The coronation revelry had scarcely quieted before the grim realities of the Seven Spheres clawed their way back into the Citadel.
Two thousand leagues north of Mount Dread lay the Ashen Rim—a desolate scar where the tectonic boundary of the Night Court fractured into the abyssal badlands of the Void. Here, the ground was not stone, but blackened bone and volcanic cinders that wept toxic, viridian mists. No snow fell upon this blasted earth; only gray flurries of dead ash sifted down from a sky torn open by hundreds of weeping violet fissures.
Gathered across the jagged ridges were tens of thousands of armored silhouettes.
These were not mere vanguard raiders like Vorgath’s butchered brutes. This was the vanguard legion of the Ashen Maw: line upon line of hulking Dread-Corsairs clad in rusted colossus-plate, siege-beasts bred from abyssal chitin and venomous spines, and silent cadres of Void-Weavers whose chanting set the dimensional fabric trembling like stretched parchment.
At the summit of the shattered basalt crag overlooking the gathered host stood Warlord Azgorath, the Scourge of Caelum.
Towering twelve feet tall, clad in spiked iron forged in the blood of fallen gods, Azgorath possessed four arms, each gripping a jagged serrated executioner’s blade. From behind his horned iron helm, four burning slit-eyes glowed with sickly green fire.
At his feet, a pool of black celestial water bubbled inside a silver scrying basin.
In the basin’s liquid mirrored surface, the coronation in Mount Dread flickered into view: Seraphina standing upon the dais, her twenty-foot wings of solar plasma burning with pure starlight, crowned by Kaelen Vance’s scarred hands as the diadem touched her brow.
"So," Azgorath’s voice was an avalanche of grinding boulders, thick with venomous amusement. "The brat of the Sun-Queen did not die in the mortal pen. She awakens."
Beside him slithered a slender, hooded figure draped in shrouds of rotting silk. The Oracle of Cinders, her face hidden behind a bronze mask weeping black grease, extended a withered, claw-like hand toward the basin.
"She does more than awaken, Warlord," the Oracle hissed, her voice a chorus of whispering corpses. "She reignited the primordial dynamo of Mount Dread. The breach in Chicago is sealed. The Seventh Leyline has stabilized its anchor. The mortal herd slips from our grasp."
"A temporary inconvenience," Azgorath snarled, his lower right fist clenching until the gauntlet plates groaned under catastrophic hydraulic pressure. "Let Vance play at kingdom with his new bride. He thinks his black mountain is impenetrable. But the solar blood running through her veins is the very key we require."
He turned his gaze from the scrying pool toward the southern horizon, where the distant, twin-peaked silhouette of Mount Dread pierced the stormy twilight.
"The celestial dynamo needs two keys to hold the Veil," Azgorath rumbled, a cruel, razor-toothed grin parting beneath his helm. "And if we rip the heart from the Sun-Heir and feed it to the Void-Mother’s altar, the Seventh Leyline will shatter permanently. Not just Chicago—every mortal city across their pathetic globe will plunge into the Maw."
The Oracle bowed low, her shroud trailing across the smoldering ash. "What are your orders, Scourge?"
Azgorath raised all four blades into the stormy sky. A concussive shockwave of green lightning ripped through the clouds, echoing the deep, vibrating roar of his ancient war-horn.
"Dispatch the Shadow-Stalkers of the Deep Rift," the warlord roared to the cheering legions below. "Infiltrate their outer keeps. Poison their leylines. And bring me the head of Kaelen Vance... and the living, beating heart of his Queen!"