“I’ve got one question for you,” Vera said, Resonance gathering along Stillwake’s shaft. “You’re stronger than last time. Why?”

  The Silent Lord in this world had been defeated by a coordinated strike from some of the strongest fighters around. Having personally experienced how strong the Veralyth from back then was from the vision carved by the Graven Daughter, she could tell that this version of Veyrith would have wiped them all out.

  Power levels in general seemed to have risen sharply over the past decade, not just for people like her. That kind of power creep made sense in a game, but it was harder to explain here.

  The cracked mask tilted toward her. From the split, she felt threads of his power fraying, thinning.

  “The Slow Reckoning approaches,” came his whispering voice. The words sounded worn and frayed at the edges.

  Vera’s brow rose. “The Slow Reckoning? What’s that?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. When he finally spoke again, it was with a question of his own. “You have become Truebound. How?”

  She frowned. Truebound was another way of saying Cycle-forged. But other than completing all of those Legacy Cycles in the game, she had no idea how that actually translated here.

  “Tell me how you became Truebound first,” she said.

  She didn’t know for sure that’s what he was, but it fit well enough.

  “I inherited my liege’s Silence. I am his vessel.”

  “You haven’t heard? The Hollow King is dead. I killed him.”

  “My liege cannot die.”

  Vera exhaled through her nose. “Funny. I think that’s almost the same thing he said. Before he died, that is.”

  As a god—one whose domain included death itself—the Hollow King hadn’t been easy to kill. But at the end of the expansion, they’d severed him from his domain using a convoluted method known as the Rite of Reversal, and that had been enough to end him for good.

  She studied Veyrith. “Were you hoping you could bring him back the way you were brought back? Because that’s not happening.”

  The Silent Lord said nothing. Then he raised his staff, Resonance flaring faintly around it. “Your soul, and those of all you know, will serve to restore my liege’s Silence.”

  Vera angled Stillwake. “You really shouldn’t have said that.”

  Veralyth Mournvale.

  The Ashborn Ascendant.

  Chosen of the Hollow.

  Slayer of Tribulations.

  His old comrade. A woman he’d fought beside in more battles than he could count.

  Vanded still had trouble believing it had been her—even after her servant appeared in Marrowfen.

  He stared out over the broken horizon beyond the marshlands, where the moonlight caught on shattered reeds and drowned stone. On missing forests and rivers. The ruins glimmered like the aftermath of a titan’s tantrum. The land had been carved open and left raw.

  A low rumble built in his chest at the sight. It simmered, growing until it broke free as a deep, booming laugh that echoed across the plaza where the Pale Hall had once stood.

  He had thought himself dead. Thought Marrowfen lost to a Silent Lord. That was no fate any sworn protector deserved, but when the end had come, he’d met it head-on. He supposed he’d resigned himself to it.

  But to have it all overturned by Veralyth Mournvale?

  He hadn’t thought he’d ever see her again. After the Crucible, he’d been sure she would have stayed gone.

  And he wouldn’t have blamed her.

  Thuds broke the quiet that followed his laugh as the Verdant Bloomtreader drew up beside him, moss and grass sprouting with each step it took.

  Vanded glanced at the creature. Its flanks were streaked with dried blood, mane clumped with traces of the now-healed wounds. One horn gleamed with a slightly different sheen. Like him, the Bloomtreader had been brought back from the edge.

  By Hollow Mercy, no less.

  He knew that Mark. He’d seen it before. But never like this. Never this refined. This powerful. House Hollow was not famed for its healing properties. What healing they had dealt with the restoration of memory, which was far less precise than the fleshcraft of Emberward’s healers.

  The moss-crowned beast gave a low, sonorous call, its eyes fixed on the horizon.

  “Aye, ain’t that right,” Vanded said with a chuckle, patting its shoulder twice with his gauntlet. “I see it too.”

  Even knowing who was responsible, he couldn’t quite reconcile what he was witnessing—or feeling—with what he thought he knew. The power rolling through the distance far surpassed the Tenth Binding. The Resonance alone was enough to make him tense.

  The Veralyth he’d known had already transcended the Tenth Binding before they killed the Chainfather Ascendant. All of the Marked Ones had. And each of them had only grown since. He’d seen Wakeshade split half a forest, Blightreaver change the skies, and the Flamebearer turn battlefields into pyres.

  He was no stranger to strength.

  But even then, he found it hard to measure what Veralyth had become.

  Had it been the Flamebearer or the Last Aegis facing the Silent Lord, Vanded might still have felt a flicker of worry about how it would end. But with Veralyth, there wasn’t a single bone in him that doubted.

