Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 388: Chapter 383: Devil in Kael’thoren

Location:Kael’thoren barracks → Kael’thoren ridge

Date/Time:Late Ashbloom, 9940 AZI

Realm:Demon Realm (Upper Realm)

The basins had been in place for months.

Every mess hall. Every barracks common room. Every entrance to every building where guards gathered, ate, or reported for duty. Stone basins filled with clear water, replenished each morning. Demons washed their hands before meals, before rituals, before council. The basins were invisible. Part of the architecture.

No one knew the water had been treated.

Vaelith’s reagent — diluted to trace concentration — sat in every basin. On genuine demons, the treated water felt like nothing. On a devil, it produced a rash. Small. Red. Barely noticeable.

The monitoring teams watched. Months of clean washes. Thousands of genuine demons.

Then the border patrol rotated in.

Forty guards cycling back from the northern frontier. Standard rotation. Six months beyond the basin network. Six months of unwashed hands.

Thirty-nine washed clean.

One scratched his wrist.

***

The monitoring officer didn’t react. Finished her meal. Left the mess hall. Reported.

Second observation. Evening meal. Different monitor. Same result — the guard washing, sitting, scratching. The rash small and red beneath the knuckles.

His name in the records was Thovren. Mid-ranking. Centuries of border service. The soldier who brought extra rations to the night watch and remembered whose brother had been promoted last season.

The extraction order went to Ren’s personal guard. Three Kael’thoren elite and two of Ren’s Kael’shira — Draven, crimson hair tied back, gold-red eyes burning with the perpetual intensity of a warrior who treated every assignment as a personal challenge, and Cassian, amber-orange eyes half-lidded, the youngest blood kin slouching against the wall like he’d rather be napping.

Pull Thovren aside during the morning equipment inspection. Isolate. Restrain. Transfer.

The plan lasted four seconds.

***

Equipment inspection room. Stone walls. One door.

Thovren walked in. Saw five armed demons in a room with chains on the table. His copper eyes moved across each face — Draven’s combat stance, Cassian’s deceptive slouch, the three elite with hands on hilts.

Then Thovren smiled.

Not the friendly smile his colleagues had known for centuries. Something beneath it. Something that pushed through the familiar features the way light pushed through cracked glass — and the face broke apart.

The copper skin paled. Whitened. The broad shoulders narrowed and lengthened. The scar on the jaw smoothed away. The features rearranged — not grotesquely, not with the horror of something monstrous emerging. The opposite. Every line settling into symmetry so precise it hurt to look at. The skin luminous. Alabaster-white. Glowing faintly from within. The hair darkening, then bleaching to silver-white, each strand identical, flowing past shoulders that had become narrow and elegant.

And the eyes.

The copper irises bled to black — deep, endless black — and then filled with light. Points of scattered brilliance, like stars seen from the void between worlds. A night sky compressed into the space behind two irises.

Draven’s blade was halfway drawn. His body was in combat stance. His training, his fifteen thousand years of war, everything that had kept him alive through campaigns that would fill libraries — all of it told him to strike.

His hands didn’t move.

The face was too beautiful. The proportions too perfect. The starlight eyes too mesmerising. His combat instincts — the ones that read threats, that processed danger signals, that had saved his life ten thousand times — couldn’t reconcile kill it with that.

One heartbeat of hesitation. That was all the devil needed.

It moved.

The first elite died without seeing the strike. A white hand — the fingers had lengthened, sharpened to blade-points — opened his throat. The second elite managed a half-step backward before the same hand came back across and caught him from temple to jaw. Both bodies hitting the floor before the blood from the first had reached the stone.

The third elite got his sword up. The blade caught the devil across the ribs. Steel on porcelain — the alabaster skin had hardened at the point of impact, and the sword skidded, sparked, and the elite’s arms jarred to the shoulders with the rebound. The devil’s elbow hit him in the sternum. The crack of the breastplate was audible. The crack of the ribs behind it was worse. He went down.

Draven charged. The hesitation burned away by rage — three soldiers dead in his sight, under his command, his responsibility. His blade caught the devil across the back. Deep. Black mist hissing from the wound instead of blood.

The devil turned. Those starlight eyes. Up close now. Three feet away.

Hollow. The stars were hollow. Points of light over an emptiness so complete that Draven’s soul recoiled. A night sky with no universe behind it. Beauty as camouflage over nothing.

