TWENTY YEARS AGO
The blood moon hung fat and crimson over the Shadowveil compound, painting everything the color of fresh slaughter.
Riven Kain was eleven years old when he learned that screaming changed nothing.
He'd woken to the sound—his mother's voice, shrill and breaking, cut short by wet impact. Steel on bone. The compound's wards had failed in silence, their rune-glow dying like snuffed candles, and the killers had come in the dark between heartbeats.
Now he crouched behind the shattered remains of his father's study desk, splinters digging into his palms, watching through a gap as they dragged his family into the courtyard.
The Covenant's enforcers moved with the casual efficiency of butchers at work. Twenty of them, maybe more. Armored in black plate etched with crimson runes that pulsed with stolen life. Their leader—a broad-shouldered man with a face like chiseled granite and eyes dead as winter ice—stood at the center, cleaning blood from his blade with a silk cloth.
Riven's father knelt in the mud, hands bound behind his back. Kaelen Kain had been the Shadowveil Clan's master—a legend among their people, a man who'd walked through fire and shadow and emerged holding the throats of kings. Now his face was a ruin of split flesh and broken teeth, one eye swollen shut, the other fixed on the enforcer with something that might have been defiance if it wasn't so obviously hopeless.
"The contract was clear," the enforcer said, his voice carrying the flat affect of someone discussing the weather. "No Shadowveil remains. No seeds planted for future vengeance. Clean slate."
"We honored... every agreement..." Kaelen's words bubbled through blood. "Served faithfully... twenty years—"
The enforcer's boot caught him in the ribs. Bone cracked like dry kindling.
"Faithfulness is a dog's virtue. The Ten Pillars don't need faithful dogs anymore. They need corpses."
Riven's mother was next to his father, her silver hair matted with gore. She wasn't crying. The Shadowveil didn't cry—they'd been trained from birth to swallow pain, to turn suffering into fuel. But her hands trembled as she reached for the small figure huddled against her.
Lyra.
Riven's sister was six years old. She still slept with a wooden horse their grandfather had carved, still believed that shadows were friendly things that kept you safe at night. Her face was ghost-pale in the blood-moon light, eyes too wide, too understanding. She knew. Children always knew.
"Please." Their mother's voice cracked on the word. "She's just a child. She knows nothing of our work. Let her—"
"No loose ends." The enforcer gestured lazily.
Two of his men stepped forward. One grabbed Lyra by her hair, yanking her away from their mother. The little girl's scream pierced the night—not the scream of someone in pain, but of someone watching their world end.
Riven's hand found the knife at his belt. A training blade, barely sharp enough to cut rope. His father had promised him a real weapon next year, when he turned twelve. When he was ready.
He wasn't ready.
His legs wouldn't move. His breath came in shallow gasps that tasted like copper and ash. The rational part of his mind—the part his father had trained relentlessly—screamed at him that rushing out would accomplish nothing. Eleven years old, untrained in real combat, armed with a child's knife against twenty armored killers.
Suicide.
But Lyra was screaming.
The enforcer holding her lifted her by the throat, her small feet kicking uselessly at air. She clawed at his gauntlet, fingernails breaking against steel.
"Make it quick," the lead enforcer said. "We have four more compounds to cleanse tonight."
Their mother lunged. Got three steps before a blade punched through her spine and erupted from her chest in a spray of crimson. She dropped like a puppet with cut strings, still reaching toward Lyra.
Their father roared—an animal sound of pure anguish—and surged upward despite his bonds. He almost made it to his feet before three swords found him. They held him there, skewered and dying, forcing him to watch.
The enforcer drew a short blade from his belt. Tested the edge against his thumb. A bead of blood welled up, black in the moonlight.
"Any last words, little shadow?"
Lyra's voice was barely a whisper, but Riven heard it. Would hear it for the rest of his life.
"Riven... help..."
The blade opened her throat.
The enforcer let her drop. She hit the mud with a sound too soft for something so final, small hands clutching at the red ruin of her neck, mouth working soundlessly. It took thirty-seven seconds for her to stop moving.
