When the outer gates of Beh-REET finally groaned open, the world shifted. O'nor marched his new vanguard out of the capital, stepping from the deep shadows of the mountain into the blinding summer glare.
The deafening cheers of the populace and the councilmen of the Empire rolled down from the high walls. The parapets and streets were packed with bodies, desperate for salvation.
Standing in the royal gallery, Kal'nor gripped the stone railing. His face was lined with concern, but as his son looked up, Kal'nor offered a resolute nod of support. Beside him, Dak'nor could not hide his fear. The scholar looked at the fifty silent, black-eyed men marching in perfect unison and saw only the blackness of the Void.
Standing slightly apart from the royal retinue was Jo'val. She gripped the edges of her cloak. Her eyes were tight with worry, but as O'nor's obsidian gaze found hers, she pressed a hand over her heart—a gesture for the man buried beneath the shadows of duty.
Watching her from the shade of the gallery was Tor'val. The disgraced general looked down at O'nor, his eyes narrowing with a bitter, begrudging respect. This was the spawn of the commander who had violently stripped him of his political influence, yet Tor'val's gaze shifted into something colder—something calculating. This boy is the key to it all.
Sensing the frenzied energy of the crowd, Tor'val seized the moment to inject himself into the legend. He leaned over the stone parapet, throwing his arms wide, and roared over the din of the masses.
"Complete your Oath, Dragon-Slayer!"
The phrase caught the wind. The desperate citizens of Beh-REET latched onto the words, twisting them into a rhythmic, thundering cadence that shook the dust from the walls.
"Dragon-Oath! Dragon-Oath! Dragon-Oath!"
The chant echoed across the dunes, but O'nor and his fifty men did not raise their weapons in triumph. They did not acknowledge the roar.
Wrapped in the emptiness of the Stillness, the Dragon-Oath did not sweat. They did not tire. They moved like a localized winter storm across the burning dunes, leaving a trail of frost over the sun-baked sand—a silent, inevitable shadow advancing toward the lush borders of the Anai.
The march toward the Anai borders served as a proving ground for the new Dragon-Oath. They faced three separate encounters with Anai border patrols on their march, and each skirmish proved the arithmetic of the Void was exactly as promised.
The first assault came in the deep dunes. Scouts of the Anai had spotted the fifty advancing Dragon-Oath and notified the nearest contingent. A hundred Anai warriors erupted from camouflaged trenches in the sand, their armor flashing in the sun. It was an ambush. Outnumbering O'nor's men two-to-one, a normal vanguard would have braced for the impact, locking their shields and anchoring their legs.
The Dragon-Oath were a blade. They drew their steel in chilling silence.
When the Anai crashed into their lines, the warriors found themselves swinging at phantoms. The men of Beh-REET moved with a frictionless speed that the Anai simply could not track. They sidestepped tachi thrusts without wasted energy. Blades flashed in the brutal summer sun. Anai throats were opened and limbs were severed with lethal efficiency, the hot blood steaming as it hit the unnatural frost that trailed beneath the Dragon-Oath's boots.
The Anai lines shattered. A dozen of their surviving warriors—proud men and women who had never known defeat—dropped their blades and scrambled backward into the sandy dunes, fleeing the slaughter.
As the enemy vanished, a few of the Dragon-Oath broke their concentration. They released their tether to the Void, the obsidian ink receding from their eyes as the sweltering desert heat rushed back over their shoulders. They raised their bloodied swords to the sky, letting out adrenaline-fueled cheers of triumph.
O'nor did not join them. He stood motionless amidst the steaming frost, his lightless gaze fixed on the horizon towards the Anai border. The thrill of survival, the passion for battle that used to pump through his veins—it was completely gone. The Void had hollowed it out. He felt no joy in the slaughter, only necessity.
"Anchor yourselves," O'nor commanded, his voice cold and flat, cutting through their celebration.
The men blinked, the black ichor flooding their eyes once more. The unnatural silence descended, and the Vanguard began their march forward again.
The second patrol met them near a dried riverbed, outnumbering O'nor's fifty by three-to-one. Having heard the results of the first skirmish, the Anai champions ordered a massive volley of arrows before their infantry engaged.
