A groan moved through the floor as Nethervale's infrastructure continued to crumble. Inside a container of seamless stone, fractures spread across the surface with a hiss of escaping air. Caldreth gasped, his lungs burning as the vacuum within broke. Moments later, the lid disintegrated, showering him in a cloud of gray debris.

  Caldreth spilled sideways onto the floor, his atrophied limbs heavy as lead. His skin, once the deep bronze of the Sangrathi, was now the color of tarnished brass, stretched thin over his ribs and leached of warmth. He pushed a shock of matted golden hair from his eyes, deep crimson irises, the unmistakable mark of Sangrathi blood, and gagged on air thick with dust.

  "Caldreth?"

  The voice was a dry rasp, a familiar authority reduced to a wheeze. Caldreth didn't answer; his throat was a desert, his mind a slow-moving fog.

  "Boy, answer me!" Morvain barked, the command cracking through a coughing fit. The older man was already on his hands and knees beside the neighboring container, his frame gaunt and trembling.

  "I'm here," Caldreth rasped, the words slow to form.

  "Morvain, how long has it been?" Serintha cut in. She stumbled out of her own container, clutching her ribs as she tried to grasp her bearings.

  Morvain reached out, touching the stone wall; it was cold, devoid of the faint vibration that once signified a living city. He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled toward an iron lever on the far wall, his boots kicking up clouds of silt. He gripped the mechanism and threw his weight against it. There was no click of gears, no hum of activating power.

  Morvain stared at the lever, his hand trembling as he pulled it back to reveal a layer of calcified dust in the joint. He looked at Serintha, then Caldreth, his eyes hollow.

  "The anchor is cold," Morvain whispered. "Lifetimes of it."

  Morvain shoved against the stone door itself in a fit of desperate strength. "It's sealed," he struggled, his face pale in the dim light.

  "The service exit, Morvain," Serintha croaked from the corner. She leaned against the far wall, wheezing through the dust. "We can... we can leave through there."

  Morvain turned, his eyes searching the shadows for the narrow stairwell.

  "Grab what you can. Move!" Morvain commanded. He stumbled toward a nearby weapons rack. As his hand brushed the stand, the ancient wood turned to powder, but before the weapon could hit the floor, his fingers locked around the hilt. A steel blade that had refused to rust nearly pulled him down.

  Caldreth forced his leaden frame toward a stone chest. He managed to crack the lid and pull out three cloaks of weave-glass. The fabric was shimmering and impossibly light, designed to reflect a killing sun while remaining cool to the touch. He draped one over his wasted shoulders.

  He handed a cloak to Morvain, swallowing dust and blinking ash from his eyes. "The demons… are they still-" He coughed. "Still roaming?"

  Morvain took the cloak, his knuckles white against the steel hilt. "A coordinated strike on both cities... we never thought the demons could unite. If Nethervale fell, Shatterdeep likely burned."

  Caldreth met Morvain's gaze, searching for something to hold onto. There was nothing there.

  His jaw tightened. "We should make for Shatterdeep," he paused, "There must be survivors, there has to be."

  The trio moved as a single, broken unit toward the shadow of the service stairwell. Serintha reached it first, her fingers clawing at the recessed handle of the heavy door. With a collective heave, they threw it open; the hinges screaming as they bit into the frame.

  Every step was a battle against muscles that felt like wet clay. They burst from the dark into a nightmare. Caldreth threw up a hand, warding off a violent, blinding glare. High in a bruise-colored sky, the sun sat like a hot iron against his skin.

  As his vision cleared, the silence hit him harder than the heat.

  Nethervale was erased. The spires of polished obsidian, once the crowns of the city, had been snapped like dry kindling. The weeping silver gardens, where Caldreth had walked in the cool of the evening, were now nothing but gray, calcified ribs of metal poking through the drifts. He took a breath, but the copper tang of old blood and sulfurous silt turned to a bitter paste in his throat.

  Caldreth took a step forward, his boot sinking into a dune of ash that felt sickeningly soft, like powdered bone. A heap of remains lay tangled against a collapsed archway nearby. Nothing more than a frantic jumble of sun-bleached pelvises and shattered skulls, the marrow long ago sucked dry by the Wastes.

  They were the blood that remained, the last living thing left in a city turned to ash.

  "No," Serintha whimpered. The sound was thin, a fragile thread that snapped against the howling wind.

  A dry clicking slithered across the sand, bouncing off the ruins around them.

  "What is that?" Caldreth asked.

  He looked to Morvain, expecting the steady gaze of his ward. Instead, he found a mask of spreading pallor. Morvain's pupils dilated until his eyes were nothing but twin pits of black, fixed on a shadow that detached itself from a broken spire.

