The ground trembled for another thirty seconds, a deep, grinding groan from the heart of the mountain. Then, silence.

  Gunther pushed herself up onto her elbows, dislodging a small slide of scree. Beside her, Sihar was already sitting, her face a pale mask in the starlight, her eyes fixed on the jagged, smoking fissure they’d crawled from moments before.

  “Jacob,” Sihar said, her voice flat.

  Gunther didn’t answer. She got to her feet, her boots slipping on the loose rock. She scanned the mountainside above them. A thick plume of dust was billowing from several new crevices and vents higher up, blotting out the stars. The entire peak looked slumped, like a giant shrugging a shoulder.

  “He knew the price,” Gunther finally said, the words tasting of ash. She forced herself to look away, down the treacherous slope toward the dark expanse of the foothills and the plains beyond. Somewhere out there, pinpricks of light would be the villages they’d left. “He paid it. We use it.”

  Sihar stood, wiping grit from her hands onto her torn trousers. “That’s it? We just walk away?”

  “What would you have us do?” Gunther snapped, a flash of heat cutting through the cold mountain air. “Dig? The whole central vault is a tomb. His tomb. He gave us the exit and brought the ceiling down on the rest. He made his choice.” She took a steadying breath, the air sharp in her lungs. “Our choice is to make it mean something. We move. Now.”

  The descent was a nightmare of sliding rock and hidden drops. They moved without speaking, conserving breath, each step a deliberate fight against gravity. Gunther’s mind worked, pushing aside the image of Jacob’s defiant stand. She catalogued injuries: a deep ache in her ribs where a falling stone had caught her, raw palms, a persistent ringing in her left ear. Sihar favored her right leg, a hitch in her step that hadn’t been there before.

  It took until the first grey smudge of dawn lightened the eastern horizon to reach the treeline. The air grew thicker, warmer, smelling of pine and damp earth instead of stone dust and ozone. They stumbled into a small clearing and Gunther held up a fist. Sihar stopped, leaning against a broad pine trunk.

  “We rest here. An hour,” Gunther said, her voice hoarse.

  Sihar just slid down the trunk to sit. Gunther unslung her waterskin, took a sparing sip, and tossed it to her. She kept her eyes on the mountain, now a dark, brooding shape against the brightening sky. No more plumes. Just a quiet, permanent ruin.

  “He conjured lightning from his bare hands,” Sihar said quietly, not looking up from the waterskin. “I’ve never seen a mage do that without a focus. Without words.”

  “He was the Pyre Lord’s Warden,” Gunther replied, scanning the trees. “His power was the mountain’s power. He spent it all in one go.” She remembered the searing light, the deafening crack, the sensation of the very air being torn apart. A final, definitive answer to the Cult’s corruption.

  The hour passed in silence. As the sun crested the foothills, painting the world in gold and green, Gunther stood. “Up. We need to reach the Eastrun by nightfall.”

  They moved faster on level ground, following the remembered path back toward the cluster of villages under the Council’s protection. The normal sounds of the forest birdsong, the rustle of creatures in the undergrowth felt alien, too peaceful. Gunther’s nerves stayed wire-tight.

  It was mid-afternoon when they found the road, a narrow dirt track worn by cart wheels and footprints. The sight of it, something man-made and ordinary, loosened a knot in Gunther’s chest. They followed it east, the pace now a gruelling march.

  The first sign something was wrong was the smell.

  It came on the breeze, not the clean scent of woodsmoke from a hearth, but the thick, greasy, clinging odor of a pyre that had burned too long. Sihar sniffed the air, her face hardening.

  They crested a low rise and stopped.

  The village of Oakhaven was gone.

  Where two dozen timber and thatch homes had stood, there was a blackened scar on the earth. Charred stumps poked from ash. The stone foundation of the meeting hall was a hollow shell, filled with debris. No movement. No sound except the caw of distant crows.

  Gunther’s blood went cold. She broke into a run, Sihar a step behind.

