The surviving Dragon-Oath broke the circle and began a disciplined fighting withdrawal. But as O'nor looked back, the blood in his veins turned to ice. The three Dragon-Oath who had just been swarmed were rising from the mud. They did not rise as men. They rose with the same terrifying black smoke as the entities they had been fighting. The abyssal tug of the Void called to O'nor's mind, a sickening connection to his fallen brothers as they opened their pitch-black eyes. Three new Shadow Sworn had just been born.
"Keep going!" O'nor commanded, turning his back on the darkness and driving his men toward the pass.