Its fingers drove into his shoulder. Through the armour. Through the muscle. Through the bone. Draven felt the invasion — cold, purposeful, spreading through his blood like frost through water. His veins darkened. The skin around the wound blackened. The cold crawled outward — toward his chest, toward his heart.

The pain was unlike anything combat had taught him. Not sharp. Not hot. Deep. Rotting. The feeling of something alive moving through his body that wanted to stay.

He screamed. His body screamed. A sound that had nothing to do with the warrior and everything to do with the animal underneath.

The devil twisted its fingers and threw him through the wall.

Not through one wall. Through three. Draven’s body smashed through stone, through the corridor, through the exterior barracks wall, and out into the dawn air. He landed forty feet from the building. Didn’t get up. The black veins crawled across his chest. His breathing shallow. The gold-red eyes dimming.

Cassian was already inside the devil’s guard. The joker was gone — amber-orange eyes fully open, fully awake, the youngest of Ren’s blood kin fighting with everything he’d learned from the oldest. His fists hit the devil’s ribs. Essence-charged. Inferno and Torrent simultaneously — fire and water colliding inside the devil’s body, the thermal shock designed to crack internal structures.

The devil staggered. One step. The first time anything had moved it.

Then it caught Cassian’s wrist. Those porcelain fingers closing like a vice. The cold flooding through the contact — the same invasion, the same crawling corruption. Cassian’s hand went black. The veins were spreading up his forearm like dark lightning.

The devil threw him upward. Through the ceiling. Through the floor above. Through the ceiling of the second storey. Cassian’s body cratered the roof and came to rest two floors up — collarbone shattered, ribs broken, the black veins racing from his wrist toward his shoulder.

Five warriors. Five seconds. The room destroyed. Three dead. Two carrying poison that standard healing wouldn’t touch.

The devil stepped through the ruined doorway. Not a scratch on it. The alabaster skin unmarred. The starlight eyes patient.

Ren was standing in the corridor.

The beast hit the containment so hard that the mental barriers cracked.

Ren’s eyes swept the room. Two of his blood kin down. Three guards dead. The thing in the doorway — alabaster, glowing, silver-white hair, a face that couldn’t be real.

He reached for it on the Common Path. Instinct. The same way he reached for every demon in the realm — the threads that connected king to subject, the web that let him feel every soul under his authority.

Nothing. The Common Path slid off the devil the way water slid off glass. Where Thovren had been — where a demon’s thread should have anchored — there was a blank space. A gap. The devil stood three feet from Ren and didn’t exist on the Path at all.

Not hidden. Not shielded. Absent. As if the Common Path didn’t recognise it as alive.

Ren filed it. The corridor behind him was full of people.

”OUT,” he said. ”NOW.”

He drove his fist through the exterior wall. The stone exploded outward — dawn air flooding the corridor, the ridge behind Kael’thoren visible, the open ground where what was about to happen wouldn’t kill everyone in the building.

The devil followed.

They stepped onto the ridge in the same heartbeat. Dawn light. Cold air. The stone beneath their feet ancient — the ridge that Kael’thoren had been built against, the same rock that had stood since before the Sundering.

The devil’s back rippled.

The white robes it had manifested split. Something pushed through — not bone, not membrane. Feathers. White feathers. Long, layered, each one catching the dawn light and scattering it like a prism. The wings unfurled. Vast. White. Feathered. They stretched twenty feet in each direction — not the leathery battle-wings of a demon but something else entirely. Something that looked like a painting of divinity. Grace made physical. Light made structural.

The devil hung in the air. Alabaster skin. Silver-white hair. Starlight eyes. White feathered wings spread against the dawn. If you had seen it from a distance — from the battlements, from a window — you would have fallen to your knees. You would have worshipped.

Ren’s transformation ripped through him.

The horns erupted from his temples — curved, black, spiralling, each one longer than a man’s arm and pulsing with Voidshadow essence. The wings — midnight-dark, membrane-stretched between bone ridges, the shadow of something vast — unfolded and caught the air. His hands reshaped. Talons extending — compressed void given edge, darkness that devoured light and matter with equal hunger.

His eyes stayed purple. The Common Path singing through him. Millions of threads. The weight of every demon in the realm.

Midnight against dawn. Shadow against light. Demon king against something that had been hiding inside his civilisation for centuries and had just killed three of his people and poisoned two of his brothers.

