It begins with a tear in the sky.
Not a metaphorical one—an actual vertical wound above the northern ridge, jagged and black, clawed open across the clouds like someone dragged a blade through a painting.
The first thing through is sound.
A low, rolling hum that vibrates in bone and old stone, drilling straight into the part of the mind that remembers being prey in the dark.
The second thing is the smell.
Sulfur. Burnt metal. The faint, sour tang of old incense and something that might have once been human.
The third thing is the first demon.
It drops out of the rift like a shadow that has decided it's tired of being two-dimensional.
Humanoid, at a glance.
Too long, on closer inspection.
Its limbs are stretched just past normal proportions, joints a little too flexible, skin a deep, matte black that drinks in the light. Two horns curve back from its brow like polished obsidian. Its eyes are a flat, wrong white—no pupil, no iris, just a blank, reflective surface that doesn't blink.
It lands on all fours, claws digging into rock like knives into leather.
Then it looks at the capital.
And smiles.
Behind it, the rift blossoms.
Shapes pour out in disciplined lines.
Some are like the first—lean, horned, built for speed and blades.
Others are heavier: broad-shouldered, plated in dull, dark armor that seems to grow directly from their skin, wielding axes that drip faint, ash-gray flame.
Above them, winged silhouettes fan out—thin, batlike creatures with too many joints in their wings and faces that are nothing but mouths ringed in teeth.
Farther back, tall figures in layered robes stride forward, staffs crackling with violet lightning that fork and reform across their fingers.
Warlocks.
This isn't a flood like the monster horde.
This is an army.
Organized.
Intelligent.
Twenty thousand strong, marching in tight formations, banners of flayed, smoking fabric fluttering from poles driven into the earth with ritual care.
The rift seals behind them with a wet, final sound.
No retreat.
No reinforcements.
Just what's here.
Just what's coming.
The alarm bells ring.
Seraphine is already awake.
She never really slept.
She's still half-dressed from the night patrol briefings when a captain slams open the war room door, helmet under one arm, face pale.
"Your Highness," he says. "Sky tear over the north ridge. Demons. Numbers—"
He hesitates, swallowing.
"Twenty thousand, by rough count," he says. "Not beasts. Organized. Banners."
Lyriel looks up from a table covered in hastily sketched circles and lines—the "next time" plans they hadn't expected to need this soon.
"Of course," she says bitterly. "They waited until the monsters softened us. Efficient."
Mira's hand tightens around the tea cup she's been pretending to drink from.
Elira's knuckles crack as she flexes her fingers.
Seraphine straightens.
Her armor is on the stand by the wall.
She doesn't call for a squire.
She straps it herself.
"We hold them at the north plain," she says. "We do not let them reach the walls."
The captain hesitates.
"Your Highness," he says, low. "Should we…wake her?"
Every eye in the room flicks, briefly, to the corridor that leads to the high warded chamber.
To the girl in the bed.
To the one person who could turn an army into ash in a single breath—and who nearly died doing it three days ago.
"No," Seraphine says.
The word is immediate, flat.
"Even if—" the captain starts.
"Especially not," Lyriel cuts in, voice sharp as broken glass. "Her lungs are still healing. Her core is unstable. If you drag her to another battlefield now, you're not asking for help, you're asking for a spectacle."
Mira nods, jaw tight.
"She woke for a few minutes yesterday," she says quietly. "She could barely sit up. Her chest hurt just from talking. If she tries to channel again—"
Elira slams her fist into the table.
"We're not doing this," she snaps. "We're not saying 'just one more time' until she dies in front of us with a smile on her face because she thinks she did her job."
The captain flinches at the rawness in her voice.
Seraphine takes a breath.
It tastes like iron and smoke from a battle she hasn't fought yet.
"We knew this might happen," she says. "We planned for it. We built defenses that don't depend on her. Today, we use them."
Her eyes flick to the others.
"Lyriel. You've wanted a field test."
Lyriel's mouth twists.
"Not like this," she mutters. Then: "But yes. The demon wards are ready to deploy—if the mages don't panic when they see what they're casting against."
"Mira," Seraphine continues. "You're not just healing. You're leading the sanctified line. We both know demons hate your kind of light."
