Page 28 of The Dark Lord’s Guide to Honeymooning (and Other Acts of Tyranny)

For a second, nothing happened.

And then, she gasped. Her eyes went wide, not with pain, but with awe. “Kaz,” she whispered. “I can feel them again.”

I placed my hands on her shoulders, focusing her. “Good. Find the lines that run beneath Solandris. Show me.”

I closed my eyes, opening my mind to our bond, letting her act as the conduit to the Heirloom. The world dissolved, and the vision she was seeing flooded my mind.

It was breathtaking. A glowing web of pure energy, veins of golden light crisscrossing the continent, pulsing with the lifeblood of the realm. I saw the smaller lines converging on Skyspire, feeding our fortress, and spreading out in every direction.

And then I saw Solandris.

And the breath caught in my throat.

The ley lines there weren’t gold, but a dead, necrotic black, like veins filled with poisoned blood. The infection was centered around the capital of Sunspire but already spreading, tendrils of darkness creeping outward, poisoning the magic of the land.

I cursed. “That’s what happened on the battlefield. We were too close to the corrupted lines. My magic tried to connect with them through the Heirloom, and…” I trailed off, remembering the searing pain, the feeling of something alien invading my power.

“It’s spreading,” Arabella said, her voice tight with concern. “And our magic is connected to each other through the Heirloom. That’s why we felt it.” She told me briefly of the screams she heard, as if dozens of lives were abruptly ended. “Does it have something to do with Auremar?”

I was still holding her, still watching the black ley lines. “Most likely. Sebastian told us Auremar rounded up the heroic bloodlines, didn’t he? He must have gotten what he needed.”

Arabella shuddered. “So they’re all dead? Every remaining descendant of the First Hero?”

I squeezed her shoulders. “We can’t know that yet. But it’s a safe bet that Auremar had to find a lot of them”—my jaw tightened in anger—“to equal one of you.”

Her voice was hollow. “And since he couldn’t get me, he…”

“That’s my assumption, yes.” My own voice sounded distant, as if it belonged to someone else. I felt the vision of the ley lines fade as Arabella’s focus faltered, but I didn’t need to see it anymore. The image was burned into my mind. I released her shoulders and took a step back.

I was this close. The outpost was ours, the army positioned, Solandris’s border defenses crumbling. And now—

Without the Heirloom’s full might, pushing deeper into Solandris would be suicide. I’d be stretching my resources against the kingdom’s full strength if they were allowed to rally. We needed to fix this and return within days. Days. Not weeks. Not months.

But even as I thought it, I knew. This wasn’t a loose connection or a misaligned rune. This was rot. Corruption. Poison spreading through the very foundation of the power I’d spent a decade hunting.

The victory at the outpost now felt hollow. Our grand first step into conquering the kingdom had landed on rotten ground. The ultimate prize, the power I had clawed and killed for, was nothing more than a festering disease.

I had been too late.

The absurdity of the failure was so immense, so spectacular, that I started to laugh. It started as a low, incredulous chuckle that scraped my throat raw. Ten years of planning, of bloodshed, of relentless ambition, only to discover that sanctimonious bastard Auremar had poisoned the well with his incompetence.

It was like conquering a brothel only to discover it was a leper colony.

The laugh grew louder, sharper, tipping over the edge from bitter amusement into something unhinged. It was the sound of a man’s carefully constructed world cracking down the middle.

And just as quickly as it began, the laughter stopped. The air in the small chamber crackled, growing heavy and cold.

My magic erupted without conscious thought—a shockwave of dominion energy that shattered the closest chair and part of the wall behind it. Splinters of wood and fragments of stone rained down around us.

It wasn’t enough. My fist clenched, and the next chair didn’t explode, it merely unraveled as my dominion magic unmade it. It collapsed in on itself and then disappeared.

“I spent a DECADE!” My voice cracked, a ragged edge to it that I’d never allowed anyone but Arabella to hear. “Tracking down every scroll, sacrificing everyone who stood in my way. I built an entire bloody EMPIRE for this moment! IT WAS MINE!”

I seized a jagged shard of the chair and hurled it across the room.

“Kaz!” Arabella’s voice barely penetrated the roaring in my ears.

My magic surged again. The obsidian pedestal cracked with a sound like breaking bones, a spiderweb of fractures racing across its surface before it collapsed into a pile of glittering black shards. The air temperature plummeted so rapidly that frost crystallized on the walls.