The world was too quiet.

After the siege, the silence pressed like a weight on the skin, heavy, endless, and wrong.

The heavens no longer pulsed. The divine stars that once burned silver and red had gone black, swallowed by the same ashfire that now slept inside my child.

Kael stood at the ruined rampart, his hair streaked with soot and blood, his flames dim as candlelight.

The wolves of Iron Howl gathered below, some kneeling, others staring at the horizon as if afraid to look back at what ...