Mira swallows.
"Yes," she says. Her voice is quiet. It doesn't shake.
"Elira," Seraphine says.
Elira grins, sharp and humorless.
"Kill squad, as usual," she says. "I'll keep the front from collapsing. Or die trying."
"You won't," Seraphine says.
She says it like she's ordering the world.
Then she pulls on her gauntlets.
"Sound the full muster," she says to the captain. "Level five alert. Demon formation engagement plan. And spread the word."
He salutes.
"What word, Your Highness?"
"That the Final Calamity is out of commission," Seraphine says harshly. "There will be no miracle firestorm today. Anyone waiting for one will die. We win this with steel, discipline, wards and blood. Or we fall."
The captain blanches.
Then nods, hard.
"Yes, Your Highness."
He runs.
The war room empties in organized chaos—officers shouting orders, runners darting out, armor clattering.
Lyriel pauses at the door.
"You sure you can leave her?" she asks softly.
Seraphine doesn't look at the corridor.
She doesn't dare.
"No," she says. "But I have to. That's the job."
Mira lingers a moment longer, fingers flexing by her side.
"She'll be angry," she whispers. "If she wakes and finds out we fought without her."
"Good," Elira says roughly. "Let her be mad. At least she'll be alive to yell at us."
Seraphine nods once.
"Let's go," she says. "If we're going to prove she doesn't have to burn herself out to keep this place standing, this is the day."
They leave the room.
The door swings shut behind them.
The corridor to Fia's chamber is quiet.
Her heart monitor is the only sound—steady, fragile, stubborn.
She doesn't know the sky is bleeding.
The north plain is colder than it was three days ago.
The frost hasn't melted since the monsters died. Now demon boots crunch it into powder.
Seraphine stands on the inner wall of the northern redoubt, overlooking the wide killing field they carved after the last siege.
They'd reshaped the terrain—on Fia's insistence, back when she could still stand without swaying.
No more flat, open invitation to be overrun.
Now there are staggered trenches, layered ditches, low mounds with embedded runes, narrow choke points lined with hidden stakes.
Lyriel's handiwork.
Fia's paranoia.
Seraphine's signature on all the orders.
It looks different in daylight with twenty thousand demons marching toward it.
Less like clever fortifications.
More like a question.
Is this enough?
The demon army halts at the boundary where the grass changes color—where the old ground meets the newly disturbed earth of their restructured field.
They don't charge.
They look.
The front rank—those lean, horned shock troops—tilt their heads in eerie unison, blank eyes flicking over ditches, rises, the faint glimmer of wards woven into soil.
A figure moves to the front.
Taller than the rest. Armor grown from its body in interlocking plates etched with red sigils. Four horns, two sweeping back, two curling forward like a crown. Its eyes aren't white.
They're ember-red.
It raises one hand.
The demon army stills as if someone froze the world on a single frame.
Then it speaks.
The language is not one any human tongue was meant to shape.
It is all edges and smoke, syllables that feel like someone dragging nails across stone.
Lyriel's breath catches.
"That's not just a commander," she mutters. "That's a covenant-bearer."
Mira, standing to Seraphine's right in polished but simple breastplate over her healer's robe, eyes hard, swallows.
"What does that mean?" she asks.
"It means they're not just raiding," Lyriel says. "They're here on…business. A formal strike. Someone asked for this."
"Someone?" Elira echoes, from further down the wall, where she's leaning out to see better. "Like who?"
Lyriel's mouth flattens.
"Later," she says. "For now, it means this: they won't break and run just because the front ranks die. They're bound. Leashed to this attack until the terms of whatever contract brought them here are satisfied."
Seraphine watches the demon champion lower its hand.
The army moves as one.
No roar.
No mindless screaming.
Just a wordless, perfectly timed advance.
"Positions!" Seraphine shouts.
The defenders snap into their assigned roles.
The first line, just inside the initial trench: shield wall, spears braced, stakes angled between.
Behind them, archers and crossbowmen, pre-sighted for the lanes Lyriel and Fia cut into the field.
To the sides, cavalry held in reserve, horses already snorting with nerves at the scent of demon blood.