Ren launched.

***

The first exchange erased the ridge crest.

Ren’s talons carved the air — Voidshadow trailing behind the strikes, corridors of absolute nothing cut through reality. Where the void passed, matter ceased. Stone. Air. Light. All of it devoured, leaving gaps in the world that the surrounding air rushed to fill with a sound like thunder.

The devil dodged. Feathered wings driving it sideways — the movement graceful, each wingbeat precise, the white feathers cutting through dawn light.

It counterattacked with Radiance.

The blast caught Ren across the chest. Golden-white light — the essence that no demon male could channel, the female-only power turned into a weapon. It hit like condensed starlight. Ren’s armour — the natural darkening of his skin during transformation — absorbed the first layer. The second burned through. The third drove him backward, boots carving trenches through stone, the Radiance searing across his chest in a line of white-hot agony.

He channeled Voidshadow through the burn. The darkness ate the Radiance. The pain vanished. But the damage remained — a scorch mark across his chest that steamed in the cold air.

They separated. Thirty metres apart. The ridge between them scarred with void-corridors and Radiance burns.

The devil hovered. White wings beating. Starlight eyes amused.

”Your people are delicious,” it said. The voice carried — layered, musical, the sound of a thousand voices singing a single note in perfect harmony. ”Have you ever tasted a demoness’s soul? Like fine wine. Each one different. Each one exquisite.”

Ren said nothing. He folded his wings and dove.

Voidshadow erupted from both hands. Twin corridors of nothing — screaming through the air, consuming the distance between them. The devil banked. One wing dipping. The void corridors passed beneath it — and hit the mountain behind.

The peak sheared. Not crumbled. Not cracked. The upper two hundred feet of the mountain simply ceased to exist. The void ate it. The remaining stone — exposed, steaming, the geological strata visible in cross-section — stood like a decapitated pillar against the sky.

Debris rained. Boulders the size of houses falling from where a peak had been.

The devil wove through the falling stone. Each dodge precise. Each movement a performance — the white wings cutting arcs through the debris, the feathers untouched by the dust and rubble.

Ren pursued. Through the debris cloud. Through the falling stone. A boulder clipped his left wing — pain flaring, membrane torn — and he drove through it, Voidshadow-charged talon splitting the rock in half as he passed.

They collided above the ruined mountain.

Close quarters. Wings tangled. The devil’s Radiance blazing from its hands — white-gold light that burned demon flesh on contact. Ren’s Voidshadow rolling off his talons — darkness that devoured everything the Radiance touched. Light and void meeting between them in explosions that sent shockwaves rippling across the sky.

The devil’s blade-fingers raked Ren’s side. Four lines of fire. The Radiance-charged tips trying to burn through his ribs. Ren twisted — the movement costing him a torn wing membrane — and drove his knee into the devil’s chest. The porcelain armour cracked. Black mist erupted from the fracture.

The devil caught his horn. Wrenched his head sideways. Ren felt the vertebrae in his neck grind.

”I’ve seen your mate,” the devil said. Intimate. Close enough that the musical voice didn’t need to carry. ”The Common Path reaches for her, doesn’t it? Even now. Even from across the realms.”

Ren’s talon punched through the devil’s forearm. The Voidshadow ate the flesh from the inside. The devil released his horn.

They separated again. Breathing hard now — both of them. The devil’s left arm hanging wrong. Ren’s wing torn, his side bleeding, his neck grinding with each turn.

Below, the landscape was destroyed. The ridge cratered. The mountain decapitated. Trees flattened for two miles. The stone scorched with alternating patterns of void-black and Radiance-white — the battlefield painted in the colours of the two combatants. From Kael’thoren’s battlements, it looked like two gods had gone to war and the mountain had lost.

The devil circled. The damaged arm regenerating — slowly. The porcelain armour growing back over the void-eaten flesh.

”You demons are fascinating,” it continued. ”You fight and fight and fight. For what? A dead god who abandoned you. A world that doesn’t want you. Mates you’ll never find.” The smile. The perfect, luminous smile. ”Centuries I’ve lived among you. Eaten at your tables. Washed at your basins. You never suspected. Not once.”

Ren circled opposite. Patient. The beast reading the pattern — the slight drop in altitude when the devil spoke. The way the regenerating arm drew essence from the wings, making the left wingbeat fractionally slower.

