PROLOGUE: THE CAVE
The night sky wept.
Rain fell in sheets so thick they blurred the world to grey. Thunder rolled across the heavens like the footsteps of something vast and hungry. Lightning split the darkness, illuminating for one frozen heartbeat the figure that ran through the chaos below.
She was barefoot. Her feet were bloody, torn by stones and roots. And clutched to her chest, wrapped in a sodden cloth torn from her own hem, was a bundle that she held as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered.
She stumbled into a cave.
It was small, barely more than a hollow in the hillside. She crashed against the far wall and slid down, her legs finally giving out.
Then she looked down at what she carried.
Two faces. Two babies, no more than a month old, their eyes closed in sleep despite the chaos around them. Their small fists clutched against each other as if even in slumber they refused to be separated.
On their foreheads, curved marks gleamed like moonlight on water. Sickle-shaped. Silver. Pulsing faintly in matched rhythms.
The woman’s eyes filled with tears.
“I’m so sorry, little ones,” she whispered. “You’ve already lost the most precious people in your lives. And you don’t even know it.”
She pressed her lips to their foreheads. The marks warmed at her touch.
“I will keep you safe,” she said. “I swear it. Whatever it-”
A flash of light tore through the cave entrance.
Not lightning. Something that left the air tasting of copper and ash.
“So,” said a voice from the entrance, smooth and cold as a blade drawn across silk. “This is where you chose to hide.”
She knew that voice. She had heard it the night everything burned.
The man stood at the cave’s mouth, silhouetted against the storm. Rain slid off him without touching his skin. He was clad in armor, black as the void between stars, threaded with veins of gold that pulsed with inner light. And where his left eye should have been, there was only a ruin, a savage wound that carved a scar from temple to jaw.
Fresh. Someone had hurt him tonight.
Good.
“Arkanis,” the woman breathed.
The thing wearing a man’s shape smiled.
“You’ve led me on quite a chase, Mira. Across three kingdoms. Through the Veilwood. Past the Shattered Coast.” His single remaining eye, golden, slitted, fixed on the bundle in her arms. “All for them.”
“You can’t have them.”
“They are exactly mine to take. Those marks on their foreheads aren’t decoration. They’re seals. And what is sealed...” He tilted his head. “...can be opened.”
Mira pressed herself back against the stone. There was nowhere to run.
But time was all she needed.
“You don’t understand,” she said. Her hand moved beneath the babies, tracing symbols on the stone floor. “They aren’t weapons for you to wield.”
“Everything is a weapon. It’s only a matter of finding the right hands.”
“Then find someone else.”
The symbols began to glow.
Arkanis lunged forward, power gathering around his fist like a swarm of black wasps.
Mira poured everything she had into the spell.
Not an attack. Something desperate and untargeted, keyed to a single word:
Safety.
The light consumed her.
When Arkanis’s blow landed, his fist passed through empty air. The woman was gone. The babies were gone.
For a long moment, Arkanis stood motionless.
Then he began to laugh.
“Run,” he said to the empty cave. “Hide. I have been searching for a very, very long time. A few more years...”
He smiled.
“...are nothing.”
He stepped back into the storm and vanished.
