جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 200

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

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.

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

It began with silence.Not the kind that comes before war.The kind that follows it.Smoke drifted across the forest floor like a fog of memory, staining the trees, suffocating the birdsong. The wolves had vanished, scenting what was to come before it arrived. Only the wind moved, and even it carried no warning.By the time Kael reached the ridge, the horizon had turned black.And Moonfang… was gone.He rode hard.Too hard.The others called after him, Mourne, Vessa, even Seren, but he didn’t stop.His heartbeat outpaced the horse beneath him. His lungs seared. His blade rattled against his side like a ghost’s whisper.He crested the final hill as the sun split through the clouds.And all that greeted him was ash.Moonfang Citadel, the stronghold of his ancestors, the sacred keep of the Northern Wolves, was nothing more than scorched stone and bone.The towers had collapsed inward.The wall sigils had been burned off by acidfire.The great moon-carved doors had shattered, the iron war

The pyre circle had not felt the weight of living flesh since the Burning of Hollowgate. Tonight, it breathed again, not with the heat of kindling, but with the raw, unvarnished truth.A ring of bloodstone pillars stood like sentinels in the flicker of torchlight. Between two towering braziers, Vessa stood alone, arms unbound, shoulders squared against the smoky haze. The lies she carried, her hidden lineage, her mother’s secret orders, the coded messages she had sent to the Dust Court, lay upon her shoulders heavier than any chain.Around that circle, the Ashborn formed a living wall. Swords hung at their hips, spears rested on shoulders, but not one blade was drawn. Wolves, dark as smoke and twice as silent, prowled the ridges above, black eyes glinting in the firelight. Even the Deathroot blooms at their feet seemed to quake beneath the weight of anticipation, their ghostly petals trembling like shivering souls.To the right of the circle, Kael stood rock-still. His face, half-lit