  The shape dropped, hitting the sand with a thud. It clicked again, a staccato pulse that seemed to map the air. More figures rose from the shadows of the broken spire, their movements fluid and predatory.

  "Demons," Morvain snarled through a throat tight with terror, the steel of his blade trembling in his grip. "Run!"

  Their wasted muscles screamed at the sudden burst of effort as they scrambled over debris. Heat radiated from the crushed stone, baking the soles of Caldreth's boots and shimmering across the horizon. Beside him, Serintha struggled to keep up, her breathing ragged and thin.

  Caldreth heard the hitch in her breath and glanced back, just for a moment. His gaze fell upon the ruined insignia on her sleeve: the Crimson Veil. A weeping eye cowled in shadow.

  "After all this time, they're still here," her voice cracked.

  Caldreth said nothing, wise enough not to waste energy on words.

  Sangrathi never run.

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  The old lesson was now a cruel joke. For centuries, they had slept beneath their ruined city, waiting for safety that never came. Now, he was stumbling through ash.

  A series of clicks assaulted Caldreth's ears. The sound sent a shiver down his spine. Serintha clawed at his arm, her grip sliding down until her fingers locked onto his wrist. She squeezed hard.

  "Steel your heart, Cal," she said between gasps. "Fear is only dust, let the wind take it."

  The same words Serintha used when he was a boy, shaking before his first duel. It comes and goes, Cal. But you remain.

  Morvain was slowing. Serintha released Caldreth's wrist and dropped back. She wrapped her hand around the older man's arm and dragged him forward. Caldreth looked for a command from the man who had forged him, but found only silence. Serintha's eyes met Morvain's; there was no backup plan this time.

  For the first time, Caldreth saw his caretakers falter as they looked at him with a desperate guilt. They were about to fail the only son they had left alive.

  "Are we the last?" Serintha said, looking at Caldreth's back.

  Caldreth kept his eyes locked on the horizon, scouring the dunes until he saw it: a jagged splinter of black stone jutting from the earth like a broken tooth.

  "There!" Caldreth shouted, pointing toward the collapsed ravine. "The ruin! Move!" The command left his mouth before he could question it.

  He pivoted, forcing his burning legs to churn through the gray ash. Morvain and Serintha followed, their veteran instincts snapping back into place under the boy's sudden directive.

  Caldreth stumbled across the threshold, the air dropping twenty degrees. The arches were too wide; the angles too sharp. It was architecture built for broad shoulders and hearts filled with hate. It smelled of old dust and dried marrow, a hole in the ground where things went to die.

  "This is death," Serintha said.

  They scrambled down the worn steps into the dark. Light from the entrance bled away at the bottom landing, revealing a chamber carved from the bedrock. Serintha and Morvain kept moving. They ran their hands along the granite walls, searching for a seam, a lever, anything. There was nothing, only solid stone.

  They retreated to the center of the room.

  "Caldreth, get behind us," Morvain's voice trembled. He stepped forward, planting his feet on the uneven floor and shoving Caldreth behind him.

  Morvain brandished the sword he had carried from the ruins of Nethervale. Sangrathi steel was immaculate, even after centuries in the dark.

  But while the steel was eternal, the wielder was not.

  Morvain's arm shook; his decaying muscles fought against his will to survive. The tip of the blade dragged across the stone, sparking. After hauling it across the Wastes, the weight of it seemed to crush him.

  Caldreth scanned the room for a rock, a bone, anything to fight with. There was nothing. He clenched his empty fists.

  He thought of Nyris then, the way he always did when things were about to go wrong. Old habit. Useless comfort.

  "No," Caldreth demanded, forcing himself upright. "I stand with you."

  Morvain glanced back, his eyes widening. For a second, the fear plastered across his face vanished, replaced by a heartbreaking pride. "Then stand tall, boy."

  Moments later, a landslide of ash-gray muscle and calcified bone-plating flooded through the opening. Their flat, lidless eyes reflected the surface's glare as their jaws unhinged with a dry, splintering crack. The air turned sharp with hot flint and old bone.

  Morvain met the first demon with a roar. He heaved the pristine blade up into an overhead arc. The steel bit cleaved through the beast's collarbone and buried itself halfway into the creature's spine. But it struck too deep. The demon shrieked, thrashing around with abandon.

  Morvain tried to wrench it free, but his atrophied muscles betrayed him. With a pop, his shoulder dislocated, causing his grip to fail.

  The demon scrambled back, the sword still jutting from its shoulder like a trophy. It retreated into the shadows of the stairwell, wounded but alive, taking the Sangrathi's last line of defense with it.

  "No..." Morvain clutched at emptiness.

  There was no time to mourn the loss before the rest of the pack descended.

  He turned his head, his eyes locking onto Caldreth's with a frantic, wide-eyed clarity. Morvain tried to roar, but his words died in a sickening, liquid gurgle.

