By the eastern iron gates of the 'nor estate, a Dragon-Oath guard leaned heavily against the stone wall. The fatigue of the day weighed on his bones, so he did what they were all trained to do: he reached into the Stillness to siphon away his exhaustion. He opened the door in his mind, just a crack, to let the cool void numb his aching muscles.
But this time, the Stillness reached back.
He gasped, his spine snapping rigidly straight against the stone. The color drained from his face, replaced by a frostbitten gray. A black, oily frost began to creep up the veins in his neck. The transition was agonizingly silent—the exact moment his soul was hollowed out, scooped from his chest like marrow from a bone. He blinked, and when his eyelids fluttered open, the whites of his eyes were gone. They were pools of oily black.
"What is wrong with you?" the Dragon-Oath beside him asked, reaching out a hesitant hand. "Brother, pull back. You're drawing too deep."
The Shadow Sworn's head snapped toward the voice with an unnatural, jerky motion, like a puppet yanked by its strings. Without a sound, he lunged, his fingers curled like rigid claws aimed at his brother's throat.
The four other Dragon-Oath stationed at the gate didn't hesitate; they reacted to the threat with cold efficiency.
Two of the Dragon-Oath stepped in, driving the steel tips of their blades directly through their brother's sternum. The blades erupted from the infected guard's back in a spray of dark blood. The Shadow Sworn barely flinched. It only paused before it kept walking forward, the glinting steel sliding straight through its chest cavity.
"Bring him down!" one of the Dragon-Oath roared.
The remaining two Dragon-Oath flanked the impaled Shadow Sworn. The first swung a heavy sword behind the walking shadow's knees, shattering both joints and dropping him to the dust. The second Dragon-Oath brought his blade down in a flawless, executioner's arc. The steel bit cleanly through its neck. The severed head thumped against the dirt, rolling a few paces away. The headless torso collapsed over, sliding away from the longswords that impaled it.
The four Dragon-Oath guards exhaled, their chests rising and falling in the dry night air.
Instead of blood pooling on the stones, the black ink that leaked from the severed stump began to writhe. Thick, black tendrils of shadow erupted from the neck and the rolling head simultaneously. The shadows reached across the dirt like grasping, liquid fingers, latching onto each other and slowly dragging the head back to the stump.
The men froze in abject horror as the tendrils stitched the flesh and bone back together. It sounded like thick mud being churned. The broken knees snapped back into place with a sickening crack, the bones resetting themselves under the dark, supernatural pressure.
Before the Dragon-Oath could raise their weapons again, the Shadow Sworn had rose again. It drove a gauntleted fist straight through one of the Dragon-Oath's breastplates, crushing his ribs and puncturing his lung.
The Dragon-Oath collapsed, choking on his own blood. In his attempt to combat the wound and re-enter the fight, the guard pulled open the veil to fill himself with the Stillness. But as the Void rushed into his veins, he spasmed, and the black frost instantly began creeping up his neck. The darkness he drank in did not just kill; it recruited the dying Dragon-Oath. His eyes snapped open, his head bent back toward the sky at a horrid angle. Solid black bled from his pupils to the whites of his eyes as he rose to his feet beside the first Shadow Sworn.
From the shadows of the courtyard, the Anai warriors watched. They had been caged by these very men, treated as hostile invaders. But as the second Shadow Sworn turned his blackened eyes toward the living Dragon-Oath, the warriors of Ne-HE-miah engaged.
A dozen Anai drew their curved blades in unison, the steel singing in the night air, and charged into the fray to defend their jailers.
The courtyard erupted into a meat grinder. The Anai and the Dragon-Oath fought side by side, their combined martial skill matching the two Shadow Sworn. They severed limbs, opened bellies, and shattered skulls. But it didn't matter. Without a way to kill the darkness anchoring them, the living found themselves trapped in a gruesome loop. Every severed arm was stitched back on by writhing black tendrils; every fatal chest wound simply sealed itself shut in seconds.
The oak doors of the library slammed open.