Behind and above, the mage corps—Lyriel at their center, hands already weaving the first ward nets.
And to Seraphine's right, the Sanctified Line: Mira and two dozen battle-clerics, their symbols uncovered, blades and maces anointed, lips moving in low prayers that make the air taste faintly of clean rain.
Seraphine draws her sword.
"For the capital," she says.
The words feel smaller than what's coming.
She says them anyway.
The demon champion raises its hand again.
The front rank breaks into a run.
They don't howl.
They lean into the charge, bodies dropping low, claws tearing furrows into the frosted earth. The ones behind them climb over their backs, using their comrades like moving ridges to accelerate.
The distance between armies collapses.
"Archers!" Seraphine yells.
Bows sing.
Arrows launch in black waves, arching high, then dropping into the oncoming tide.
This isn't like shooting monsters.
Demons aren't fleshwashed beasts.
They're built for war.
Many of the arrows glance off the lean ones' skin, sparking as if they'd hit stone. Some find eyes, throats, the softer joints in limbs. Those demons go down, tripping others.
The heavy-plated ones at the rear don't bother to dodge.
The shafts hit and stick, quivering.
They keep walking, unfazed.
"Wards," Lyriel snaps.
The first demon hits the invisible threshold.
The ground detonates.
Not in a fireball.
In a light-snap—a circle of pale radiance that bursts upward like an inverted sun, searing into demonic flesh with a hiss and a smell like burnt hair and acid.
The demon's skin bubbles where the light touches.
It shrieks—a sound like metal screaming against metal.
Demons stumble backward, colliding with the ones behind.
The ward-runes buried in the earth crackle, burning out, leaving blackened circles of scorched grass.
A second wave hits the next set.
Another crack of inverted sun.
Another ring of shrieks.
The advance stutters.
"Again!" Lyriel shouts.
Mages along the wall throw their hands forward, activating the next row.
A grid of holy-laced traps flares to life one by one as the demons charge through them.
It's not pretty.
It's not enough to kill all of them.
But it slows.
It wounds.
It forces the front line to bleed before it ever meets steel.
Mira watches a demon stagger out of a ward burst, skin burned in patchy, hissing spots.
She raises her hand.
Light gathers around her fingers—not soft, healing glow, but hard, focused radiance with an edge.
"Lux exspirare," she murmurs.
The beam lances out.
It punches through the demon's chest like a spear made of noon.
The creature convulses, black skin fracturing around the wound like cracked obsidian.
It falls and does not get up.
Mira's jaw tightens.
"This is what Fia would do," she whispers, more to herself than anyone.
"Less burning the horizon, more precision," Lyriel mutters, hearing her. "I approve."
The demons adapt.
Of course they do.
Those lean shock-troops begin to jump the ward zones, their bodies twisting midair, claws finding safe ground between circles.
Some deliberately sacrifice themselves—hurling into the active wards to blow them prematurely, so the soldiers behind can pass.
The heavy demons at the rear plant their axes and murmur in that grinding, ugly tongue.
Where the blades touch earth, the ground shivers.
The next ward circles to trigger flare weakly.
Then sputter.
Then die.
Lyriel swears.
"They're disrupting the lattice," she says. "Target the axe-bearers!"
"Archers!" Seraphine roars. "Back line—heavy plated, mark the ones with weapons!"
Arrows arc again.
This time, they're tipped with silver and blessed oils.
When they hit, they sink deeper, hissing.
One axe-bearer takes three shafts to the chest.
It stumbles, snarls, and tries to rip them out.
The silver burns its fingers.
It drops one axe.
Three more arrows hit.
It falls.
Another raises its weapons, crackling with violet haze.
"Warlocks," Lyriel says. "Back row!"
The robed demons at the rear raise their staves.
The air between armies twists.
Something invisible slams into the front of the shield wall.
The first rank of human soldiers reels as their shields bounce back into their own faces.
Noses break.
Teeth crack.
A gap opens.
The lean demons see it.
They pour in—not as a chaos wave, but as a spear.
One single wedge of horned bodies targeting the weakest point.
"Hold!" Seraphine shouts, already moving.
Elira is faster.
