Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

”I want the finest mind-mages in the province waiting for him when he thaws. He will tell us where the children are, even if we have to pry the answers from his shattered psyche.”

Sir Lucas grinned, a terrifying, scarred expression. ”A pleasure doing business with you, Marquess. The Duke sends his regards.”

”My deepest thanks to the Vanguard,” Julian nodded, his posture relaxing slightly as the heavy, anti-magic manacles clicked securely around the abductor’s wrists. The crisis that had haunted his city for a month was finally breaking. ”We have him. By the Light, we finally have him.”

It was a moment of triumph.

It was the closing scene of a successful hunt.

And then, the wind changed.

Out in the main plaza, walking hand-in-hand with Kaelus, Seraphina suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.

The heavy, comforting blanket of Kaelus’s protective dark mana, the aura that had been shielding her from the sensory overload of the market, was abruptly, violently pierced.

It was not a physical breeze.

The air in the market was warm, stagnant, and thick with the humidity of thousands of breathing bodies.

But what brushed past Seraphina felt like a physical caress of absolute, freezing zero.

It was a phantom wind, a breath of air dragged directly from the deepest, most lightless trench of an icy ocean.

Seraphina’s breath hitched in her throat.

Her lungs seized.

The piece of sugar dragon she had been chewing turned to ash on her tongue.

Her Supreme Dark Core, the apex magical anomaly that had lain dormant and peaceful since her awakening, suddenly contracted.

It didn’t expand to protect her, as it had done when she touched the Void-pearl.

It shrank, curling inward with the desperate, primal instinct of a small animal trying to make itself invisible to an overwhelming predator.

’What... what is that?’ Seraphina’s mind screamed, the sheer intensity of the spiritual pressure short-circuiting her thoughts.

She wasn’t looking at ghosts.

The nostalgic, harmless spirits of the merchants that had been hovering around the stalls were gone.

They hadn’t faded peacefully; they had vanished in a microsecond, fleeing into the ether in absolute, blind terror.

Seraphina let go of Kaelus’s hand.

She turned her head, looking back over her shoulder, her dark eyes wide, tracking the source of the unnatural, freezing current that was slicing through the ambient mana of the festival.

The crowd was thick.

People were laughing, drinking from wooden tankards, and holding glowing paper lanterns aloft.

To the naked eye, it was just a sea of humanity.

But Seraphina’s Spirit Sight cut through the mundane veil.

Moving through the dense crowd, heading precisely toward the dark alleyway they had just left, was a man.

He did not look like a monster.

He did not wear the dark, tactical leather of an assassin, nor did he carry the heavy, blood-stained armor of a mercenary.

He was dressed with the impeccable, flawless elegance of high nobility.

He wore a tailored, immaculately cut overcoat of deep, plum-colored velvet, embroidered with subtle, twisting patterns of silver thread that caught the light of the lanterns.

A pristine white silk cravat was tied neatly at his throat.

Upon his head sat an elegant, wide-brimmed black hat, tilted ever so slightly forward, casting a deep, sharp shadow over the upper half of his face.

He walked with a hypnotically smooth gait.

There was no bobbing of his shoulders, no wasted kinetic energy.

He seemed to glide over the cobblestones, his polished silver-tipped cane tapping rhythmically against the ground, though the taps made absolutely no sound.

But the most terrifying aspect of the man was not his attire or his unnatural grace.

It was the way the crowd reacted to him.

The market was packed shoulder-to-shoulder, a chaotic crush of bodies.

Yet, not a single person bumped into the man in the plum coat.

Without realizing it, without even looking at him, the commoners subconsciously parted, creating a clear, two-foot radius of space around him as he walked.

Their primitive survival instincts were screaming at their nervous systems to move out of the way, even as their conscious minds remained blissfully ignorant of his presence.

He was a shark gliding through a school of oblivious fish.

Seraphina couldn’t breathe.

The sugar dragon slipped from her numb fingers, shattering into a dozen sticky, red shards on the dirty cobblestones.

’Ominous,’ her mind whispered, the only word capable of capturing the suffocating density of the aura rolling off him.

It was a presence so ancient, so heavily saturated with malice, that it made the blood-soaked killing intent of the Reaper of the North feel like a warm summer breeze in comparison.

The man in the hat did not look at Seraphina.

He did not look at Kaelus.

He was focused entirely on his trajectory.

He was heading straight for the alleyway.

Kaelus, noticing the sudden loss of contact with Seraphina’s hand, stopped immediately.

He spun around, his violet eyes flashing with instant alarm.

”Seraphina?” Kaelus demanded, his hand dropping to the concealed hilt of his dagger. He saw her frozen posture, the absolute terror draining the color from her face, her eyes locked on the moving crowd. ”What is it? What do you see?”

Kaelus cast his own senses out, trying to track her line of sight. But the market was too crowded, the ambient magic too chaotic.

He saw nothing but merchants and peasants.

”Papa,” Seraphina whispered, her voice a trembling rasp. She raised a shaking, tiny finger, pointing toward the gap in the stalls. ”That man... the hat...”

In the alleyway, thirty paces away, the scene was calm.

Sir Lucas and Sir Boris had successfully handed the anti-magic manacles of the freezing abductor over to Julian’s estate guards.

The Marquess was turning around, preparing to step back into the light of the market to signal Kaelus that the extraction was complete.

The elegant man in the plum velvet coat stepped into the mouth of the alleyway.

No one knew of the silent storm coming through at that moment, not anyone except Seraphina.