She can see the look in his eyes—the frantic desperation of a father losing his daughter all over again. The broken look on the face of the man who raised her—who made her feel like a chosen daughter.
“We’ll find her,” she says, drawing a blade from her thigh holster. “We’ll find her.”
Revryn moves. Fast. Like he canfeel—somewhere in the depths of himself—that Calira is not okay.
Seren follows Revryn through the battlefield at a dead sprint, golden threads lashing violently from her palms as soldiers surge toward them from every direction. One catches her around the wrist and she snaps a Gateway open beneath his feet without breaking stride, dropping him screaming into an echo-plane before sealing it shut again.
“CALIRA!” Revryn roars.
No answer comes. Nothing save for the dying screams of soldiers from every angle.
Then Seren sees the bodies.
Northern soldiers sprawled across shattered stone in grotesque positions, black veins crawling up their throats where toxins have already claimed them. Others choke violently in clouds of sickly green vapor still hanging low across the battlefield. Needle-like darts litter the ground between corpses, buried in eyes, throats, arteries.
Every tool a Venomshade carries.Used.
“Fuck,” Seren breathes.
And at the center of it all…
Calira.
She’s backed against the remains of a crumbling wall, blood pouring down one arm as she drives a short blade into a soldier’s throat with enough force to drop him instantly. A deep cut is carved into her forehead, and blood spills openly down her face. Another soldier lunges for her and she catches his wrist, snapping it sideways before slamming the blade beneath his ribs.
The Crown’s Blade. She is the weapon the world carved her into. But she’s slowing. Not by much. But enough.
The soldiers see it too. They begin closing in carefully now, no longer hunting, but descending, like vultures that smell death on the wind.
“MOVE!” Revryn bellows.
He tears forward.
Seren runs beside him, golden threads whipping through the battlefield in lethal arcs. One catches a soldier around the throat and tightens instantly, luminous against blood and smoke, before she hurls him backward into an echo-plane that swallows him whole.
Revryn reaches the others first. His broadsword cleaves through a soldier so brutally that Seren hears bone split over the chaos of battle.
Calira glances up at the sound. And the moment costs her.
A soldier surges from her blind side and drives his blade straight through her stomach. Seren feels the impact in her own body. Calira gasps. The blade punches clean through her.
Revryn’s roar is inhuman.
Another soldier closes in on her immediately. Then another.
The battlefield collapses into violence.
Seren moves on instinct now, Teddy’s training igniting in her veins like a fire left to simmer. Golden threads lash outward like nooses, catching soldiers around their throats, torsos, limbs. She rips echo-planes open beneath them one after another, casting screaming bodies into undying portals of isolation and torment before sealing the tears shut again.
Revryn becomes catastrophic beside her. There is no precision left in him now. Only grief.
His sword hacks through armor, flesh, bone alike as he cuts his way toward Calira with enough force to stagger even seasoned soldiers backward in terror.
By the time the last body hits the ground, the battlefield around them has gone strangely still.
Calira collapses.
Revryn catches her before she hits the stone.
