In the training room, Elian and Glenn shared a mont of precarious quiet. The disciple lay on the ground catching his breath as they exchanged calm words. Then, in the blink of an eye, the world transford.
The impact ca before comprehension. A wave of primordial power swept through the castle like a cosmic typhoon, distorting reality and tearing through the air with divine force. Glenn, even with his heightened senses, barely had ti to widen his pupils before his body succumbed to the crushing weight of that celestial presence. He collapsed, breath trapped in a silent scream.
Elian, untouched by the chaos, turned his gaze beyond the shimring walls and understood instantly.
"So she's finally lost patience..." he murmured, his voice as unshakable as tempered steel.
Elian extended a cloak of prana around Glenn's body. As the entire castle groaned under the pressure, he shielded his disciple from that deluge of absolute power.
**
Elsewhere in the tower, the royal consort's attendants also fell:
Dahlia stumbled in the hallway, her fingers losing strength, the tray of food shattering on the ground a mont before her consciousness faded.
In the alchemy lab, Hera dropped a glass vial that exploded into multicolored shards as her body collapsed onto the workbench.
Aster, in Glenn's room, fell to her knees like a puppet with severed strings, the broom toppling beside her before she could react.
Beyond the palace walls, the impact echoed like a magical earthquake. In the ancestral halls, six motionless figures exchanged glances:
Valerius furrowed his brow.
Cassian pressed his lips together.
Silas inclined his head.
Marius crossed his arms.
Lyra clenched her fists.
Isolde sighed.
A silent chorus of disapproval.
The royal guard soldiers crumpled like dry leaves in the wind. Anyone below the rank of Master was swept away by the tidal wave of power. In the central courtyard, however, one man stood firm as a rock against the storm.
The Captain of the Royal Guard roared, his aura exploding into a golden domain that enveloped every fallen soldier. His muscles trembled under the strain, veins bulging in his neck, but his smile was pure exultation.
"Your Majesty..." he whispered with devotion, feeling his queen's power reach the pinnacle of existence. It was like touching the face of a god.
**
And then, Chaos stilled.
The sky darkened in the blink of an eye. Purple clouds coiled like cosmic serpents, their lightning illuminating the city with ghostly light. Across the capital:
Guild magic crystals sputtered and died with agonized crackles.
rchants scrambled to lock their shops, hands trembling on the latches.
In restaurants, forks and knives clattered onto half-finished plates.
In the streets, citizens froze. The air turned thick, each breath a battle. Parents pulled their children close; warriors gripped their weapons in vain. For a tiless mont, Chaos lost:
Its sounds.
Its colors.
Its lifeblood.
And at the center of that void, like a black hole of pure will, Selene reigned.
** Three days later
Faenor Lasair was in his sanctum when the black ebony walls began to tremble. Not from the distant impact of Selene's aura, but from sothing closer, more personal. The alarm bells didn't sound. The eternal flas in the candelabras bowed as if in reverence. He looked up from the grimoire he was studying, his fingers stained with the ashes of creatures incinerated in his experints, and he knew. She had co.
The door to his sanctuary exploded into charred splinters. Lissal Quesset, Queen of the Elves, stepped inside with silent footsteps, her jade armor gleaming under the distorted light of the flas. Her guards, wreathed in green mist, surrounded Faenor like specters ready to drag him to hell.
He laughed, a hoarse, desperate sound as his own flas guttered out, smothered by the ancestral dominion she held over his lineage's magic.
"You thought I didn't know?" Lissal asked, her voice as soft as the rustling of dry leaves before a wildfire. "You and those vermin from the other towers, playing god with flesh that isn't yours." Her gaze fell on the open book, where sketches of Glenn appeared alongside dissection diagrams. The fury that followed didn't co in shouts, but in icy silence. She didn't even need to give the order. Shackles forged in the depths of the Black Exile clamped around his wrists.
Faenor still tried to resist. "He is the key!" he snarled, eyes burning with the madness of one who had seen secrets ant to stay hidden. "With him, we could..." A flick of Lissal's wrist, and the shackles heated to a searing red, cutting him off with a muffled scream. As he was dragged away to the fate awaiting all traitors of the elven court, his last sight was his own tower in flas, not from the fire he so loved, but from the ghostly green of Lissal's ancestral magic, erasing his existence as if he had never been lord of anything.