The devil’s Radiance gathered at its fingers. A concentrated blast — brighter than the others, the golden-white light intensifying until the air around its hands rippled with heat distortion. It fired.

Ren didn’t dodge. He met it.

Voidshadow from both hands. The full weight of his essence — the absence of everything, the hunger of the void, the darkness that existed before the Codex created light. The twin streams hit the Radiance blast mid-air.

The collision was silent.

For one heartbeat, there was no sound. Light and void cancelling each other — the two fundamental forces, creation and oblivion, meeting between a demon king and something that used Radiance as a weapon.

Then the shockwave hit.

The blast expanded outward in a sphere. The remaining trees — everything within three miles — went flat. The stone beneath them fractured in concentric rings. The air itself compressed and then tore, the atmospheric shockwave visible as a wall of distortion racing outward from the collision point.

On Kael’thoren’s battlements, demons grabbed the parapets. The fortress shook. Dust cascaded from the ceilings. In the deep cells, the ancient chains rattled.

When the dust cleared, both combatants were still airborne. The devil’s right wing was burning — Voidshadow had eaten through three feathers, and the void damage wouldn’t heal. The white feathers curling, darkening, disintegrating where the darkness touched them.

Ren’s chest was burned. The Radiance had punched through his Voidshadow counter — not fully, but enough. His breath came short. Broken ribs from the earlier strike grinding with each wingbeat.

The devil looked at its burning wing. The first expression that wasn’t amusement. Something colder.

”Enough,” it said. ”I’ll offer you something. Tell me how you detected me — whatever method you’re using — and I’ll give you the location of Sharlin’s most prized prison.”

Ren’s circling stopped.

Sharlin’s prison. The place where people disappeared and never came back. The place his intelligence teams had been searching for — the place his parents might be. If they were still alive. If Sharlin had kept them rather than killed them.

The devil saw his reaction. The perfect smile returning.

”Yes. I know what you’re looking for. Two demons. Hidden away. Very well hidden. I can tell you exactly where.”

Ren’s talons flexed. The Voidshadow hissing along their edges.

”How many of you are in my realm?” he countered.

The devil laughed.

The sound was — there was no other way to describe it. It was what music would sound like if music had never known sorrow. Voices in impossible harmony. A chorus of tones so pure they resonated in the chest, in the bones, in the place where the soul met the body. It was the most beautiful sound Ren had ever heard. And it was utterly, completely empty.

The devil smiled. Playful. The starlight eyes bright.

”Wouldn’t you like to know?”

The smile was wrong. Not the shape of it. The feeling of it. Ren had spent his life reading the Common Path — reading souls through their connections, their weight, their light. He could read demons the way a musician read sheet music. The emotions. The intentions. The depth.

The devil’s smile held genuine emotion. For the first time in the entire fight. Not malice. Not cruelty. Not the cold calculation of an infiltrator maintaining cover.

Amusement. Real amusement. The pleasure of a being that found this conversation genuinely entertaining.

That wasn’t Zartonesh. The Zartonesh were beasts. Driven. Mindless in their hunger. They didn’t find things amusing. They didn’t play. They didn’t enjoy.

”You’re not Zartonesh,” Ren said.

The devil’s expression shifted. Not the smile — the eyes. The hollow starlight flickering with something that looked, for the first time, like a real reaction.

”What are you?”

The devil’s face twisted. Not in pain. In disgust. The perfect features contorting with a revulsion so genuine it cracked the beauty.

”Zartonesh?” It spat the word. ”Those are beasts. Filthy, mindless, ugly creatures that we drive before us like cattle.” The white wings spread wider. The alabaster glow intensifying. The starlight eyes blazing. ”We are their gods.”

Silence. The wind across the ruined mountain.

The devil settled. The disgust fading back into the smile. The playful warmth returning — the warmth that had no soul behind it.

”Don’t you want your mate back?” it said softly.

The air between them shimmered. A holographic image forming — projected from the devil’s Radiance, drawn from memories that should have been impossible to possess.

A toddler. Two years old. Dark hair. Green-gold eyes — bright with the unmistakable shimmer of a female demon child. Suzarin. Ren’s first truemate. Alive in the image. Reaching for something beyond the frame. Laughing.

The image was perfect. Every detail precise. The child who had been killed ten thousand years ago, preserved in a devil’s memory like a pressed flower in a book.

