CLAAAAAAAAAANG—
The seventh strike was a dying gasp. The shadow had learned to swallow sound itself. Despair, final and heavy, settled like stone dust over the hall. The contraction resumed. This was the end.
Then, a light.
Not from within. A silver-white scar slashed across the darkness outside the eastern arrow-slit. It was a line of pure, furious geometry, so sharp it seemed to cut the eye. The congealed shadow where it passed didn't part—it was excised, leaving a burning afterimage of reality.
A second line cut, then a third, weaving a searing sigil. The bounded darkness disintegrated with a silent, surgical hiss.
Framed in the glowing breach stood a man. Tall, in worn traveler's grey. His hair was pale gold streaked with white. His face was a monument to austere sorrow. In his only hand—his right—he held a long, slender rod of white stone, its tip alive with captured silver light.
His left sleeve was pinned up neatly just below the elbow. The absence was not an infirmity; it was a statement. A historical fact carved in flesh.
Arlen Valen. The Fallen Saint. The brother who had voted to sacrifice Arden, and who had paid for that vote with his own hand, severed by Dawnbringer in the furious, shattered moments after Arden learned the truth.
He stood in the street, the cool air of the dead city swirling around him. He did not enter. His winter-blue eyes swept the hall, a living audit of their desperation. The gaze held no warmth, only a profound, weary recognition of cost.
It lingered on Kaelen's bandaged hand, on the guttered ember of his dawn. A faint, almost imperceptible tightening around Arlen's eyes—a shared, bitter understanding of paying in blood and light.
Then his eyes found Lyssa. The scan was swift, absolute. He saw the Magus Primordial. His expression did not change, but the sorrow in it deepened, as if he beheld a beautiful, doomed experiment.
Finally, he spoke, his voice crystalline and cold.
"Noise is not a counter-argument. It is a symptom of the problem." He lifted the white rod in his solitary hand. The movement was efficient, devoid of flourish. "To silence a falsehood, you do not shout. You demonstrate a clearer truth."
He turned his back on them, facing the shadow already oozing to seal his precise breach. He raised the rod, not with a warrior's grip, but with the exacting pose of a scholar pointing to a fatal flaw in a text.
A needle of silver-white light lanced out. It did not strike the mass. It struck a junction, a point of conceptual weakness in the shadow's forming matrix. The effect was silent and catastrophic—a tiny, perfect sphere of nothingness appeared where the beam hit, and the shadow around it unraveled in a precise, geometric cascade. The breach widened, not through force, but through impeccable, dispassionate refutation.
He was not fighting. He was correcting.
Without looking back, his voice carried into the stunned keep, clear as ice breaking.
"My brother brings the dawn. A blunt instrument of memory and pain. I bring the proof. The logical conclusion his light implies." He paused, and the weight of his next words hung in the air, heavy with his own maimed history. "You must determine if you are part of the proof… or a variable to be eliminated for its elegance."
Then he stepped forward into the reforming dark, his white rod already tracing the lines of his next immaculate, silver-white equation against the void. The saint with one hand had entered the siege, a walking testament to a brother's wrath and his own unforgiving logic. His judgment on Saltmire—and on the new dawn growing within it—had begun. And his methods promised to be as precise, and as merciless, as the blade that had once taken his hand.