  A blur of gray muscle and corded neck-veins slammed into Morvain. Jaws unhinged and clamped shut across his throat with a wet, splintering snap.

  Caldreth stood paralyzed in a cold, primal fear. The man who had been his father in everything but name was being unmade in seconds. The stifled whistle of air escaping a severed windpipe assaulted Caldreth's ears, a frantic, high-pitched hiss that wouldn't stop. Morvain's heels drummed against the stone as the predators dragged him down.

  A hot, metallic spray of crimson splattered across Caldreth's face. Caldreth wanted to lunge, to scream, but his muscles had turned to lead.

  The stories he'd been told in the halls of Nethervale, the tales of Sangrathi hunters wading into the Wastes for sport, treating demons like pitiful vermin to be harvested, withered and died in his mind.

  "No!" Serintha screamed.

  The word started as a scream but ended in a broken, high-pitched breath, as if the air had been kicked out of Serintha's lungs. She recoiled, stepping back to buy herself precious seconds.

  Her hands, usually so steady when binding Caldreth's wounds, flew to her own throat in a sympathetic reflex, her fingers digging into her skin as if she could feel the phantom pressure of the demon's jaws. For a heartbeat, the brave front she put on was replaced by a woman witnessing the end of her world.

  Her eyes darted from Morvain's kicking heels to Caldreth, a flash of wild, frantic guilt crossing her face. She had failed the first half of her charge, and the weight of it seemed to age her ten years in a second. Then, the grief curdled into a desperate, suicidal focus. She set her feet apart, almost slipping in the widening pool of Morvain's blood, and thrust her hands forward, fingers splayed in a familiar casting stance. Caldreth waited for the roar of power, the shockwave that would shatter bones.

  Only an empty, mocking silence answered.

  Serintha stood with her fingers splayed and trembling, grasping at a void where her power used to be. The stasis had drained them dry. A look of wide-eyed terror flooded her face a second before the pack reached her. She, too, was nothing but soft, unprotected meat.

  The creature hit her mid-breath, its weight slamming her into the stone with a sickening, hollow thwack. There was no time for a final word. A second predator joined the first, its unhinged jaws buried in her shoulder, dragging her down into the ash.

  Serintha reached an arm toward Caldreth, her fingers trembling as they clawed at the air between them. Tears tracked through the dust on her cheeks, leaving silver lines in the gray.

  "Fear-" she started, her voice a fragile rasp. She was trying to anchor him, to offer the lie of safety one last time.

  A pair of claws swiped across her throat, mid-word.

  The sound was a sharp, wet whistle. A fresh spray of hot blood painted the wall next to her. Caldreth stood frozen as the light died in her eyes, replaced by a flat, empty stare that mirrored the desert above them.

  "Serintha!" Caldreth lunged. He threw a punch exactly as Morvain had taught him a thousand times, knuckles tucked, weight forward. But here, against the raw muscle of the Wastes, the lesson failed. It was a child's strike against a mountain. As the demon swatted Caldreth aside, the horror settled in. He was empty-handed. For a Sangrathi, that was a death sentence.

  This can't be real.

  The largest of the pack stalked forward, drool splattering as it hit the stone floor. Cornered prey always tasted better.

  It lunged. Caldreth shouted, a raw, defiant sound, and threw his arms up in a futile guard. Heavy claws pinned his chest, crushing the air from his lungs. He fell back onto a slab, the stone biting into his spine.

  The beast's maw opened, revealing serrated fangs, before it descended. Pain exploded. Hot and absolute. He felt his life rushing out to meet the beast's hunger.

  Was he the last? Was this how the Sangrathi met their end?

  But then, the demon gagged.

  The creature thrashed backward, retching. It shook its head, spitting out a mouthful of blood as if it had swallowed acid. Black foam bubbled at its lips.

  The demon choked, bounding back up the stairs, convulsing as Caldreth's blood worked through its system like poison. The others froze, sniffing the air. A scent filled the chamber, not just iron, but something older.

  They whined, ears flattening, and backed away from the dying figure on the slab. Caldreth lay alone, his heartbeat slowing to a thudding drum. The pain faded, replaced by a cold, drifting silence.

  Caldreth didn't fight it.

  The two who raised him were dead, and Nethervale was nothing but ash.

  A face cut through the dark. Not a fragment, her face. Nyris. The bloodgems in her hair caught the light the way they always had, sounding like tiny crimson bells when she turned her head.

  I'm coming, Nyris, he thought. Her smile was the last thing he saw before the dark took him.

  The air shivered with a cold vibration, the resonance of a lock breaking deep within the aether of the Underworld. A silent shockwave rippled outward from the crypt, washing over the Infernal Wastes like a phantom tide.

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