She drops from the wall like a thrown spear, hitting the ground with enough force to jolt her knees.
She doesn't stop.
She slams into the wedge's point with all the momentum she has, sword coming up in a brutal, rising arc.
The first demon's head jerks back.
It doesn't come clean off—the spine is tougher than that—but the blow staggers it.
Before it can recover, she drives a boot into its chest, knocking it back into its own line.
She moves like someone who has been starving for something to hit.
The demons oblige.
Claws slash.
She parries, the impact ringing up her arms.
She ducks under a second strike, steps in, and drives her blade up through a demon's throat, twisting to rip it free.
Black blood sprays.
It sizzles where it hits the ground.
Her forearm burns where a few drops land on exposed skin.
She grits her teeth.
"Acidic," she notes, half to herself. "Fun."
The wedge keeps coming.
This isn't a monster tide that shies from pain.
This is a disciplined assault that treats casualties as calculations.
If ten die and one reaches the gap, the ten were worth it.
Humans flinch.
Demons don't.
That's the difference.
That's the problem.
"Close the line!" Seraphine yells, dropping from the wall herself, landing beside Elira with shield raised high.
Their movement is instinctive.
Seraphine takes high.
Elira takes low.
A demon lunges for a soldier's exposed side.
Seraphine intercepts with her shield, the impact shuddering up her arm.
Elira steps in and hamstrings it.
The soldier—barely out of training—stares at them, shaking.
"Move!" Elira snaps. "You're in the way or you're helping. Choose!"
He gulps and raises his spear again.
The wedge slows.
Then grinds.
Then stops.
Not because the demons lose nerve.
Because bodies—demonic and human—begin to pile in the gap.
The ground turns slick.
The shield wall tightens.
Behind them, Mira raises her staff.
She doesn't have time for gentle prayers.
Only commands.
"Behind the line!" she calls. "Anyone not braced is falling back through us now!"
Wounded stumble back.
Some walk, clinging to comrades.
Some are dragged.
The demons scent weakness.
They push harder.
Mira's eyes harden.
She slams the butt of her staff into the ground.
A circle of pale light flares out from her, passing through the human ranks like mist.
Where it touches them, it doesn't heal—not fully.
It stiffens.
Bruises ease just enough for shields to lift.
Breathing becomes less of a knife and more of a dull ache.
Hands stop shaking long enough to close around hilts again.
The light hits the demons.
They recoil as if someone slapped them.
Smoke curls off their skin.
The ones closest to the front line shriek and claw at their own faces, as if trying to rip off a film of pain.
Mira's lips move.
"Lux resistite," she murmurs. "Light—resist them."
Her magic doesn't burn as bright as Fia's fire.
It doesn't need to.
It's not there to annihilate.
It's there to keep people standing.
Lyriel's voice cuts over the clash of steel.
"Second circle—NOW!"
The ground beneath the second row of demons flares.
Not in a circle this time.
In lines—sharp, intersecting paths of light that slice up through the earth like buried blades.
Demons jerk as if speared.
The lines are thin, but they cut, etching glowing, searing marks across legs, ankles, knees.
The second line stumbles.
The third crashes into them.
The formation fractures.
"Drive them into the kill lanes!" Lyriel shouts. "Don't meet them on open ground—funnel!"
Officers pick up the call.
"Left flank—back two paces! Right flank, hold! Center—brace and give ground on my mark!"
To an untrained eye, it looks like the line is faltering.
To a commander, it's a controlled, agonizing backward dance—luring the demons into the narrow channels between trenches where their numbers work against them, where they have to crowd, where archers can aim into packed bodies instead of scattering shots across a spread.
It works.
Slowly.
Brutally.
At a cost.
Men and women die.
Some are ripped open by claws that move faster than their shields.
Some are crushed under demon plate when they slip on blood-wet ground.
Arms break under impacts.
Ribs crack from glancing blows.
A knight loses his sword and grabs a demon by the horns, holding it in place long enough for the soldier next to him to drive a spear through its chest.
The demon dies.
So does the knight, when a second demon rakes claws across his unguarded back.
No one has time to drag his body to safety.
They step over him.
Not out of disrespect.
Because stopping to grieve will get them all killed.