Dozens of metal-tipped shafts rained down. Several found their marks, sinking deep into the shoulders, chests, and thighs of the Beh-REET Dragon-Oath.
The Anai raised their bows in triumph, but the gesture died—slowly at first, then all at once.
Noli'lx took an arrow directly through his bicep. He merely looked at it with obsidian eyes, snapped the wooden shaft off with his free hand, pulled the metal tip from his flesh, and kept walking. The Void within him seized the injury, the skin visibly rippling and knitting tight over the torn flesh, stopping the bleeding before it could even begin.
Panic and confusion ripped through the Anai ranks as the silent, unfeeling monsters closed the distance. The resulting melee was a culling. The Dragon-Oath wove a wind of slaughter that left many of the one hundred and fifty Anai dead in the dirt in a matter of minutes.
By the third encounter, the Anai spirit was fractured. A heavily armed scout patrol crested a dune only to stumble upon the bloody wake of O'nor's vanguard. They watched the fifty men advancing, entirely untouched by fatigue, their black eyes locked forward and their swords dripping with gore.
The Anai soldiers simply ran.
Weapons were dropped in the sand. Many of the Anai who witnessed the massacre fled in terror back toward the safety of their lands. O'nor raised a single, gauntleted hand, commanding his Dragon-Oath to hold their ground. He did not pursue them.
Let them retreat, O'nor thought, his mind operating with military precision. Let them run and tell their commanders what they saw. If they consolidate their forces, I can finish this endless war in a single skirmish.
He gave the silent gesture to advance. The true Anai army would be waiting for them at the mouth of the Red Canyons.
The Shadows of Men
They were a magnificent force. The Anai's armor gleamed, their weapons painted with the bright, defiant colors of their valleys. The Beh-REET Dragon-Oath stood at a mere fifty men, facing Anai numbers in the hundreds. The Anai frontline was led by three Paired Champion groups.
The deafening war cries of the Anai suddenly died. At a silent signal, they veiled their faces—a vow of silence washing over the enemy force as they prepared to take life.
O'nor raised a single, gauntleted hand. As his arm started its descent, the Anai unleashed a blackened sky of arrows. O'nor finished the signal to attack, and the Dragon-Oath moved forward, slipping past the falling volley with unearthly speed.
The Dragon-Oath hit the Anai front-line not as men, but as a scythe through wheat. The Anai swung their tachi blades with severing force, but the vanguard was no longer bound by the friction of the mortal world. They slipped through the chaotic melee, their movements a dance of violence. Armor was bypassed. Tachi struck only empty air.
The Dragon Pierces the Veil. A technique used only in the most elite duels of blade masters was now the standard attack of the Dragon-Oath, and it was devastating. O'nor moved through the blood-soaked dirt as an untouchable shadow, his blade opening Anai as easily as a wooden sword passing through an ironbark post.
The vibrant spirit of the Anai began to break against the unfeeling wall of the Void his men wielded.
Through the chaos of the rout, O'nor's obsidian eyes locked onto a singular figure.
She was fighting furiously, a whirlwind of lethal grace. Her armor was lighter, intricately carved with the winding vines of Ne-HE-miah . Astonishingly, she had actually felled one of Beh-REET's Dragon-Oath. Her twin curved tachi blades moved with a beauty that stood in stark contrast to the mechanical butchery of the Dragon-Oath.
But it was her eyes that made O'nor pause. They were a piercing, crystalline blue.
The same eyes that had haunted his periphery since the early days of the conflict. The Anai woman he had saved from the winged myth at the outer walls of Beh-REET.
O'nor stepped over a fallen body, the Stillness carrying him across the battlefield in the blink of an eye. He appeared directly in front of her.
Only feet away, her Paired Champion sister lay lifeless in the dirt, killed by the very Dragon-Oath the blue-eyed Anai champion had just slain.
The woman gasped, her instincts flaring as she brought her blades up in a cross-guard to meet him. But O'nor was faster. He moved as if her guard meant nothing, the Void allowing him to sweep under her blades entirely. He struck her midsection, his steel piercing her abdominal wall—deep enough to drop her, but missing vital organs.