  Even when that woman had no idea what she was doing, she always landed on her feet. People had called her reckless, headstrong—said she and Vanded were cut from the same bad cloth. Maybe they weren’t wrong. But that same wild edge was why he trusted her more than most. Few people burned as bright or as stubbornly as Veralyth Mournvale.

  “Blazegrip,” came a grinding voice from behind him.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  He turned to look at the Bound Witness kneeling among the rubble, its shape flickering faintly, chains dragging through the dust.

  Hollow Mercy wouldn’t work on a specter. They were already memories made solid, after all. There was nothing else to restore them to.

  The Witness lifted its hollow face toward him. “That woman… was she…?”

  “Hollow’s Chosen? She was. Happy you finally got to see her yourself?”

  It stayed quiet.

  “It dawns on me,” Vanded said, scratching his chin, “that my Vice-Master must’ve known about her from the start.” A crooked grin spread across his face. “Reckon that means she’s the same lady Gard lured me into getting that gift for. Her daught—”

  He stopped mid-thought. His gaze drifted back toward the horizon, where flashes of Resonance still split the night.

  Did this mean that Veralyth Mournvale had a daughter?

  When in the Godgrave’s mawchewed depths did the woman find the time to pop one of those out? After the Crucible? No, Gard’s description made the lass sound older.

  Vanded wasn’t sure which part surprised him more—that Veralyth had a kid, or that she’d let herself keep one. He’d never thought of her as the settling sort. But then, maybe he’d underestimated her again.

  But now he was very excited about offering the Ashborn Ascendant’s daughter her gift.

  “Mournvale…” The Bound Witness mouthed the name, as though testing its weight. “The Hollow has chosen well this time.”

  Vanded nodded once. “That they have.”

  “Perhaps we will not all perish tonight.”

  “That’s the spirit.” He kept his eyes on the horizon as another wave of Resonance flared, followed by a thundercrack that made the roofs of Marrowfen tremble.

  He rolled his shoulders, bones popping audibly. His voice lowered. “But it’s not right for us to just stand here while she’s bleeding for us.”

  He turned, surveying Mournvale’s beasts. Everyone of them stood still, watching the distant flashes of the battle. Around them sprawled the shattered corpses of the Tetherborn that had flooded the district. Not a single one twitched. Veralyth had ended them all before he’d even realized she was here.

  He lingered a moment, offering a small, silent gesture to the Sleeper in Gray and the Pale Chorister for their souls. Then his gaze shifted toward the crater at the heart of the ruins, where Veralyth’s first clash with the Silent Lord had torn what remained of the ground apart.

  Vanded strode across the wreckage, boots crunching over splintered stone and ash. He knelt, flexed his arms, and heaved a slab of debris the size of a wagon aside, letting it crash down in a plume of dust. Beneath it, a shape moved.

  Whitefinger glared up at him, eyes burning with quiet fury.

  It had seemed like Veralyth hadn’t spared him a thought during her fight, but now Vanded saw the truth. Whitefinger’s legs had turned to stone, the gray creeping up his torso in cracked veins. The same pattern was starting to crawl across his arms.

  Funeral Weight. An effect applied through the Fourth-Seal Mark of the Gray Reliquary. Vanded had seen her use it, but he’d thought it wasted on the Silent Lord. He should have known better. Even in the thick of battle, she’d found time to afflict Whitefinger.

  Vanded looked down at him with an unreadable expression.

  “How,” Whitefinger spat, “did she become that strong?”

  “I don’t know,” Vanded said.

  He grabbed the man by the collar and hauled him upright until their eyes met.

  He wanted to crush him—right there, right now—for every life the man had ruined, every name lost to his experiments and betrayals. But they could use answers. The rites he’d performed as Mereon Talse. What he’d done to the Boneward Concord and Vaust. Who he worked with.

  Whitefinger wouldn’t give them up easily. But Vanded would make sure he did.

  For now, though…

  Resonance flared through his veins as he raised one gauntleted hand, its fingers glowing like heated iron.

  Whitefinger’s gaze locked on it. “You think this will matter?” he hissed. “You’ll all die tonight—”

  His words twisted into a scream as Vanded’s thumb sank into his eye socket. The wound tried to knit shut, but the gauntlet’s heat seared faster than any Mark could mend. He held until the resistance stopped—then did the same to the other.

  Even blind, Whitefinger still fought, thrashing as Vanded let him drop. His face stayed impassive as he looked across the destruction around him.

  Suddenly, a stillness settled over the plaza. Not the suffocating, commanding kind of the Hollow King, but steadier, reverent. The kind that belonged to the end of a vigil.