  They skirted the perimeter. The destruction was total, but it was wrong. No dragon’s work. A dragon would have left craters, melted stone, great swathes of earth scorched to glass. This was simpler, crueler. Fire, but a hungry, spreading fire. Arson.

  In the center of the village green, now a patch of mud and ash, a crude pole had been driven into the ground. Tied to it was the tattered, weather-stained banner of the Council of Mages, its silver thread sigil ripped in half.

  “Scavengers,” Sihar spat, gripping her staff until her knuckles were white. “They waited until the mages were drawn west to the mountain.”

  “Not scavengers,” Gunther said, her voice low. She knelt, brushing ash away from a set of tracks near the pole. Boot prints. Many of them, coming from the north road, milling here, then returning the same way. Organized. “The Cult didn’t just breed dragons. They have blades on the payroll, too. They’re cleaning up. Making a statement.”

  She stood, looking north. The next village, Riverbend, was half a day’s march that way. It was larger, with a permanent detachment of two battle-mages.

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  “We’re too late for Oakhaven,” Gunther said. “We might not be for Riverbend. Run.”

  They ran. Fatigue was a beast on their backs, but they outran it with sheer, screaming will. The forest blurred beside the road. Gunther’s ribs screamed with each jarring footfall. Sihar’s breath was a ragged saw in her throat.

  They heard the battle before they saw it.

  Not the deep-bellied roar of dragons, but the sharper, uglier sounds of mortal combat: the clang of steel, shouted orders, and the distinctive, concussive thump of magical force.

  Gunther vaulted a fallen log, pulling ahead. The road curved, and Riverbend came into view.

  Chaos.

  The village was under attack by a force of at least fifty men mercenaries in mismatched armor, their tabards bearing no heraldry. They fought with disciplined ferocity, pressing a shield wall against a barricade of overturned carts and spiked fences manned by village militia. Arrows flew from rooftops.

  And in the center of the main street, the mages made their stand.

  A young woman with her dark hair tied back in a severe knot stood behind a shimmering, semi-circular shield of amber light that covered the mouth of the street, holding back a concentrated push of mercenaries. Sweat poured down her face, her arms trembling with the strain. Behind her, an older man with a grizzled beard whirled his hands in complex patterns, launching searing bolts of white-hot energy over the shield. They struck the mercenaries’ ranks with devastating effect, blasting men off their feet, but for every one that fell, two more pressed forward.

  The mercenaries had brought their own counters. A squad of crossbowmen on a flanking rise were focusing fire on the male mage, forcing him to divert his energy into a personal, flickering barrier. His offensive strikes were growing fewer, weaker.

  “The shield mage is the priority!” Gunther yelled to Sihar. “If her focus breaks, that street floods!”

  Sihar didn’t need telling. She skidded to a halt behind the cover of a storage shed at the village edge, planted her staff, and began to chant, her voice a low rumble. The air grew heavy.

  Gunther drew her blade, a simple, unmagical longsword, and sprinted low and fast toward the crossbowmen’s position. She was ten paces away when the first noticed her, swinging his weapon around. Gunther didn’t break stride. She ducked under the awkward shot, came up inside the man’s guard, and drove her sword point through the leather cuirass. She ripped it free, parried a wild swing from a second, and kicked the man’s legs out from under him before finishing him with a downward thrust.

  A crossbow bolt grazed her shoulder, tearing cloth and skin. She ignored the burn.

  Above her, the sky darkened over the rise. Not with clouds, but with a localized, swirling mass of grit and small stones Sihar had summoned. With a final, shouted word, Sihar thrust her staff forward. The miniature storm descended on the crossbowmen. It wasn’t lethal, but it was utterly disorienting a blinding, stinging hail that sent them stumbling, crying out, dropping their weapons to shield their faces.

  The relief for the male mage was instant. He dropped his personal shield, drew a deep breath, and thrust both hands forward. A whip-crack of pure force, visible as a distortion in the air, lanced down the street. It hit the mercenary shield wall like a battering ram. Wood splintered, metal buckled, and a half-dozen men were thrown backward, breaking the formation.

