LOGINZane's Point Of ViewWe came out of the stairway running and didn't stop.Floor 7 was a courtyard at the bottom of a dark mountain, and the mountain had a castle on it, tier after tier of black stone climbing until the towers disappeared into a sky the color of a dead thing. The Sigen Lord was up there. I could feel him the way you feel a hand resting on the back of your neck, and after six floors, after the mist and the wall and everything the tower had thrown at us just to slow us down, all I wanted was to reach the stairs on the far side of this yard and keep going. Ronan ran half a step ahead of me and we didn't waste breath on words.My legs were screaming. The glow under my skin hadn't gone out since the Sixth Floor, and my new core sat in my chest like a coal that wouldn't cool, and I ran on it anyway, spending what I had, because somewhere far below us a city was dying and a core was failing and every minute counted.We were halfway across the yard when the air in front of us
The outer city had gone quiet.Not the quiet of peace,,, the quiet of a place that had been drunk dry. The wraiths had taken the courtyards, the secondary gates, the academy where the young soldiers had died with their life force leaching out of them like heat from a corpse, and now the streets beyond the inner sanctuary stood empty in the dark. The crimson sky had faded to the color of an old wound. Even the light was dying.On the sanctuary steps, the Alpha King counted his front line for the third time that night and got the same number each time. Too few. His cloak was gone, torn off somewhere in the retreat from the courtyards. His armor had dried black. Some of the blood on it was his.Behind him the doors stood open, swallowing civilians in a slow, shuffling stream... the old, the wounded, children carrying younger children. And beneath everything, hum the city's magic core, the heartbeat under the flagstones. It stuttered. A catch, a skip, like a man trying to breathe around a
Zane's Point Of ViewThe cold edge of the Void-Guard's heavy iron halberd was already pressing into the skin of my throat, cutting just deep enough to draw a thin trickle of blood, when everything went dead quiet. The screech of metal, the smell of burning ozone, and the sound of Ronan screaming my name on the other side of the dividing barrier vanished in an instant, swallowed by a silence so total it felt like drowning. For a heartbeat, I wondered if I'd already died and simply hadn't noticed. I knelt in the vault, chest heaving, the dragon fire and wolf lightning churning in my ribcage like two freight trains locked head-on. Every nerve in my body screamed for release, and some distant, rational part of me wondered if this was what dying felt like… this unbearable pressure with nowhere to go. My vision blurred at the edges, the world narrowing to nothing but the twin infernos trying to claw their way out of my chest. Daekan hauled me up by the vest, embers spitting from his lips
Zane's Point Of ViewThe cold bite of the Void-Guard's halberd vanished from my collarbone. The deafening thud of Ronan pounding his fists against the iron wall died instantly into a strange, heavy silence, as if the entire world had been swallowed by a held breath.The physical world fell away, and when my eyes opened, I wasn't lying flat on my back on a three-foot obsidian ledge over an endless void.I was standing in the center of the cosmic arena.The floor beneath my boots stretched out in a massive, seamless ring of ancient, dark stone, polished like glass and suspended over an infinite expanse. Below the edge of the stone, rivers of thick, liquid starlight swirled side by side with surging trenches of deep, crimson magma, casting a low, rhythmic pulse of light across the vast void. The air hummed with a thick, ancient mana that tasted like ozone and dry earth, settling into my throat with a heavy, physical weight. Every inhale felt like swallowing a piece of history older than
Zane's Point Of View My boot scraped the edge of the obsidian ledge, sending a spray of fine black dust down into the dark abyss below. The air on Floor Six was so thin and cold it felt like swallowing crushed ice, every ragged breath burning a path clean down into my chest. My lungs ached with the effort of keeping pace, and somewhere beneath the pain, a thread of fear coiled tight in my gut... we were running out of floor, and running out of time."Keep the pace!" I yelled over my shoulder, my fingers white-knuckled around the sweat-slicked hilt of my stolen steel blade. "We have two floors left before..."SNAP.The sound was a violent, high-pitched electrical hiss that made the hair on my neck stand straight up.Right between our boots, the floor tore open in a blinding grid of harsh crimson light. Ancient spatial runes flared from the stone, spitting fat sparks that singed through the leather of my trousers."Zane, back!" Ronan's voice shattered the quiet behind me, his hand sho
Zane's Point Of ViewMy boots skidded across the cold obsidian stone, dust kicking up around my shins as I pushed the pace. The air on Floor Six hung cold and thin, sharp enough to bite at the back of my throat like swallowed needles. My chest heaved, every breath burning against my bruised ribs, but I refused to slow down. We'd come too far to stall now. "Keep the pace, Prince!" I shouted over my shoulder, my knuckles turning white around the hilt of my stolen steel blade. "We have two floors left before…" SNAP. The sound wasn't a crack of thunder. It was a sharp, electrical hiss that made the hair on my arms stand straight up, some primal instinct screaming at me a half-second before my mind caught up. Right between our boots, the floor burst into a blinding grid of crimson light. Ancient spatial runes flared out of the stone, spitting sparks that singed the leather of my boots. "Zane, stop!" Ronan roared behind me, reaching out a hand to grab my shoulder. Before his fingers c