Riven counted every one.
His father was still alive, pinned by steel, gurgling something that might have been a curse or a prayer. The lead enforcer stepped close, crouched down until they were eye to eye.
"Your clan served its purpose. Be grateful you lasted this long." He drove his blade through Kaelen's remaining eye, straight into his brain. Twisted once. "Give my regards to whatever gods still listen to failures."
Then they began the systematic butchery of the rest.
Uncles. Aunts. Cousins. The compound's guards—men and women who'd trained Riven in blade work and shadow-stepping, who'd told stories around fires and laughed at his childish attempts at stealth. They were hunted down and killed with the efficiency of men clearing vermin from a granary.
Riven stayed hidden. Watched it all through the gap in the shattered desk while his family's blood soaked into the earth and the blood moon watched with its idiot crimson eye.
Coward, something whispered in his mind. Coward. Coward. Coward.
But he didn't move.
The enforcers set fires as they left. The compound's ancient wood caught eagerly, flames climbing toward the diseased sky. Riven waited until their footsteps faded, until the roar of the fire was the only sound, before crawling out from his hiding place.
The heat hit him like a physical thing. Smoke choked the air, thick and black and tasting of burning flesh. He stumbled toward the courtyard, toward the place where his family lay in pieces.
His father's remaining eye stared at nothing. His mother's hand was still outstretched. Lyra—
He couldn't look at Lyra.
The wooden horse lay in the mud beside her. Somehow untouched by blood. Riven picked it up with trembling fingers, felt its weight, its solidity. Proof that she'd existed. That she'd been real.
The fire was spreading. Soon the entire compound would be ash.
Riven turned north, toward the distant shadow of the Void Marches. Toward the place where civilized men didn't go. Where monsters lived and sanity died and the darkness was thick enough to drown in.
He walked until the fire was just a glow behind him. Until his feet bled and his lungs burned and exhaustion threatened to drag him down.
He didn't stop.
I'll come back, he promised the night, the blood moon, the uncaring void between stars. I'll become something worse than any of you. And I'll kill every single one of them.
The darkness seemed to listen.
In the Void Marches, something ancient and hungry smiled.
Present Day
The rain fell like punishment.
Riven stood in the shadows of an alley in Greyhaven—a port city on the Iron Coast where civilization still pretended to matter—and watched his target through the downpour.
Merchant-Lord Davos Crenn. Fat, prosperous, protected by a dozen guards and enough gold to buy pardons for any crime. He climbed from his gilded carriage, servants rushing to shield him from the rain with silk umbrellas, and waddled toward the entrance of the Emerald Serpent—the finest brothel in the city.
A minor player. Not one of the Ten Pillars. But connected. A tributary feeding the great river of The Covenant's power.
Riven's fingers traced the void-touched blade at his hip. The weapon pulsed with hungry darkness, eager to taste blood again. He could feel the familiar itch beneath his skin—the void corruption spreading with each passing day. Black veins crawled up his forearms like creeping frost, visible even in the dim light. His reflection in puddles showed eyes gone completely black, pupils drowned in liquid shadow.
The price of power. The cost of survival.
Twenty years in the Void Marches had stripped away everything soft. Everything human. He'd made pacts with things that shouldn't exist, drunk from poisoned wells, let the darkness hollow him out until only purpose remained.
Eclipse, they called him in the Northern Ember. The shadow that devoured light.
He'd left them a month ago. Returned to civilization with a list of names burned into his memory and a hunger that twenty years hadn't dimmed.
The Ten Pillars would fall. One by one, he'd tear down the supports until the entire rotten structure of The Covenant collapsed into blood and screaming.
But first, the tributaries. First, the foundations.
Davos Crenn disappeared into the brothel, his guards taking positions at the entrances. Professional. Alert. Armed with steel and minor blood-runes etched into their armor.
Riven smiled. It felt wrong on his face, like a mask that didn't quite fit anymore.
He stepped from the shadows and the rain, pulling the darkness with him like a cloak.
The hunt had begun.