Back by the wall, the demon warlocks raise their staves in unison.
The air aches.
Lyriel senses it before the hum finishes building.
"DOWN!" she screams.
She throws herself flat.
A black-violet arc rips across the field at chest height.
Anything standing in its path that isn't demonic is hit.
Shields take some of it.
Bodies take the rest.
The arc doesn't explode.
It steals.
Where it passes, armor rusts in a heartbeat, metal going from polished to pitted and flaky.
Flesh beneath it goes the same way—healthy skin and muscle turning gray, then crumbling.
Roars turn into strangled, cut-off screams.
Men fall, their armor collapsing along with them into flakes and dust.
A whole pocket of the line disintegrates.
A new gap yawns.
The demons howl—not mindless, but triumphant.
They surge toward the breach.
Lyriel pushes herself up on already bruised elbows, teeth bared.
"That spell again and we're done," she spits. "Mira!"
"I know," Mira says, voice hoarse. "I'll take the next."
She doesn't mean she'll block it.
She means she'll try.
She steps forward, out from behind the relative safety of the shield line.
Seraphine swears in a language her etiquette tutors tried to beat out of her.
"Back," she snaps.
"No," Mira says. There's steel in her trembling hands. "You can't reach them with a sword. I can."
The warlocks ready their staves again.
The hum builds.
Lyriel lifts her hands, weaving counter-sigils as fast as she can.
She's quick.
They're quicker.
"Now," Mira whispers.
She slams her staff down.
A dome of pale light erupts around the central portion of the line, translucent and thin as eggshell.
The warlocks release.
The black-violet arc smashes into Mira's dome.
It doesn't bounce.
It doesn't pass through.
It sticks.
Like oil hitting water.
The dome shudders.
Cracks spiderweb across it, dark veins spreading through the light.
Mira's knees buckle.
Her teeth grind.
In the anchor link, pain sparks—sharp behind her eyes, sick in her stomach.
Some of it spiders into Lyriel, Elira, Seraphine—dull echoes, enough to make them grit their teeth but not enough to drop them.
Mira takes the rest.
The dome holds.
Barely.
The arc gutters out, expended.
The warlocks lower their staves, surprised.
On the wall, archers see a target.
"Now," Seraphine growls.
Volley.
Forty blessed shafts rise.
Forty fall.
Not all of them hit.
Enough do.
Warlocks stagger as arrows punch through shoulders, throats, eyes.
Their concentration breaks.
The next spell never launches.
Mira drops to one knee, panting.
Blood trickles from one nostril, bright against her pale skin.
Lyriel rushes to her, hand already glowing to seal whatever internal damage holding that dome caused.
"You idiot," she mutters. "You brilliant, necessary idiot."
Mira laughs weakly.
"I'm fine," she lies.
Lyriel doesn't argue.
There's no time.
The battle grinds.
Demon bodies pile in trenches, black blood turning frost into slick, dark mud.
Human bodies lie where they fell, faces slack, eyes open to a sky that doesn't care.
The demons don't break.
Bound to their contract, they push and push and push, even as their numbers dwindle.
They don't retreat.
They don't bargain.
They just keep coming.
Seraphine fights until her shield is a dented, scored wreck and her sword feels like an extension of her arm—something that moves because she decides it must, not because she has the strength left.
She takes a slash across the ribs that sends lightning pain up her side.
She keeps moving.
If she stops, she'll start thinking.
If she starts thinking, she'll remember that she left the person she loves most lying in a bed while the world tried to end itself outside.
Elira loses track of how many times she kills.
It becomes a rhythm.
Block, cut. Step, thrust. Boot in a demon's chest. Blade through a knee. Shield to the face. Turn. Repeat.
Her arms burn.
Her lungs burn.
Her eyes sting from smoke and sweat.
She doesn't care.
Every time a demon nearly slips past, she's there.
Every time she has to choose between saving the soldier on her left or the one on her right, she makes the choice that keeps the line intact.
She hates every one of those choices.
She will remember their faces.
Later.
If there is a later.
Lyriel's magic becomes less precise as the hours drag.
Not because she's sloppy.
Because she's tired, and the field is chaos, and the lines she drew in neat ink back in the war room are now buried under mud and corpses.