Dak'nor and O'nor sprinted out onto the stone steps, weapons drawn, just as Kal'nor arrived from the inner estate corridors. The old patriarch stopped dead in his tracks. The sight of the two Shadow Sworn regenerating from decapitations shattered his reality.
"By the Stone..." Kal'nor breathed, his voice trembling with an alien fear. He looked at his youngest son. "O'nor... what are these things?"
O'nor gripped his sword, his jaw tight. "The end of light in the world, Father."
Kal'nor looked back at the courtyard. He saw the Anai and the Dragon-Oath's frustration fester, their strikes growing sloppy against an enemy that never tired. He saw the despair etched into the faces of his sons.
The fear in Kal'nor's eyes vanished, replaced by the calculating steel of the former head of the Val'dora.
"Right flank!" Kal'nor roared, his voice booming over the clash of steel, commanding the chaotic courtyard as he sprinted into the melee. "Pepper the nearest shadow! Do not commit to lethal strikes—force him to heal!" He turned to the Ne-HE-miah warriors. "Anai! Attack from a distance on the other! Break their limbs and pull back!"
The strategy was brilliant. By continuously inflicting shallow, crippling wounds—hamstringing them, slicing tendons, breaking kneecaps—the living forced the Shadow Sworn to expend time and energy reconstituting their vessels. The relentless healing process drastically slowed their advance, while conserving the stamina that lethal strikes demanded.
The tactical genius of his father's command snapped Dak'nor out of his horrified stupor. The theory clicked into reality.
"O!" Dak'nor shouted over the din of battle. "I need a safe place to enter the Void! Now! Before the city is completely overrun with these things!"
Before O'nor could answer, a piercing shriek of metal echoed across the courtyard.
One of the Shadow Sworn—the original—adapted. The entity within the corpse abandoned its wild, berserker strikes and settled into a low, predatory stance.
O'nor's eyes widened in horror. Panther in the Canyon. It was a lethal martial form, the same that nearly cost O'nor his life in the canyon pass.
The Shadow Sworn moved with near impossible speed. It slipped beneath the guard of the two closest Anai warriors. In two fluid motions, the former Dragon-Oath's blade severed the right arm of the first Anai at the shoulder, then whipped back around, slicing cleanly through the throat of the second.
Both warriors hit the stone training grounds of the courtyard, dead before their bodies fully registered the strikes.
From the original Shadow Sworn's boots, a pool of black, oily tendrils slithered across the stones like vipers. The shadows plunged into the open wounds of the two fallen Anai. Their spines arched violently backward, severed limbs reattaching, bones popping, and snapping as the darkness puppeteered their corpses. They rose to their feet, two new husks to the ranks of the Shadow Sworn in the courtyard.
"Staggered withdrawal!" O'nor roared, realizing the courtyard was on the brink being lost. "Pull back!"
Kal'nor drew his own sword, stepping forward from the rear ranks and moving directly toward the advancing husks.
"Anai forces, fall back into the estate!" Kal'nor commanded. "Follow my sons!"
"Father, no!" Dak'nor yelled, stepping forward to grab him.
Kal'nor didn't look back. He raised his blade, stepping to the front line alongside the remaining Dragon-Oath guards. He was a father who had already failed to protect his family in the council chambers. He would not fail them on the battlefield.
"Go, Dak'nor!" Kal'nor bellowed, parrying a blinding strike from a newly turned Anai husk. "We will hold them!"
O'nor gritted his teeth, the soldier warring with the son, before he grabbed Dak'nor by the shoulder and physically hauled his brother back toward the doors of the estate, leaving their father to the encroaching dark.
Heirs to the Ash
The doors of the library groaned under the relentless assault outside, but Kal'nor's voice still carried cleanly through the wood.
"Right flank! Pepper the nearest shadow! Do not commit to lethal strikes—force him to heal!"
Hearing his father barking tactical orders in the teeth of a nightmare, O'nor's mind drifted involuntarily, calculating the variables. Could Kal'nor actually survive out there? If the remaining Dragon-Oath maintained the rhythm of crippling wounds—hamstringing the husks, forcing them to spend precious seconds reconstituting their flesh—they might hold the line long enough...
