The crow glided silently, wings stretched wide against the last streaks of dusk. The light caught along its feathers, turning them silver for an instant before the bird dropped lower, coasting on a pocket of air.

  Beneath it stretched the warhost.

  The valley floor seethed with life that was not human. Thousands of kobolds crowded together in rough clusters, crouched around bone fires that burned with greasy smoke. Their armor clicked and rattled with every twitch and motion, thin plates of bone and scavenged metal layered like beetle shells. Spears jutted upward from the crowd, swaying as the creatures snarled and yipped in excitement.

  Between them moved shapes larger and slower. Trolls, hulking and bent, their bodies covered with mossy hides and sores that oozed when they moved. The smell of them reached even the crow’s sharp nose: rot, fungus, and dried blood. They carried clubs carved from whole trees and dragged nets tangled with the bones of things they had caught and devoured.

  Even taller were the ogres. Not as many as the kobolds or trolls, but far more dangerous. They sat apart from the fires, even swatting at kobolds who got too close. Pride clung to them, heavy as the scars across their gray flesh. They did not shout or laugh. They prepared.

  The crow’s eye saw all of it. And in a half-collapsed tower deep in the western hills, Nezzarod watched through the crow’s borrowed sight.

  He stood before a wide bowl carved from black stone, its surface filled with a layer of fine ash. Smoke curled upward in twisting streams, mirroring the bird’s vision. His fingers moved carefully above the bowl, twitching in rhythm with the crow’s wings. The pale glow in his eyes flickered with each shift, a mark of the power he pulled through himself to guide the flight.

  The shadow sorcerer had worked for years to gather such an army.

  The kobolds were simple. Always hungry. Always ready to bleed for the promise of more blood. They swarmed to any cause that promised fire and chaos.

  The trolls had been harder. They slumbered deep in their bogs, more beast than soldier, and needed bait to rouse them. He had promised them meat. Villages to pull apart. Gold to hoard, even if they had little use for it. They had stirred, lured by the scent of ruin.

  But the ogres…

  The ogres demanded proof. They would not follow words alone. They needed to see power, to feel it. And that, too, he had given them.

  The dragon artifact had changed everything.

  Even without holding it in full, its presence was enough. It breathed with a faint pulse, a whisper of something greater than gods. An echo of an age when the sky had belonged to scaled wings and the ground trembled beneath their passing. He had shown them glimpses through the bowl. They had seen its glow, its impossible weight. That was all it took.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  They feared it. And they desired it. And in that tension, he bound them to him.

  The crow wheeled above the valley one last time before the sorcerer released it. His hand fell to his side, the glow fading from his eyes. Smoke in the bowl thickened, then dulled to gray.

  He stepped back, drawing his hood higher. The air around him shimmered faintly, as if something unseen had brushed his shoulders. The whisper followed, the low, steady murmur of voices not entirely his own. Words older than memory. Words of affirmation.

  He closed his eyes, listening for a moment.

  There had been a time centuries ago when he had been only a boy. A child near a riverside town where streets were crooked and markets smelled of fried fish and oil lamps. He remembered the sound of the river moving past the docks, the way the lantern light spread across the water. For a time, he had believed he belonged there.

  But the townspeople had known he was different.

  Not seemingly human. Not truly anything they could name. He had looked ordinary to himself, but to them he was strange. Wrong. They had whispered at first, then mocked. Children threw stones.

  He could only watch from afar in the woods, wondering what life would be like if he were one of them.

  What they feared, they tried to destroy.

  But he had survived.

  His blood carried two legacies: drake and dryad. Flame and root. His veins hummed with the tension of both. He could draw from the deep threads of shadow that ran beneath bark and stone, and he could touch the veil between worlds, where silence became strength.

  It was why he could do what others could not, why he could bend creatures to his will, why he could stand alone in the ruined tower and still be stronger than the army waiting below.

  It was why he would succeed.

  He opened his eyes and looked again at the empty bowl. Harbinth would fall. Not simply as a city, but as a symbol. He wanted it to burn not only as vengeance, but as an offering. Proof that the world which had cast him out would be forced to kneel.

  The humans would see. The dwarves would see. Even the dryads, those who thought themselves above him, would see.

  They had chosen not to claim him. They had left him without a place.

  He would give them justice.

  Not the kind whispered in temples. Not the kind written in law. His justice would be fire and ash. It would break walls and bones alike. It would teach them what it meant to fear what they had cast away.

  He drew his cloak tighter, feeling the pulse of the artifact even across the miles that separated them. Once it was his in full, there would be no barrier left. No dreamscape he could not pierce, no truth he could not unmake.

  The thought warmed him.

  He turned from the bowl, letting the smoke drift and settle into silence. His boots pressed against broken stone as he walked to the open window of the ruined tower. From there, he could see the faint glow of the kobolds’ fires flickering in the distance, far down in the valley.

  They waited for his command. They believed in him, even if they did not know the shape of his blood or the truth of his past. That was enough.

  The humans in Harbinth prayed to their gods. The dwarves sharpened their axes. The dryads whispered to their roots and begged the forest to protect them.

  It would not matter.

  Soon they would kneel. Not before gods. Not before kings or lords.

  But before him.

  Nezzarod closed his eyes and let the voices whisper in his mind. He smiled faintly.

  The night was nearly over. The dawn would bring fire.

  And with it, his rise.