Chapter One
The sound of a cannon rings out. He flinches awake, his heart hammering against his ribs as he dashes to his window. His bare feet slap the cold stones—a surface he has yet to become accustomed to—as he grips the wooden sill and looks down into the courtyard.
Another loud boom echoes out, vibrating straight through the stones beneath him. Below him, a section of the outer wall explodes inward, showering the dirt courtyard in jagged stone, mortar, and blinding white debris.
Smoke surges upward, thick and smelling violently of sulfur. He doesn’t wait for the air to clear. He lunges back across the room, his eyes scanning the floor for anything usable. There are no weapons here—no blades, no armor, nothing but a heavy oak chair and the cloth on his back.
Shouts echo from the breach below. Not a chorus of different voices, but a singular, uniform command repeated by dozens of identical throats.
He grips the back of the oak chair, his knuckles turning white as his body instinctively drops into a low, braced stance. His feet find their traction on the dust-covered stone. He doesn’t know this room, and he barely knows this body, but as the first figure darkens his doorway, his fists ball up automatically. He isn’t waiting to be found.
He scrambles around the room, grabbing the chair and snapping a leg off of it. The second the leg comes free, he feels a weird tingle as if the leg is being drawn toward something. Strangely, he drops it and it flies a few inches away into a loose stone that was on the ground. A bright flash, and all of a sudden neither the loose stone nor the leg of the chair is left. In their place is a strange stone knife, the blade roughly eight inches long with a wooden handle.
The door bursts open. With no time to think, he hurriedly picks up the knife and dashes toward the intruder, ready to defend himself.
The figure filling the doorway is an exact mirror of the voices below—same face, same vacant stare, and a uniform completely clean of dust despite the explosion in the courtyard.
He closes the distance before the man can fully cross the threshold. He drives the newly fused stone blade upward, aiming straight for the center of mass.
The intruder reacts with eerie synchronization, its arm coming up to check the strike and block his armed right hand. But his left fist automatically fires out in a short, brutal hook, catching the figure square in the temple. The impact is solid, and the man staggers sideways, his vacant eyes widening slightly as the physical force disrupts his balance.
He capitalizes on the opening instantly, pivoting on his bare feet against the cold stones. He drives the eight-inch blade forward into the exposed side of the neck.
Dark, hot blood splurts across his knuckles. The figure doesn’t scream; he just releases a heavy, choked gasp as his knees buckle, collapsing into a heavy heap right across the doorway, blocking the entrance to the room.
Outside in the corridor, the heavy thudding of identical, synchronized footsteps begins to echo, heading straight for his floor. They know exactly where he is.
He wipes the back of his bloodied hand across his forehead, his eyes darting from the corpse in the doorway to the window. The courtyard below is a disaster zone of smoke and crumbling stone, and the hallway outside is quickly filling with the sound of incoming boots. He grips the wooden handle of the stone knife tighter, his mind racing for an exit before the next wave breaches the room.
Without a second thought, he runs toward the window, climbing out and dropping onto a ledge a few feet down. A sharp pain shoots up his leg as his ankle twists on the landing, but the sheer volume of adrenaline pumping through him keeps him moving. He runs full speed across the small ledge and dives, sliding down a partial incline on the roof just beside him. He takes another drop—smaller this time, but still painful to land on with an already injured ankle.
He staggers as he lands, climbing into the open room and looking around for a brief moment to get his bearings. It is his father’s room, but his father is nowhere to be seen. He must already be at the walls, he thinks to himself.
Back in motion, he moves toward the door, opening it a crack to make sure the coast is clear. Seeing no one and hearing no voices, he runs down the empty corridor and down a spiraling staircase of stone and mortar. He reaches the bottom quickly, but stumbles violently as his foot hits the floor, nearly falling because of his injury.
Steadying himself, he looks to his right toward a massive door—the entrance to his father’s throne room. But from the other side of the wood, he hears that exact same voice coming from the room. He freezes. He can’t fight another one, not in this state.
He pivots, turning the opposite direction and moving as fast as he can. He goes for the door leading to the outside. He has to reach the wall to find his father—the one person he knows he can trust. He scrambles out the door and stumbles down the stones of the front path leading to the wall as the blinding light from the sun beams down upon him.
Bringing his hand to his eyes to block the glare, he notices his father upon the wall not far from him. He dashes as fast as he can move to the closest stair leading to the top of the walls. As he reaches the top, still nearly thirty yards from where his father is, he quickly notices his father isn’t just standing; he is fighting multiple attackers.
A new rush of adrenaline hits. He sprints forward toward his father, calling out for him. It was a mistake—one he will never forget.
Hearing the cry, his father whips around, with only enough time to yell his son’s name: “Nox!”
They are the last words to ever leave his mouth. Still about six yards away, he suddenly feels a warm, strange mist coat his skin. In the same breath, his father’s head falls from his shoulders to the dirt, severed by an attacker’s blade swinging powerfully in a wide, brutal arc.