”She was beautiful before the Soulreaper tore her apart,” the devil said. The musical voice gentle. Tender. ”Her soul was delicious. The purest light. Salroch saved me a piece.”

The image shimmered. Suzarin’s face. Two years old. Laughing.

”But I can recreate her for you.” The devil’s voice dropped. Intimate. The offer of a being that had been making offers for longer than the demon civilisation had existed. ”Surrender. Serve us. Loyally. And you and every male demon will have a mate. We can give you what the Codex can’t.” The white wings spread. The starlight eyes bright with the promise. ”Why fight for a god that has abandoned you?”

Ren looked at the image of Suzarin. The child he’d mourned for ten thousand years. The mate whose death had carved a wound in the Common Path that had never healed.

He looked at the image for a long time.

Then his eyes went cold. Not the fury of the earlier fight. Not the rage that had driven him through the devil’s chest. Something deeper. Something that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with certainty.

He moved.

The speed was beyond what the fight had shown. Beyond what the devil expected. Beyond what any demon should have been capable of — the full, absolute, unreserved output of a demon king channeling every thread of the Common Path through a body built for war and refined by ten thousand years of grief.

The Voidshadow-charged talon crossed the devil’s throat.

One stroke.

The head separated from the body. The hologram of Suzarin flickered and died. The white feathered wings spasmed — once — and went still. The alabaster skin lost its glow. The starlight eyes dimmed. The beauty remained, even in death. Even falling. Even dissolving.

”You talk too much,” Ren said.

The body fell. The white feathers scattering as the wings disintegrated — drifting across the ruined landscape like snow. Each feather dissolving before it touched the ground. The alabaster skin evaporating. The silver-white hair. The porcelain armour. All of it misting away into nothing.

All of it except one thing.

A crystal. Fist-sized. Dark. It lay on the scorched stone where the devil’s chest had been — the last solid piece of something that had otherwise ceased to exist. It pulsed faintly. A heartbeat rhythm. Slow. Stubborn.

Ren descended. The transformation receding — horns withdrawing, wings folding, talons retracting. He landed on the ruined ridge. Reached down.

His hand closed around the crystal.

Disgust hit him like a wall. Physical. Visceral. His body recoiling before his mind understood why — every muscle contracting, his skin crawling, his gorge rising. The thing in his hand was wrong the way the devil’s smile had been wrong. Not dangerous. Not painful. Just fundamentally, cellularly offensive to everything his body knew about what should exist.

He held it. Through the revulsion. Through the instinct to throw it as far as his arm could manage. He held it, and he channeled.

All seven essences he could channel. Simultaneously.

Inferno. Torrent. Verdant. Terracore. Metallurge. Galebreath. Voidshadow.

Every essence except Radiance — the one no demon male could touch. Every other frequency. Every other wavelength of power that Ren’s cultivation had reached across decades of training and ten thousand years of existence. All of them at once — channeled through his hands, through the crystal, through the dark pulsing thing that the devil had left behind.

The crystal resisted. For one heartbeat. Two.

Then it shattered.

The sound was not glass breaking. It was a scream — high, thin, oscillating between frequencies that hurt the ears and frequencies that hurt something deeper. The devil’s final sound. Not the layered music. Not the beautiful harmonics. A raw, animal shriek of something that had believed itself immortal being proven wrong.

The fragments disintegrated. Dark mist streaming upward from the shattered pieces. The scream fading.

And then — silence.

Ren stood on the ridge. Fragments of dark crystal dissolving around his feet. The scream gone. The devil gone. The pulsing gone.

But the air wasn’t empty.

They came slowly. Faintly. Like candle flames in a strong wind — barely there, barely holding shape. Souls. Demon souls. Rising from where the crystal had been, unfolding from the fragments, drifting upward like sparks from a dying fire.

A thousand of them. Maybe more. Mostly men — broad-shouldered, warrior-built, the shapes of demon males who had lived and fought and died and never reached the Tree. A handful of women among them — demonesses, their forms dimmer still, diminished, as if whatever had held them had been draining them for longer than the men.

Their faces were... relieved. The particular expression of someone who had been in pain for so long that the absence of pain was itself overwhelming. Not joy. Not peace. Just the cessation of something terrible. A held breath finally released.

They turned. All of them. A thousand faint demon souls, their forms barely more than light, turning toward the king who stood among the crystal fragments with blood on his face and seven essences still crackling across his hands.

They bowed.