She adapts.
Broad net wards instead of narrow traps.
Short, brutal pulses of force to shove demons into kill zones rather than artful circles.
At one point, a demon makes it to the base of the wall and starts climbing, claws digging into mortar.
Lyriel points at it.
Air compresses around its head and shoulders.
There's a sound like stone cracking.
The demon drops.
No finesse.
Just raw, ugly necessity.
Mira's voice grows hoarse.
Her prayers get shorter.
Not because she's losing faith.
Because there's no time for full liturgy when someone's artery is open or a demon is about to tear through a gap.
She blesses blades with a touch, sends small, searing pulses of light into demon faces, seals stab wounds just enough that the bearer can limp back into formation.
She can't save everyone.
She doesn't try.
She saves who she can reach.
Her hands are sticky with blood that is not her own and will not wash off clean tonight.
By late afternoon, the field is a grave.
Of twenty thousand demons, less than a quarter remain standing.
They're breathing hard now, too.
Even creatures of hell get tired.
The demon champion still stands at the center, armor cracked in places, obsidian horns chipped, ember eyes banked with fury.
It surveys the field.
The broken wards.
The trenches full of black and red bodies.
The human line—thinner now, ragged, but still there.
Still holding.
It looks at Seraphine, sword low, armor scored, hair matted with sweat.
It tilts its head.
Then it raises its hand.
The demons stop.
The sudden halt is almost worse than the attack.
Silence spreads, thick, heavy.
The champion speaks.
Lyriel hears enough to make out the shape of the spell.
Not an attack.
A call.
"Archers!" she shouts, panic threading her voice for the first time. "Stop it!"
Too late.
The air above the champion splits.
Not a full rift.
Just a crack—barely wide enough for something to push through.
A limb emerges.
Dark.
Scaled.
Too many joints.
It presses against the crack, feeling the edges like a blind thing testing a cage.
Then the crack stops widening.
Something slams into it from the other side.
The limb jerks.
The champion flinches.
A voice—not human, not demon, not anything with a throat—booms across the battlefield, loud enough to rattle teeth.
It speaks a single word.
The crack slams shut.
The champion stiffens as if yanked by a leash.
Its head snaps toward the capital again.
It snarls.
For the first time, there is emotion in the sound.
Frustration.
Denied escalation.
Lyriel exhales shakily.
"I don't know who just vetoed that," she mutters. "But I'll send them a fruit basket later."
The champion lifts its hand.
One last time.
This gesture is different.
Sharper.
Final.
The remaining demons straighten.
Then they charge.
No tactics.
No spells.
No structured advance.
Just a brutal, last-ditch rush to fulfill whatever measure their contract requires.
Seraphine feels it.
"This is it!" she shouts. "Last wave! Hold or die!"
There's nothing clever about what follows.
It's a brawl.
Demons slam into the line with all the force they have left.
Shields crack.
Swords break.
Men and women fight with daggers, with spearbutts, with bare hands.
Mira's voice is gone.
Her magic isn't.
She raises both hands and lets a burst of raw, unrefined light flare out—not a spell with a name, just need.
It blinds demons closest to her, searing their eyes.
It hurts the humans near her too.
They grit their teeth and keep swinging.
Elira finds herself face to face with the champion.
Up close, it smells like burning iron and rain on hot stone.
It smiles.
"So small," it says, in rough, accented human speech.
She bares her teeth.
"Big enough," she snarls.
They clash.
Its strength is inhuman.
Every block jars her arms.
Every dodge is a heartbeat away from being too slow.
It swings a blade grown from its own forearm—jagged and black.
She ducks.
It grazes her cheek.
Her skin burns where it touches.
She doesn't have time to worry about it.
She steps inside its reach.
If it were human, that would be suicide.
If it were human, it would flail.
It isn't.
It simply pivots, knee driving up.
She twists.
The blow glances off her hip instead of her ribs.
Pain sparks.
She uses it.
She drives her sword up under its breastplate, aiming for where a heart might be if the universe made any sense.
It isn't there.
Of course it isn't.
The champion laughs.
Close enough that she can feel the vibration in its chest.
