All Chapters of Broken by One, Desired by All : Chapter 371 - Chapter 380

The air in the Elven Highlands tasted of burnt resin and ozone. High up on the white granite towers of the Alliance Citadel, the stone groaned under the stress of a hundred wind-currents clashing at once. Below the ridge, the pine forests that had stood for six centuries lay reduced to blackened stumps, smoking in the unnatural cold that had rolled down from the weeping sky. The smell of ash clung to everything, seeping into cloaks and armor alike, a bitter reminder of how much had already been lost. General Kaelen pulled the braided leather string of his longbow back until it pressed against the corner of his jaw. Three silver arrows, tipped with holy light spells that hummed like trapped bees, sat notched across his knuckles. His arms ached from hours of held tension, but he did not let it show. Two hundred lives depended on his steadiness. "Hold your drawn breath," Kaelen shouted down the line of two hundred high elf archers lined along the battlements. His voice was sharp, cutt

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

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

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

Chapter 12: The Last Ten MinutesThere were no more rings.Kaelen's last ring had held for a while and then it hadn't, the way everything in this siege had held for a while and then hadn't, and the defense had been pushed back across its own dead and up the plaza, and then up the first of the throne steps, and there it stopped, because there was nowhere else. The throne room doors stood shut behind them all, tall as old trees, and behind the doors was the throne, and behind the throne there was nothing at all, no further line, no next plan, no ground.The core's pulse was gone. The wards were dead stone. The sky had finished bleeding hours ago and now it was just black, a black with no stars in it, and the plaza below the steps was filling and filling with wraiths, thousands deep, wall to wall, more pouring in through the broken ward-lines every minute without end.The Alpha King stood on the middle of the steps, alone in the way a man is alone when everyone can see him and no one can