Now, the empire cracked, not with fire or blade, but beneath whispers.Rumours travelled faster than the ashfall. They slipped through camps, circled fire pits, and coiled around command tents like unseen vipers.The ash army pressed northward, relentless as dusk. Each step scorched the ground, leaving behind blackened trails and crushed bones of memory. At its front rode Sirelia, a living monument to vengeance, draped in armour kissed by runes and retribution. Her mount, a horned shadowbeast, its skin like smoke and bone, snorted embers with each breath. And her cloak shimmered faintly, runes stitched from the names of the dead catching the moonlight like curses.But beneath the chants, behind the smoke, beneath the sound of drums and the clink of weapons, rumours festered like rot beneath gilded paint.They told of a city that chose to burn itself rather than bow.Of a people rising not for war, but for rebirth.Of Seren, no crown, no castle, walking as one among her people.And of
The sky above Crescent Vale was clear, blessedly, eerily clear, for the first time in nearly a generation.No ash clouds strangling the sun. No crimson moons casting ominous glows over broken rooftops. No electric storms tearing across the skyline like ghosts of a dead empire. Just a pale, honest blue stretching infinitely overhead, as if the heavens themselves were finally willing to look down again.Below, Crescent Vale stood like a wounded monument to history. The capital city, once the heartbeat of Elara's shining realm, now lingered somewhere between ruin and rebirth. Marble arches shattered. Temple spires are broken. Ivy winding across old courtrooms where laws once chained the innocent. A realm's heart, now half-choked with the overgrowth of memory and silence.But something stirred in that silence.Something ancient.Something new.Thousands had gathered, drawn not by summons or decree, but by the whisper of change. Survivors came in caravans and on foot, threading through roa
The crypt beneath Greythorne Keep stank of old blood and silence older still. Not the silence of reverence or peace, but the kind that crawled beneath skin and sat heavy in the lungs. It was a silence earned through centuries of forgotten screams and oaths broken in moonlight.Lucien moved slowly.Each step was deliberate, each scrape of his boots against the wet stone echoing like a whisper of regret. Moss clung to the walls, slick and shining, and the faint drip of condensation echoed like a slow, dying heartbeat.This place was sacred once. Not to gods. Not even to monsters.To the promise of surrender.This was the last place vampires knelt. Not in prayer. In defeat.The Fall of Frosthearth had shattered what remained of the old courts. Once-mighty vampires who ruled with silk and fangs had been turned to ash and scattered to the winds. Nobles became phantoms. Queens became stories told by firelight. The covens, once proud and opulent, were hunted down, cornered, and extinguished.
It should have been a battlefield.Kael had led the scouts across the northern vale for three days, bracing for resistance at every bend. Thornebridge wasn’t just another city. It was the heart of the region—a junction where three rivers met and every surviving trade route tangled like roots in the earth. Whoever held Thornebridge controlled the future of the realm.They had been warned: the Dustborn might have gotten there first.But they hadn't.No banners flew. No gates stood. No sentries patrolled the walls.Just stillness. And smoke.Seren reined in her steed at the shattered edge of what had once been the city gate.Mourne dismounted beside her, eyes scanning the skyline, hand unconsciously hovering near the hilt of his blade.Kael had already entered.He met Seren with a single, grim look.She didn’t ask what he saw. She could already feel it.She walked past him, into silence and cinder.The city was gone.Not captured. Not sieged.Burned.Every home had collapsed inward, cons
Ash did not fall.It rose.From the earth, from forgotten ruins, from the mouths of those who had dared whisper her name in shadowed corners and candlelit prayers. Sirelia. The name once uttered with fear and reverence, now chanted like a drumbeat echoing across red deserts and shattered cities. Her return was no cataclysm. It did not arrive on the back of thunder. It came cloaked in silence, heavier than the storm.And then came the footsteps.A thousand at first.Then ten thousand.Then more.They did not breathe. They did not bleed. They did not hope.These were not soldiers. Not truly.They were remnants. Revenants.A tide of bone-bound warriors, raised not from life but from oath and grief, stitched together by threads of dust and ancient, defiant magic. Their forms were sculpted from the broken earth and the memories of those history had erased. In their hollow chests echoed the names of queens cast down too soon, of children whose prayers went unanswered, of revolutions quelled
There are places the world forgets.Not because they are unimportant, but because they remember too much.The Temple of Moonroot was one of those places.Long abandoned. Half-buried by ivy.Hidden in a gorge carved by a dying river. It had once been a place where queens laid down their blades and begged the stars for peace.Now it held only dust.And Seren.She came alone.No guards.No wolves.No fire.Just the hum of the earth beneath her feet and the quiet question that had followed her since the first city burned:Am I becoming her?The wind here didn’t sing.It watched.She stepped over the threshold and into the shadow.The altar was cracked.The runes long faded.And at the centre, where old ash still clung to the stone, stood a figure.Not fully formed.Not quite alive.Not quite dead.Elara.She wore no crown.Only the scars of too many wars and the silence of too many regrets.Her hair was wind-tangled, her dress scorched at the hem.Her eyes, Seren’s eyes.Seren stopped.Di