"Wrong side," it says.
It raises its arm for the killing blow.
A blade punches through its neck from behind.
Silver.
Blessed.
Seraphine's.
The champion chokes.
Not in pain.
In surprise.
Seraphine rips the blade sideways, tearing through whatever passes for vital structures in a demon body.
The champion reaches up, touching the wound almost curiously.
Black ichor spills over its fingers.
It looks at Seraphine.
At Elira.
At the line still holding behind them.
At the city walls beyond.
Then it laughs, low and gurgling.
"You will miss her," it says, in almost-perfect human speech. "When she dies in bed instead of on the field."
Seraphine's grip tightens.
"What did you say?" she snarls.
It doesn't answer.
It collapses.
The last of the demons see their leader fall.
The contract binding them trembles.
Then snaps.
The survivors don't retreat in an organized fashion.
They unravel.
Some drop where they stand, bodies going slack as if the animating force simply departs.
Some scream and claw at their own chests, as if trying to hold onto something that's leaving.
Some flicker like bad reflections and vanish altogether.
The field goes quiet.
Really quiet.
No horns.
No screaming.
Just the crackle of small fires, the groan of injured, the low murmur of healers.
Seraphine stands over the champion's body, chest heaving, blood—not hers—dripping from her blade.
She hears its last words on a loop.
You will miss her.
She shakes her head, hard, as if to dislodge them.
"Check the ridges," she says hoarsely. "Make sure there's no one hiding. Then start counting. Ours and theirs."
Lyriel stumbles to her side, hair singed, robes torn, hands still faintly glowing.
Mira leans heavily on her staff, lips cracked, eyes ringed with exhaustion.
Elira wipes black blood from her face with the back of her hand, leaving a streak that looks like war paint.
They look at each other.
No one smiles.
"We did it," Elira says.
It doesn't sound like victory.
It sounds like disbelief.
"We held without her."
Lyriel nods slowly.
"At a cost," she says. "But yes. The city stands. The walls didn't fall. We didn't have to drag her out of bed and throw her at the horizon again."
Mira's gaze drifts toward the distant palace, barely visible through the haze.
"She's going to hate this," she whispers. "Missing it. Not being here."
"Good," Seraphine says quietly.
They look at her.
She stares at the field.
At the trenches full of demon corpses.
At the stretch of ground where the champion fell.
"At least we can tell her," she says, "that we did what we promised."
She sheathes her sword.
"We proved her right," she says. "We can protect this place without burning her up to do it."
She turns toward the city.
"Now," she says, voice low, heavy, "let's go tell her."
Hours later, when they finally stagger back into the high warded chamber, armor stained with red and black, faces lined with new shadows, Fia is still asleep.
Her breathing is shallow but steady.
Her chest rises and falls without hitch.
No blood at the corner of her mouth.
No strain in her brow.
Just the fragile, ordinary effort of a damaged body doing its best.
Seraphine sinks onto the stool beside the bed.
She takes Fia's hand.
Her fingers leave a faint smudge of someone else's blood on skin gone too pale.
"We did it," she whispers.
Her voice cracks.
She doesn't care.
"We did it without you."
Elira collapses into the chair by the window, sword clattering onto the floor.
Lyriel sits on the edge of the writing desk, too tired to worry about ink stains on her robes.
Mira kneels by the bed and lays her hand gently over Fia's heart, feeling the beat.
"We're here," she says softly. "You got to sleep through this one."
Fia doesn't answer.
She dreams.
Of heat.
Of cold.
Of battles she fought and battles she didn't.
Of a field she didn't see today—but that still reeks of demon smoke and human blood in the air that reaches her in this room.
She stirs once, faintly.
Her fingers curl a little tighter around Seraphine's.
The war isn't over.
The illness isn't gone.
The knife edge is still there.
But today, the kingdom proved something quietly, brutally important:
The world does not end when she lies down.
And if she dies someday—it will not be because they kept asking her to be the only wall.
It will be in a world where others have learned, painfully and imperfectly, to stand without her.
Dark.
Ugly.
Adult.
But real.
For now, she sleeps.
And outside her dreams, for the first time in a long time, the capital stands because of a battle she did not fight.