Not the formal bow of subjects to a king. Something older. Something that came from the part of the soul that recognised liberation and knew, without words, who had provided it.

Ren stood still. The purple eyes wide. The Common Path singing — and for the first time, he could feel them. The freed souls. Faint. Fading. But there. Each one a thread that hadn’t existed a moment ago, each one a presence that the Path recognised as ours.

Rainbow light filled the ridge.

It came from above — not from the sky, not from the sun. From somewhere else. Somewhere beyond. The light cascaded down in colours that didn’t have names — colours that the eye read as a rainbow only because the mind had no other category. It touched the souls. Wrapped them. Lifted them.

Ren looked up. Into the light. And for one fraction of a heartbeat — one instant so brief it could have been imagination — he glimpsed something vast. Ancient. A structure so enormous that what he saw was like seeing a single leaf and knowing it belonged to a tree that spanned horizons.

Branches. Reaching down. Roots reaching up. A tree that existed between realities, its structure visible only in the moment when souls passed through the barrier between existence and whatever came after.

The souls rose. Into the light. Into the branches. Home.

The rainbow faded. The ridge went dark. Just scorched stone and crystal dust and a king standing alone in the wreckage.

Ren stood there for a long time.

Then he turned. Walked toward Kael’thoren. The thousand demons on the battlements staring — not just at the fight, not just at the power. At the light. At the souls. At whatever they had just witnessed their king do.

He walked through them without stopping.

”Draven. Cassian. Take me to them.”

***

They lay in the healer’s wing. Side by side. Draven conscious — barely. The crimson hair matted with blood. The gold-red eyes dim. The black veins spread across his shoulder and chest, dark lines beneath the skin, pulsing. The healers’ formations flickered against them and failed. Standard cultivation healing — Inferno warmth, Verdant restoration, Torrent cleansing — sliding off the corruption the way water slid off oil.

Cassian was worse. Collarbone shattered. Ribs broken. The black veins from his wrist past his elbow now, creeping toward his shoulder.

Ren stood between their beds. The healers stepping back. Not because he ordered them to — because the expression on the king’s face made room a necessity.

He reached for Draven’s shoulder. The wound site. Where the devil’s fingers had penetrated, and the corruption had entered.

The Voidshadow came without being called.

It flowed from Ren’s hand like dark water — seeping into the wound, following the channels the corruption had carved. Not burning. Not cutting. Consuming. The void meeting the alien essence and recognising it the way a predator recognised prey — something that didn’t belong, something that existed in the space between realities, something that the void was built to devour.

The black veins began to retreat.

Slowly. Inch by inch. The corruption pulling back from Draven’s chest, concentrating, trying to resist — and the Voidshadow following, patient, relentless, eating it the way darkness ate light. Not fighting it. Consuming it.

Draven gasped. The gold-red eyes brightening. Colour returning to his face. The veins fading — not disappearing, not yet, but retreating from the territory they’d claimed.

Ren moved to Cassian. The same process. Hand on the blackened wrist. Voidshadow flowing into the corruption channels. The void finding the alien essence and beginning to devour it.

Cassian’s amber-orange eyes opened. Unfocused. Then focused. Then locked on Ren’s face.

”Did you... win?” The joker’s voice. Rough. Broken. But the words forming.

”He talked too much.”

Cassian’s mouth twitched. The ghost of a smile beneath the pain and the corruption and the shattered bones.

The healers watched. The Voidshadow doing what their formations couldn’t — purging the devil’s poison from the blood of Ren’s brothers. A new ability. One Ren hadn’t known he possessed until the moment he needed it.

The void devoured. That was what it did. That was what it was for.

It would take hours. Multiple sessions. Draven and Cassian wouldn’t be fit for duty for weeks. But the corruption was retreating. The veins were fading. The devil’s last weapon — the poison it planted in the people it couldn’t kill — was losing.

Ren stayed between their beds. Hands working. Voidshadow flowing. The king who had torn a mountain apart, healing his brothers with the same essence that had killed the thing that hurt them.

Because the power was not the point. It had never been the point.

In the mess halls. In the barracks. In every building across the realm. The basins sat. Clear water. Trace reagent.

There were more of them. Not Zartonesh — something else. Something that called itself their god. Something with white feathered wings and hollow starlight eyes and a voice that sounded like the most beautiful music ever sung.

Something that could use Radiance.

The king would find them. Every last one.