The hum was the first thing to change.

  For days, it had been a constant, gnawing companion in the Crystal-Frost cell—the sound of her cage, the pulse of Bergian control. Then, it stuttered. A discordant note, like a plucked string snapping. The blue glow of the containment sigil overhead began crackling wildly with energy.

  From deep above, through miles of stone and crystal, came a sound not of bells, but of a scream: a vast, metallic, architectural scream. The palace shuddered. A rain of fine ice-dust sifted from the ceiling. Distantly, alarms began to clang, not in orderly sequence, but in a panicked, overlapping clamor.

  Then, a wave passed through the prison. Corvannafax felt it in her bones, a subsonic shudder that had nothing to do with stone. It was a shock through the world’s hidden veins. Majik.

  The sigil over her head died with a soundless pop. The relentless hum ceased, leaving a ringing silence that was more deafening than noise. The cell was just a hole in the rock.

  A moment later, the wall opposite her shimmered. The crystal steps, which had only grown on command, now erupted from the surface, jagged and uncontrolled, as if the palace itself were having a seizure. They led up into darkness.

  The guards would come. To check the cells, to restore order. Or to eliminate the prisoners.

  She did not wait.

  Corvannafax was on her feet, muscles uncoiling after days of enforced stillness. She tore a long, sharp shard of crystal from the newly formed staircase. It wasn’t an axe, but it would cut. She took the steps three at a time, a red shadow emerging from the blue gloom.

  The guard station at the top was in chaos. Two helmeted soldiers were fumbling with crystal panels that now showed only dead, dark facets. They looked up as she emerged.

  She gave them no time to shout. The crystal shard took the first in the throat before his hand could find his sword. The second managed to draw a short sword, but she was inside his guard, her free hand snapping his head back against the stone wall with a wet crack. She took his sword. It was a better tool.

  She became a storm in the underworld of the palace. The majikal failure had sealed many security doors, but blasted others open. Conduits of glowing energy in the walls spat weird majikal arching energies. Panicked shouts echoed down side corridors. She moved with a predator’s economy, following the sounds of chaos upward, toward the heart of the tumult.

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  She encountered squads of guards; some running to defend the upper levels, others trying to contain prisoner riots in other cell blocks. They saw a Red Malatak, armed and roaring, and they died. She carved a path through them, a one-woman riot given purpose. Her world narrowed to the next enemy, the next turn, the next stair leading up. Koronos was coming. She felt it in the bond of blood-oath, a pull as certain as gravity. He was in this madness somewhere.

  Bursting through a reinforced archway, she found herself in a main service corridor, wide and high-ceilinged. The air here was thick with smoke and the shriek of combat from elsewhere in the palace. The fine mosaics underfoot were slick with blood, bluish tinted blood.

  From a side passage to her left, a squad of corrupted soldiers shambled into view. Their grey flesh, their void eyes. The Whisper’s army had breached the palace itself.

  As she braced to meet them, a thunderous crash echoed from the far end of the corridor. A secondary service gate that was a smaller, less ornate entrance of banded iron and oak; splintered inward.

  Through the smoke and debris stormed a familiar, massive shape. Shelove, her black fur matted with frost and gore, leaped upon the corrupted soldiers, breaking their formation. Behind her came Pericles, his face a mask of battle-rage, hewing left and right with his sword. Daggeroth stumbled after, an arrow nocked but his eyes wide with terror. Even that she-devil herself: Zeyzey.

  And then, him.

  Koronos filled the shattered doorway, his blue skin streaked with soot and black blood, the attuned spear in his hand glowing with a fierce, clean light that seemed to push back the corridor’s gloom. His white eyes swept the scene, past the pantera, past his men, and locked onto her.

  There was no cry of greeting, no wasted breath. His gaze took in her standing there, armed, alive, and a grim approval flashed across his face. He saw the corrupted soldiers regrouping between them.

  One of the fallen at Pericles’s feet was not a shambler, but a Bergian officer in ornate, now-bloodied, armor. A glowing crystal shortsword lay beside the corpse, its blade emitting a steady, cool blue radiance.

  Koronos kicked it with his foot. The blade skittered across the slick floor, straight toward Corvannafax; she would need it to use against these corruptions.

  Her hand shot out and caught it by the hilt mid-slide. The grip was wrong, the balance alien, but the sharp, singing energy in the crystal was a welcome fury. It felt like a piece of this hateful place, turned to her hand.

  The remaining corrupted soldiers turned toward the new, larger threat.

  Corvannafax hefted the glowing sword, fell into step beside Shelove, and gave Koronos a single, sharp nod.

  The reunion needed no words. The corridor ahead was full of enemies. The palace was falling. They had a throneroom to get to, a traitor to kill if he gets in the way, and hopefully, a way back home.

  Together again, they advanced.

  Koronos the Kazarian | Royal Road