เข้าสู่ระบบZane's Point Of View "What about the armies?" I asked, wiping another smear of foul, dark Sigen blood off the flat of my blade. "If the Sigen Lord is pushing all his forces toward the central core, he's leaving his flanks completely exposed. Their main vanguard has to be stretched thin by now." Ronan opened his mouth to answer, his jaw set, the calculation already visible behind his eyes. I could practically see the gears turning in his head, mapping troop positions and weak points the way he always did before committing to a plan. But before a single word could come out, a sharp, piercing chime cut through the quiet of the gorge, slicing clean through the tension between us. A violent, blood-red light burst from his side pocket, casting a harsh, pulsing glare over the slick obsidian walls and the headless corpse cooling at our feet. Even the air seemed to still, as if the gorge itself sensed that whatever came next would matter. I felt the hair on my arms rise, some primal instinc
Zane's Point of View "If you keep staring at the back of my head, I'm going to think you missed me," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the narrow obsidian ridge ahead. "I'm checking your balance," Ronan replied, his voice a low, steady rumble right over my left shoulder. "You're still favoring your left leg by half an inch." "My leg is fine, Prince. The skin is sealed, the muscle is patched, and if you keep micromanaging my gait, I'm going to trip you into the ash." "Try it," Ronan grunted, the leather of his pauldrons creaking as he shifted his grip on his broadsword. "See if I don't carry you the rest of the way to the keep." "God, you two are unbearable," I muttered under my breath, flicking my wrist to test the balance of the stolen steel blade in my grip. The weight sat wrong in my palm, foreign after years of favoring my own weapons, but it would do. It always had to do, lately. 'He's just worried his little human is going to break again,' Daekan rumbled in the back of my s
Zane's Point Of View "I just need to rest for five minutes," I muttered, my head resting heavily against the crook of Ronan's neck as he carried me toward the archway. "Five minutes... then we can keep moving." Ronan stopped dead in his tracks. His arms tightened around my back and knees, hard enough to compress my bruised ribs, and I felt the tremor of restrained fury running through his whole body. "Are you out of your fucking mind?" he snapped, his voice dropping into that dark, dangerous register he used when he was two seconds away from losing his temper. "Look at you, Zane! You're leaking blood from four different places, your ribs are shattered, and you can barely hold your head up! We're retreating back to the vanguard camp. Now." "Not with you looking at me like I'm made of glass," I rasped, forcing my eyes open to glare up at his jawline. "We came through that gate for one reason, Ronan. One. To stop the Dark Sigen from tearing the realms apart. And the only way we do th
Zane's Point Of View I didn't let go of the dagger right away. I just sat there on my knees in the dark, my hands locked around the hilt, my knuckles white, my whole chest heaving like a bellows. Blood… his dark, foul Sigen blood and my own hot, copper-tasting blood ran down my forearms in thick, warm streams, pooling over my legs and dripping through the floor grates below.My arms trembled from the effort of holding on, though the fight was already over. Some part of me refused to believe it, refused to trust that the thing slumped in front of me had actually stopped moving. My mind kept replaying the last exchange of blows, half-convinced I'd wake from some fever dream to find him lunging at me again. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. Nothing moved. The ancient bastard didn't twitch. He didn't breathe. His head rolled back against the metal, his mouth hung open, and his life had drained completely into the cold Void-Iron blade jammed straight through his ribs. I stared at
Zane's Point Of View The cold steel was descending. I didn't need eyes to know it. I could feel the microscopic displacement of air right above my sternum, the faint, greasy shift of the Void-Iron mist as the blade came down for the kill shot. Every instinct in my body screamed to move, to run, to do anything but lie still, but instinct wasn't what had kept me alive this long. Discipline was. Daekanr's voice echoed somewhere in the back of my skull, patient and unyielding even now: ‘stillness is a weapon too, boy. Learn to wield it.’ I didn't move my chest. I didn't flinch. Every muscle in my body locked into place, screaming for release I refused to give it. Clop. His weight shifted onto his right heel. A quarter inch to the left. That was all I needed. I rolled… hard, fast, ignoring the violent scream of tearing flesh across my ribs, and slammed my shoulder straight into the back of his knee. "What!" CRACK. His knee joint buckled backward with a nasty, wet pop. The guy let o
Zane's Point Of ViewZane's Point Of View Another cold line of fire ripped across my ribs, and my legs just gave out. My knee slammed hard into the wet metal grating, the sound ringing out flat and dead in the dark. I didn't even have the breath left to curse properly. Just a long, ragged wheeze that tasted like copper and iron, my lungs feeling like somebody had stuffed them full of broken glass. Every inhale scraped against something torn inside my chest, and I wondered distantly how much longer my body could keep doing this… kneeling, bleeding, breathing, before it simply forgot how. Somewhere beneath the pain, a small, stubborn part of me refused to accept that this was how it ended, though I couldn't have said why it still bothered arguing. "Oh, look at that," the voice purred from somewhere above my left ear, floating in that greasy, heavy fog. "The little hybrid is kneeling. Tell me, captain, does it hurt more in your flesh or in your pride?" "Fuck... you..." I dragged out
Zane's Point Of View “Tonight’s Ball Star is…”Elaris Mavellen’s voice rang out across the grand ballroom like a bell cutting through fog.The entire space went silent.Utterly.Completely.It was a stillness I could feel, a trembling hush suspended in magic and disbelief. My breath hitched. My ch
Ronan's Point Of ViewThe hall had quieted again, though not from peace. This silence felt charged, like the moments before a thunderstorm breaks the skies in half.I could feel their stares on us.The professors from both academies sat in their velvet chairs, blank-faced and unmoving, but their au
Zane's Point Of ViewI’m thirty.The thought burned itself into my skull, sharp and bitter. Thirty, and here I was, lying on the cold earth, nightfall pressing down like a suffocating blanket, the forest around me a dark blur of shadowed shapes and whispers. My body felt foreign. Heavy. Broken. Ever
Zane's Point Of View I stood there, staring at him at Ronan. He was still silent. Still cold. Like nothing had just shattered between us. That mask he wore, so damn perfect. So empty. Like I hadn’t bled in front of him just moments ago. My chest burned. My fists trembled. I looked down at the ph