  The shield mage, seeing the pressure relent, gasped and allowed her amber barrier to drop. She sagged to one knee, panting.

  But the mercenary commander, a broad-shouldered man in a spiked helmet, was quick. He saw the opening, saw the exhausted mage. He bellowed an order, pointing his sword directly at her. A wedge of his best fighters, armed with axes and heavy shields, peeled from the main group and charged the vulnerable street mouth.

  Gunther was too far away. Sihar’s focus was spent on the storm. The male mage was already channeling another bolt, but it would be too slow.

  The axe-men were five strides from the fallen mage when the earth in front of them erupted.

  Not with fire or ice, but with thick, gnarled roots and vines that exploded from the packed dirt of the street as if they’d been growing for a century in seconds. They wrapped around ankles, slammed into chests, coiled up legs. Men screamed as they were tangled, tripped, and hauled down. The charge dissolved into a writhing, trapped mass.

  From the doorway of a nearby cottage, a third figure emerged. She was elderly, dressed in the simple woolens of a village herbalist, her hands stained with soil. She held them palm-out toward the trapped men, her expression one of fierce concentration. A druid. Not Council-trained, but a village wise-woman.

  The male mage seized the moment. His gathered energy, instead of a bolt, he released in a wide, horizontal wave of concussive air. It swept over the tangled mercenaries; those not held fast by roots were lifted and hurled back into their comrades, causing a cascading collapse in the rear ranks.

  The momentum of the attack shattered. The mercenary commander roared in frustration, but the sound was cut short by a new noise a deep, thrumming horn from the woods south of the village. The signal for retreat.

  The mercenaries disengaged with the same discipline they’d fought with, covering each other as they fell back, dragging their wounded. In minutes, they had melted back into the tree line, leaving behind their dead and the burning, choking silence of reprieve.

  Gunther walked slowly into the village center, her sword still in her hand. The male mage was helping the shield mage to her feet. The old druid was kneeling by a wounded militiaman, her hands glowing with a soft green light.

  The village elder, a man with a bloodied bandage around his head, approached Gunther. “You… you came from the west road? From Oakhaven?”

  “We passed it,” Gunther said, sheathing her sword. “They’re gone.”

  The elder closed his eyes, a wave of grief passing over his face. When he opened them, they were hard. “They hit us at dawn. Said they were ‘collecting the tax for the new order.’ They had mage-breakers with them. Iron-tipped bolts, silence powders. They knew how to fight you.”

  Sihar joined them, leaning heavily on her staff. “The mountain stronghold is destroyed. The Pyre Lord is dead. His dragons with him.”

  The male mage, the grizzled one, looked up sharply. “Destroyed? By who?”

  “By one of his own,” Gunther said. “The source here is gone. But the Cult’s war isn’t. They’re adapting. Using men where they can’t use monsters.” She gestured to the scorched Council banner on her belt, taken from Oakhaven. “They’re telling everyone the Council’s protection is broken.”

  The shield mage, her voice shaky but clear, said, “Our comm-crystal went dark two days ago. No contact with the central conclave. We’re isolated.”

  Gunther looked from their exhausted faces to the weary, frightened villagers beginning to emerge from cellars and bolted homes. The Cult wasn’t just attacking villages. It was attacking the idea of hope itself.

  “Then we stop waiting for contact,” Gunther said, her voice cutting through the murmurs. She turned to the Council mages. “You two, and any who can fight, will fortify here. Riverbend becomes a bastion. The druid’s magic works with the land use it. Set traps. Make them pay for every inch.”

  She turned to Sihar. “We’re not delivering news anymore. We’re hunting the messenger.”

  Sihar met her gaze, understanding dawning. “The ones who gave the order for this.”

  “The ones who sent those men north from the mountain,” Gunther said, nodding. “The Cult’s local commander. Their puppet lord in these territories. We find where the orders came from. We find the next link in the chain.” She looked back at the smoldering ruins at the edge of the village, then east, toward the heartlands where the rich held their courts. “And we break it.”