The blade in her off-hand clattered to the bloody dirt. O'nor kicked the shoulder of her primary arm, completely disarming her and sending her crashing backward to the earth. He instantly brought the edge of his blade to her throat as she lay helpless and bleeding.
The battle around them echoed as a dull roar. O'nor stared down at her, expecting to see the terror that had broken every enemy who had looked into his lightless eyes today.
But there was no fear in the striking blue eyes of the Anai warrior. There was only recognition. She looked at the man who had once saved her life, now hovering over her as a promise of death.
"Tan-AH-ee," she whispered.
The name carried an ancient, lyrical cadence that cut through the deafening pressure of the Void in O'nor's ears. It was spoken with pure reverence.
O'nor stiffened. The true name of the Dragon struck his mind like a physical blow. For the first time since he had pulled the Stillness into his veins, the unfeeling armor around O'nor's mind cracked. A surge of human emotion—confusion, dread, and a bizarre, magnetic pull toward this enemy woman—flooded his chest.
His hand trembled.
Slowly, against every instinct of the warlord he had become, O'nor began to lower his blade.
Before the steel could leave her throat, a sound tore through the canyon.
It was a scream of absolute agony from his own ranks.
O'nor snapped his head around. Thirty yards away, one of his elite Dragon-Oath had dropped his weapon. The man was on his knees, clawing frantically at his own face, tearing through flesh and armor. The black ichor was no longer just in his eyes; it was pouring from his nose, his mouth, his ears.
The soldier let out a final, gurgling shriek as a shadow of smoky black ink violently expanded, consuming his skin and his armor. The Dragon-Oath slowly rose from his knees, no longer resembling a man, but a shadow of living black ash wearing human skin. The Void had consumed the vessel and replaced him with a true Shadow.
O'nor stared in horror as the Shadow attacked everything near it. The enhanced speed and power of the Dragon-Oath were not lost on the fiend. Four Anai warriors shifted their attacks to this new monstrosity, but three were dismembered in a single, blurring arc of its arm. The appendage holding the blade of the fallen soldier still bore the skin of the Dragon-Oath, but it was cracked and leaking a thick, lightless smoke that seemed to absorb the desert sun.
The fourth Anai slipped under the arc and plunged her blade upward into the neck of the fiend, causing it to collapse to the ground in a heap.
The Anai warrior raised her blade in victory, only to watch in terror as the Shadow reconstituted itself. It rose, extending thick, ink-like tendrils across the bloody sand toward the three Anai it had just killed.
In a display of sickening horror, the creature's tendrils stitched the severed bodies of the three Anai back together. They rose from the dirt with blackened veins, blackened nails, and lightless eyes. These husks moved with jerky, unnatural speed, puppeteered by the Void itself.
O'nor turned fully to face the creature, opening his mouth to order his remaining Dragon-Oath to attack. But before he could speak, the Shadow Sworn turned its faceless head toward him, and a voice rippled through the frequency of the Void itself.
Relent.
Beside O'nor, another Dragon-Oath dropped to the sand, his hands covering his face as the consumption began.
O'nor felt the oily tendrils of the dark reaching for his own mind. It was a terrifying tug-of-war against a wave of cosmic hunger. Tightening his focus, O'nor violently pushed away the mental pull. He lunged at the first Shadow, his blade flashing in the dim light, cutting the creature cleanly in half.
The fallen Shadow simply began to reform its smoking halves.
O'nor backed away, utter disbelief shattering his tactical mind. The Void was replacing them. His ultimate weapon was a parasite, and they had just opened the door for it.
He had no choice.
O'nor spun around, grabbed the bleeding, blue-eyed Anai woman, and hauled her roughly over his shoulder.
"Retreat!" O'nor roared, his voice cracking with a mortal terror as he looked at his surviving men. He pointed his bloodied blade away from the mountain of Beh-REET, aiming it straight into enemy lands. "Retreat toward the borders of the Anai!"
In the blood-soaked dirt of the Red Canyons, the first Shadow Sworn were born.