The predawn hours were the coldest on Mount Dread.
A heavy, clinging fog rolled off the northern glaciers, blanketing the outer ramparts of the Iron Bulwark—the sprawling defensive fortress that guarded the narrow, mile-high mountain pass connecting the Night Court to the jagged frontier.
Sentinel Captain Valen paced the frozen battlement, his frost-rimed dragon-scale armor clinking softly with every step. At his side, a squad of six high-fae archers stood with bows strung, their silver eyes scanning the milky gloom below. The great coronation bells of the Citadel had long fallen silent, leaving only the whistling of the sub-zero gale whipping through the crags.
"All quiet on the lower gorge, Captain," an archer murmured, blowing warm breath into her leather-gloved hands. "The dynamo's resonance seems to have driven the scavengers back into the fissures."
Valen didn't answer immediately. His pointed ears twitched, picking up a sound that didn't belong to the wind—a faint, rhythmic clicking, like bone needles tapping against stone.
"Douse the braziers," Valen ordered, his hand dropping to the hilt of his broadsword.
"Captain?"
"Douse them. Now."
The archers hurried to extinguish the oil basins, plunging the rampart into the pale twilight cast by the setting twin moons. Valen leaned over the parapet, peering two hundred paces down into the sheer obsidian drop.
The rock face was moving.
At first glance, it looked like flowing tar seeping upward against gravity. But as the fog shifted, the horrific reality resolved before Valen's eyes.
Dozens of spindly, arachnid silhouettes were scuttling up the frozen cliff with sickening speed. These were the Shadow-Stalkers of the Deep Rift—infiltrators bred in the abyssal trenches of the Ashen Maw. Their bodies were elongated carapaces of matte-black chitin, six razor-sharp scythe-legs driving into the stone without making a sound. Where their heads should have been, clusters of red, blind sensory pits flared in the dark, sniffing the ether.
"Sound the—" Valen’s shout was cut short.
A liquid shadow shot upward from the darkness beneath the parapet. A barbed filament of bone-glass impaled the archer to his left through the throat, yanking her over the edge before she could release a scream.
"Infiltrators on the wall!" Valen roared, drawing his enchanted blade. The steel blazed with cold blue fae-fire as he cleaved downward, severing the clinging leg of a stalker cresting the rampart.
The abomination hissed, spraying black, acidic blood across the stone that sizzled through dragon-scale like boiling oil. Two more stalkers vaulted over the wall in silent, synchronized arcs, their scythe-limbs flashing with blinding lethality.
The remaining five sentinels fought with desperate, disciplined fury, their enchanted daggers carving through chitin, but the stalkers did not fight like soldiers; they fought like a hive swarm. They swarmed over the guards, sacrificing limbs to drive venomous proboscises into the exposed joints of the fae warriors' armor. Within seconds, the paralyzing neurotoxin turned immortal blood to sluggish ice.
Valen backed toward the alarm bell, his blade carving an arc of blue fire through the chest of a lunging stalker. He reached for the rope of the bronze gong.
A heavy, chitinous claw clamped around his wrist.
Rising over the rampart was the brood-leader of the stalkers—a massive, eight-legged terror twice the size of its kin. In its central chest cavity burned a pulsating, parasitic crystal of sickly viridian void-matter: a Leyline Spite-Core.
"Do not ring your bell, little bird," a telepathic hiss echoed directly inside Valen’s skull, cold and full of worms. "The gates belong to the Maw now."
Before Valen could ignite his fae-blood, the brood-leader drove the glowing green crystal straight into the sentinel captain's chest.
Valen's eyes rolled back, his veins turning an oily, infected emerald as the necrotic parasite devoured his will from the inside out. His sword clattered harmlessly against the frozen flagstones.
The brood-leader released him, turning its sensory pits toward the southern horizon, where the glowing spires of the Citadel rose against the twilight.
"The perimeter is severed," the hive-whisper rippled across the mountain face. "Release the crawlers into the lower aqueducts. The Sun-Queen’s blood will soon be harvested."