  The air split open. A rift tore through space, spilling gray light as a figure tumbled out in a blur, hitting the ground in a cloud of dust. A heartbeat later came Veralyth, halberd already sweeping through the air, carving a quick glyph into the stone. Rings of silver-gray Resonance spread outward, enveloping the area as the rift closed.

  In front of her, the Silent Lord staggered upright. His mask was a splintered mess of ivory and soot, and his robes leaked Resonance like smoke, revealing glimpses of bone turned black as obsidian beneath.

  Vanded looked between the two, once more forcing his mind to accept what he was seeing. Veralyth Mournvale—beating a Silent Lord bloody and standing unscathed.

  It reminded him of the old tales of Noreath’s Hundred, but even they had lost limbs and eyes fighting the Children of Dust.

  Though Veralyth had always been one to craft new legends entirely.

  She looked his way once, watching him, then turned back toward the Silent Lord.

  “You cannot kill me.”

  Unspoken words echoed directly in Vanded’s head.

  Veralyth’s lip curled. “What did I say about the Hollow King’s final words?”

  She vanished.

  The Silent Lord’s staff rose, Resonance coiling into a defensive shield of marrow, but it shattered instantly as her halberd struck. The impact hurled him across the plaza, through stone and shadow alike. He righted himself mid-fall, slamming his staff into the ground, and a field of bone spears erupted in a wave toward her.

  Veralyth pushed off the ground, her boots exploding stone as she vaulted over the barrage. Midair, she twisted and drove her heel down in a Breakstep that split sound like lightning, propelling her straight back at him, halberd trailed by crescents of cold light.

  The Silent Lord brought his staff up to block, but the weapon snapped under the blow. A burst of Resonance split the night, spiraling into the clouds like a column of ashen fire.

  She pressed the assault, each strike sharper, heavier, and fracturing space around her movements. The Silent Lord countered with desperate sweeps of decaying power, but each defense came slower than the last. Then, with a clean upward cut, Veralyth severed an arm.

  For a heartbeat, it was as if everything froze. Sound fell away.

  Then, with one fluid motion, she stepped forward and cleaved his head clean off.

  And silence descended fully.

  “I… will… not…” a voice whispered within it, lingering.

  Veralyth drove her hand into Veyrith’s chest, drawing back a swirling mass of pallid Resonance, its core pulsing like dying embers. With her other hand, she raised Stillwake and carved a rift open in the air. “I think your type needs to be sent a message.”

  She stepped through and vanished.

  Vanded felt where she had gone before he saw it. His gaze rose toward the Marrowvault’s spire, where a beacon of Hollow Resonance erupted, spreading like the light of dawn. No one in Marrowfen would miss it.

  This was unmistakably the Ashborn Ascendant.

  Her power surged higher still, and he caught fleeting impressions of the Mark she was invoking.

  Withering Hollow.

  Several, at once. Dozens of Fifth-Seal Marks that made any experienced warrior flinch. A force that rent the soul itself.

  There was a pause, then a sound like glass fracturing across the heavens. The Marrowvault trembled as an explosion of power bloomed at its peak—and was then completely snuffed out.

  Seconds passed, then Veralyth reappeared in the plaza, fragments of crystal cradled in her hand.

  Vanded simply took her in. For that singular moment, with Resonance still crackling around her, she seemed utterly apart from the world. A presence that didn’t belong here.

  Then the fragments dissolved into her Vaultring, and the Verdant Bloomtreader stepped forward to meet her. The other beasts followed, circling protectively. Veralyth smiled faintly, and the oppressive weight around her broke.

  “Thank you for helping out,” she said.

  The Bloomtreader gave a low, rumbling call, with the rest answering in kind.

  Then Veralyth’s eyes met Vanded’s.

  They studied each other in silence before he crossed his arms. “Didn’t think it was worth telling an old friend you were back, huh?”

  Her brows lifted. “That’s an odd way of saying thanks.”

  He laughed, the sound echoing off broken stone. Then his face hardened. “Thank you, Vera. Marrowfen and I owe you a debt we can’t repay.”

  Something flickered behind her eyes—a look he couldn’t read. Then she lifted Stillwake, its blade shimmering as she invoked what he recognized as Mark of the Stillbound Veil, though the amount of Resonance poured into it far surpassed ‘ridiculous.’

  “It’s hard to tell with all the people, but I think there are still Tetherborn in the city.” She drew another rift open in the air. “Let’s save the talking until that’s handled.”

  Vanded nodded. “Agreed. But one thing first.”

  She glanced back. “What’s that?”

  He grinned, teeth bright. “When do I get to meet the little one?”