**
Thorgrim Ironvolt felt the tremor in the copper wires before he even heard the alarm cries. His calloused fingers, still blackened with the oil that kept his machines running, froze over the pulsing energy core before him.
The air slled of ozone and fear. He didn't need to see to know, Selene had revealed her true face, and now the price would be paid.
The door to his private workshop was broken down not by enemies, but by his own subordinates. "Master Thorgrim!" an apprentice shouted, face bloodied from a hasty fall. "The records... the experints... what do we do?" Thorgrim didn't answer. Instead, he raised his war hamr, not to fight, but to destroy.
The first strike hit the energy core with a crack that echoed like bottled thunder.
"You know what must be done," he growled, his voice as rough as forged iron. "No traces. No witnesses." His eyes, small and glowing like embers, swept over the room full of forbidden machines, devices that extracted affinities from living creatures, crystals that stored stolen essences. All the things he had called progress would now be his death sentence if discovered.
The younger apprentices hesitated. One, a dwarf girl with hands still clean of blood, stamred, "But the years of research..." Thorgrim didn't let her finish. His hamr t her skull with a wet crunch. "Now you understand," he muttered, wiping the steel on his apron. "The weak have no choice!"
**
Lysandra Maris sensed the first sign in the still waters of her observatory. The liquid in the great silver chalice began to boil without fire, forming violent whirlpools that splashed droplets like tears across the white marble. Her slender fingers, still damp from her latest experints, tightened around the chalice. She knew. Selene had declared war, and the Tide Tower was in her sights.
The silence of her domain was shattered by hurried footsteps in the wet corridors. "Lady Lysandra!" an acolyte cried, slipping on the soaked floor. "The ssengers say the Fla Tower has fallen, and the Wind..."
"Silence." Lysandra didn't raise her voice. Her words simply cut through the air like a blade over still water. "Gather the Nine Tiers in the Grand Aquarium. Now."
The Grand Aquarium was not a place of beauty that night. The reinforced glass tanks that usually displayed rare sea creatures now reflected pale faces, her best researchers, her most promising students, all gathered like fish in a net.
"You know the price of betrayal," Lysandra declared, her voice echoing in the damp chamber.
She didn't even need to point to the corpses floating in the central tank—three ssengers who had arrived too late with warnings. "The Demon Queen will leave no stone unturned if she discovers what we did to the demon prisoners."
A young water mage fell to his knees. "But our work..."
"Will be preserved," Lysandra interrupted, a frigid smile curving her lips. "In the only places Selene will never reach."
"The sea keeps its secrets better than any grave," Lysandra whispered as she watched the first group be pushed into the abyss through the underwater tunnel. The bubbles rising to the surface seed to applaud.
**
Laek gathered his mages in the circular hall atop the tower, where the winds used to sing through the cracks. That night, however, the silence was absolute.
"She knows," Laek announced, his voice a hoarse whisper that echoed like a shout in the stillness. "And we won't be caught like the others."
His followers exchanged glances. So were young, still with light feathers on their wings. Others, veterans of a thousand forbidden experints. All knew what those words ant.
"The Void Plan," one murmured.
Laek nodded, extending his claws. "Prepare yourselves. When night falls a second ti, not one stone of this tower will remain."
At midnight, the beastkin mages assembled in the central atrium. Laek traced circles in the air with his claws, each movent leaving behind trails of black smoke that refused to dissipate.
"Where are we going, master?" asked an apprentice, wings trembling.
Laek smiled, revealing sharp teeth. "Where the wind cannot follow."
With a final gesture, he pierced his own chest with a claw, letting a single drop of blood fall into the center of the circle. The ground shook. The walls began dissolving like sand carried by the wind.
That sa night, sowhere between wakefulness and dreams, Glenn awoke choking.
For an instant, between sleep and awareness, he swore he saw a tall, feathered figure standing in the corner of his room.
"You are next," the figure whispered before dissolving into feathers that never touched the ground.
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