"O'nor!"
A hand snapped onto his arm, breaking the trance. It was Naamah. Her eyes burned with clarity as she looked up at him, her voice taut with the reality of the moment.
"They cannot hold them forever," Naamah urged, glancing back at the buckling doors. "We need a way out. Now."
Before O'nor could answer, Dak'nor stepped forward, sweeping his arm toward the centuries-old furniture of the family library.
"Barricade the doors!" Dak'nor ordered the remaining Anai and Dragon-Oath guards. "Use the tables, the shelves—anything!"
Decades of blood feuds dissolved in the face of annihilation. The surviving Dragon-Oath and the Anai warriors fell upon the furniture together, dragging heavy ironwood tables and stacking towering piles of ancient manuscripts against the wooden doors.
O'nor stood locked in the center of the tactical hesitation, his mind a grinding gear of dread. They were trapped inside the estate of their ancestors, walls that had stood for a century, now destined to fall to the very creatures they had invited into the world.
Beneath his feet, the floor groaned and creaked. The shifting wood triggered a chain reaction in his memory, pulling him back to the quiet intimacy he had shared with Jo'val years ago, beneath the floorboards of this very estate, back when they were just two children stealing wine and clumsy kisses before the world went to war.
Nobody would think to look under their feet.
The memory shattered his paralysis, unlocking the mechanism of their salvation.
"Beneath the floorboards!" O'nor roared over the din, dropping to his knees. "There is a passage!"
A gauntleted hand, wreathed in the dark frost of the Void, burst straight through the center of the barricade, splintering oak and tearing parchment to shreds.
Dak'nor and the men holding the line recoiled instantly, scrambling out of the reach of the grasping, shadowy fingers.
"Follow me!" O'nor roared.
They threw themselves downward, scrambling beneath the hidden floor panels into the dark, subterranean passageway where he had once stolen kisses from the daughter of the man who had caged them and invited this apocalypse.
As the Anai and the remaining Dragon-Oath fled into the dark descent, Dak'nor paused, his eyes darting frantically to two separate corners of the library.
"Dak, what are you doing? We have no time—"
With a deafening shriek of splintering wood, the Shadow Sworn that had punched through the door violently tore the rest of the barricade apart, stepping fully into the library. A cloud of dust, broken timber, and flying pages exploded into the air around its blackened frame.
Without hesitation, Dak'nor hurled a glass vial from his right hand straight at the creature's feet.
The compound ruptured on impact, instantly shrouding the Shadow Sworn in a dense fog of fine white powder. The creature paused, its unnatural movements faltering in momentary confusion.
With a sharp grunt, Dak'nor hurled a second, heavier glass sphere into the exact same spot.
The resulting eruption of heat and concussive force rivaled the breath of dragons. A wall of white-hot fire roared through the room. The blast wave hurled Dak'nor backward across the floor until he collided hard with a bookshelf, while the shockwave blew the Shadow Sworn into a thousand blackened fragments across the courtyard.
O'nor scrambled back through the smoke, rushing to his brother's side as the air rang with the deafening aftershock. He grabbed Dak'nor by the shoulders, hauling him up.
"Dak, are you okay?" O'nor rasped through the choking dust.
"Expanded... the ventilation..." Dak'nor wheezed weakly, offering a bloodied, triumphant smile.
Before they could take in the momentary victory, the horrifying sound of shifting ash drew their eyes back to the courtyard. The scattered fragments of the Shadow Sworn had already begun to twitch, black tendrils snapping out like magnetic threads to coalesce back together.
Through the smoking breach in the estate wall—created by Dak'nor's explosive compound—they caught sight of their father. Kal'nor was retreating backward, parrying blows from the remaining husks. As the old patriarch glanced toward the library, his eyes locked with his sons'. He gave a sharp nod of acknowledgment, seeing that they had found a way out.
As the brothers dropped down into the secret underground passage, they watched the first hungry tongues of flame lick up the ancient tapestries, consuming the walls of the estate as the horde of husks and Shadow Sworn turned their focus toward the new opening in the estate.