The romantic haze that had filled the Garden of Lunar Glass vanished like mist before a gale.
Another violent tremor rocked the cavern, violently stripping the delicate amber petals from the weeping willow above. Far below the garden’s roots, the deep, rhythmic hum of Mount Dread warped into a shrieking groan of stressed metal and failing dimensional wards.
Kaelen’s transformation from impassioned lover to apex warlord took less than a breath.
With a single fluid gesture, his ancestral black dragon-steel armor materialized across his broad torso, greaves, and vambraces in a cascade of crackling black lightning.Gloom-Weaversnapped from the ether directly into his right hand, the broadsword humming with ravenous, lethal dark matter. His eighty-foot shadow-wings flared wide, shedding trails of freezing void-frost that crystallized the air around them.
"Stay behind my guard until we reach the armory," Kaelen commanded, his silver eyes flashing with sovereign authority as he caught Seraphina's hand, pulling her toward the exit.
"I don't hide, Vance," Seraphina countered, her amber eyes blazing with defiance. She didn't have armor, but her Sunblood surged to meet the threat. Blinding, incandescent golden fire rippled down her arms, coating her forearms in gauntlets of concentrated plasma. Behind her shoulder blades, her twenty-foot wings of crystallized starlight unfurled, casting away the subterranean gloom with brilliant, radiant dawn. "Give me a weapon that bites, and I'll carve the vanguard myself."
A fierce, savage grin slashed across Kaelen's lips despite the dire sirens echoing through the halls. "Gods, you are magnificent," he growled, leaning down to press a swift, bruising kiss to her mouth that tasted of battle-rage and promises. "Come, then. Let’s show them what happens when shadow and sun march together."
They burst through the thorned gates of the garden, sprinting through the lower corridors of the Citadel.
The fortress was in utter chaos. Alarms forged from enchanted bronze bells clattered throughout the obsidian corridors. Sentinels of the Night Court, armored in black scale and wielding moon-glass halberds, rushed downward in disciplined echelons. Yet the smell drifting up from the lower levels was foul—the stench of rotting sulfur, ozone, and burning flesh.
As they reached theGates of the Deep Abyss—the colossal, five-hundred-foot vault doors guarding the path to the subterranean celestial engine—they found the first defensive line slaughtered.
Dozens of high-fae sentinels lay torn across the smoking flags, their armor shattered by crushing, hydraulic impacts. Rising from the mist beyond the shattered bronze gates were the vanguard of theCourt of the Ashen Maw.
They were monstrous corruptions of the fae: towering nine-foot brutes clad in rusted, spiked iron plating, their flesh gray as grave-dust and laced with weeping black veins of liquid entropy. From their backs protruded skeletal, bat-like wings of rotting membrane, and their eyes burned with the sickly, pale green fire of corrupted rifts.
At the center of the horde stoodVorgath the Flayed, a massive warlord wielding a two-handed cleaver dripping with caustic, acidic ichor.
"Vance!" Vorgath’s voice was a wet, grating rattle that echoed off the high vaults. "Your little mortal toy was quite the beacon across the rifts! Her blood cracked the stone, and now the engine belongs to the Maw! The Void-Mother will feast upon the ashes of your court!"
"You will choke on those ashes first, dog," Kaelen roared.
He launched forward with terrifying velocity, a living comet of dark matter and void-lightning.Gloom-Weaverdescended in a brutal vertical cleave that cleaved the lead two Ashen Maw soldiers from crest to pelvis before they could raise their shields.
Simultaneously, Seraphina leaped from the gallery above, her golden wings beating with thermonuclear power. She drove her plasma blades into the shoulder joints of a third brute, unleashing a blinding solar nova that flash-vaporized its corrupted core into white smoke.
Back to back, the High Sovereign of Mount Dread and the Sun-Heir met the corrupted horde, turning the threshold of the deep into a slaughterhouse of gold and shadow.