The silence left by the drones wasn't a reprieve; it was the heavy, suffocating calm before the next mechanical wave.I knelt in the center of the Grand Hall, the quartz in my chest grinding with a dull, rhythmic tectonic thrum. My left arm—a translucent, waxy monument of Moonstone—rested on the obsidian floor, the gold veins beneath my skin pulsing with an irregular, dying light. I wasn't cold. I couldn't be. The petrification had robbed me of the ability to feel the frost, but it hadn't robbed me of the sight of Kael.He was ten feet away, pressed against a shattered pillar. He wasn't the Prime Alpha who used to command the North with a single growl. He was a man—a shivering, broken, and utterly mortal man.Thump.A dull, wet sound echoed through the hall.Kael was trying to stand, his fingers clawing at the jagged basalt, but his right leg collapsed under him. A piece of jagged, high-tensile shrapnel from a destroyed drone had torn thro
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