Anadar Teil 3

It is just a beginning.....

20

The door to the Conclave was not a great door. It was not ornate, not heavy, not overloaded with symbols as if it had to prove that it mattered. It simply stood there in the white wall of the lower council chamber and waited for what was going to happen anyway.

Rotar went first. Not because he pushed forward, but because protocol is also a form of magic. Manador followed, calm as always, and then Anadar. The three stepped through the door and found themselves in a small hall.

The room was round, or almost round, so precisely that you only noticed when you let your gaze run along the wall. In the middle stood a round table of white marble, so smooth it did not look like stone but like a surface denying its own substance. Around the table stood chairs in six groups, each group of three seats, and between each delegation space had been left, as if gaps had been built into the order on purpose so it could breathe.

Six doors led out of the room. Each door belonged to a school, to a delegation. Each door was the same, so no one could claim their door was more important.

The light did not come from torches. It came from the walls. The white masonry and the ceiling seemed to return it, as if they had learned to hold light without possessing it. The floor was marble as well, white with fine veins, and every step sounded different, as if the room were judging it.

Along the walls stood black statues. Not many, but enough that you never quite felt alone. Figures in robes, in old garments that no longer fit any modern form. Their faces were smooth, or hidden under hoods so as to reveal nothing. Whom they represented lay so far back in the past that it was not recorded, or was no longer meant to be recorded. They did not feel like decoration. They felt like witnesses.

The delegations came out of their doors almost at the same time. Three members per school, exactly as the code required. No one was greeted. There were no new names to celebrate, no appointment that belonged in this room. There was only protocol.

The Wind School of Ashambrat entered as one, Hokn’f in front, Roto and Kloni close behind him. Hokn’f moved like someone used to people making room without being asked.

The Water School of Soont arrived quietly, but not softly. Sinadie, sturdy as a matron whose strength came not from muscle but from stance. Form and Grot beside her, two masters who looked like calm pillars.

The Earth School was heavier. Tranda, old and yet not broken, only slower. Slonda beside him, and Isidre, young, red haired, eyes awake. Isidre looked small in this room, but she held her head as if she refused to be reminded.

The School of Mind entered almost noiselessly. The Mother did not walk like a delegate, she walked like a presence. Sina and Oni flanked her, both calm, both alert. The Mother did not smile. She was there, and that was enough.

The School of Life stepped into the room at a measured pace. Fontal, dean of Gontar, entered with a kind of weariness you only have when you have lived too long too close to people. Sil and Onina followed, both with the look of those who know what it means when a body can no longer go on.

And finally the Fiery Fortress. Rotar stepped forward, cloak still, gaze straight. Manador beside him, too disciplined to look around. Anadar followed.

They sat. Each delegation behind its door, exactly where it was meant to be. The gaps between them remained empty, as if they themselves were a reminder that distance is needed so order does not become compulsion.

No servant entered. No messenger entered. No one served. In this room, no one was served.

Hokn’f stood up. Because he still held the chair, because protocol required him to mark the beginning.

“By the Code,” he said, and his voice was neither loud nor soft, it was appropriate. “Opening of the Conclave. Verification of presence.”

The names were read aloud. Each delegation confirmed. No discussion. No comment. Only words that were not allowed to be negotiated.

Then came the formal handover. The chair changed in turn. This time it passed from the Wind School to the Water School. Hokn’f rose, took a staff that was not large but old enough to carry more meaning than material, and handed it to Sinadie. It was not a gift. It was a duty you carried for half a year.

Sinadie took the staff with both hands. She did not hold it like a symbol but like a tool. “I accept,” she said, and in the sentence there was no joy, only obligation.

“Next chair,” Hokn’f said, “in half a year, by rotation, the Earth School.”

Tranda nodded so slowly it almost looked like a sigh. Isidre glanced at him as if trying to understand whether he meant it or merely endured it.

Then came the litany.

Exchange of students. Reading of names. Handing over of scrolls to formalize everything so no one could later claim they had understood differently. Who was sent where. Which students went to royal houses. Which remained in towers, apart from society, because they chose it or because no one was left to bring them back.

Deaths were named. Kings who had died. Succession arrangements that sounded clean though everyone knew they never are. Political information one had to share so later one could say it had been shared. Sentences spoken so many times they no longer hurt.

Anadar listened because Rotar expected it. Manador listened because he believed information is power. The Mother listened because she always listens, even when she looks as though she is elsewhere.

And then came the last item.

The many refugees.

Sinadie laid her hand on the staff as if she had to remind it why it was there. “We come to the last point,” she said. “The movement of people. The expulsions. The flight.”

In that moment the room changed. Not louder, not dramatic. Only denser, as if the white walls had suddenly understood this was not a point of protocol but a crack.

Sinadie spoke first. She had gathered information farther than many here had eyes. From islands, from coasts, from routes not marked on their maps. “Everywhere the same picture,” she said. “Expulsion, and further expulsion of the expelled. Cause unknown. People leave because it grows too cold. Because it becomes unreal. Because they cannot bear it. No reliable report of an enemy. No report of a confrontation, except among the refugees themselves. There tensions form. There fights form. Hunger and fear move faster than order.”

Hokn’f nodded as if that was exactly what he had expected. “These are human concerns,” he said. “The Code forbids interference.”

Form added calmly, “If we interfere, we make it larger. And if it becomes large, we are part of it.”

Grot nodded as if it were already decided.

Tranda cleared his throat. “The Code,” he said slowly, and you could hear him weighing the word like a stone in his mouth. “The Code did not arise from indifference, but from experience.”

His tone wavered, and it was the first time one sensed uncertainty in him. He did not want to intervene. He did not want to look away either. He was old enough to know both mistakes.

Fontal gave him no time to hide in caution. She leaned forward slightly, not aggressive but clear. “Gontar stands in the force of it,” she said. “You tell us to stay out of it. You say these are human fates. But they are not only fates. They are people. And they die because no one holds them.”

Hokn’f raised an eyebrow. “That is not our task.”

“Of course not,” Fontal said. “It is only convenient to say so when one lies far aside. On islands. Or deep in the desert. Or behind mountains. We are not far aside. We stand in the road.”

Sinadie tightened her grip on the staff. “That is an argument,” she said. “But it is not the Code.”

“Then the Code is wrong,” Fontal said.

The sentence was not loud. It fell like a stone, and in the white room it sounded heavier than it should have.

Rotar reacted diplomatically. He stood up not to dominate but to catch the sentence before it split the room. “Investigation,” he said calmly. “Not interference. We can observe without steering. We can test whether this is a natural phenomenon or something else. If it is something else, then it is no longer only human anyway.”

Sinadie nodded slowly. Hokn’f gave a quiet snort, but he did not contradict immediately. Form and Grot glanced at each other briefly, as if water were deciding whether to flow or stand.

The Mother said nothing.

She was not silent because she had nothing. She was silent because she knew every word in this room acquires a direction you cannot control. She looked absent, almost as if she were not sitting at the table but beside another reality no one here could see.

Slonda and Anadar met each other’s eyes briefly. Only a glance. Both understood. This discussion was clean. This discussion was protocol. Facts were made elsewhere.

Sinadie turned to the Mother. “Zoordak,” she said. “If we send observers, if we send healers, will you send mind readers? Would you send some?”

The Mother lifted her head slowly. Her gaze did not go to Sinadie, but over the table as if she were looking at something not lying on the marble.

“One can only read what is written,” she said at last.

She said nothing more.

There was so much in that sentence that everyone found something. Sinadie nodded as if she had heard agreement. Hokn’f heard warning. Fontal heard excuse. Rotar heard possibility. And no one asked a follow up, because each believed they had understood.

In the end they decided to send healers. Healers with an Earth School background, to Gontar, to ease the obvious without officially intervening. They spoke of observation. Of patience. Of caution. Of waiting.

They talked a great deal for hours, and the result was thin. Wait, do not interfere, observe.

Then Rotar brought in the proposal he had probably carried in his head before he even entered the room.

“The intervals of the Conclave,” he said. “Six months is too long. If this is not a storm but a trend, then we must speak more often, even if we do not act more quickly.”

Sinadie looked at him. Hokn’f wanted to object and did not. Fontal nodded at once. Tranda closed his eyes briefly as if calculating how many protocols his life could still bear.

“Monthly,” Rotar said.

“Monthly,” Sinadie confirmed.

It was adopted.

And with that the Conclave ended, almost uneventfully, as uneventfully as you can call it when a room full of power decides to do nothing.

They rose. Each delegation stood, went through its door as it had come. No handshake. No exchange. Only departure.

When Anadar opened the door back into the Fiery Fortress, a different sound hit them.

Agitation. Voices. Footsteps. A confusion that did not smell of protocol, but of shock.

A messenger almost ran into them and only stopped himself at the last moment when he recognized Anadar.

“Master,” he panted. “At the shore. On the peninsula.”

Rotar stepped behind Anadar, his face instantly awake, without emotion. “What is it.”

The messenger swallowed. “A corpse.”

Anadar felt his stomach tighten before the next sentence even came.

“Bloodless,” the messenger said. “As if drained. They found her as if she had been laid down.”

Anadar stood still for a moment.

“Who?” Anadar asked, and though he had not been there, Slonda’s voice was suddenly in Anadar’s head. Like an echo. Like memory. Like a knife.

The messenger looked at Anadar as if he disliked speaking the name.

“Sonda,” he said.

And in that same moment Anadar knew the Conclave had just been caught up by reality.

21

The path to the peninsula was not far, but it felt longer because the footsteps suddenly sounded different. In the Fiery Fortress one was used to noise, to voices, training, fire, arguments, laughter. Now Anadar mostly heard what was missing. Too many pauses between sounds. Too many people who did not know whether they should stop or keep going.

Guards were already standing at the shore. Not in order, but in a semicircle shaped by fear. Rotar was there, Manador, Loon, Vaslat, Intra, Koscht. Fantor too, loud even before he spoke, and now conspicuously quiet because even he understood this was not a moment you comment on without making yourself ridiculous.

The corpse lay where it had been found.

Sonda did not lie as if he had fought. He did not lie as if he had tried to flee. He lay as if someone had placed him there, almost carefully. His clothing was intact. No visible wounds. No blood. Only that dry emptiness Anadar had seen before, back in Salbeen, when the first body had shown them there are things that can take a person without tearing him apart.

Shara knelt beside Sonda without hesitation, as if her body were faster than her revulsion. She touched his neck, checked what no longer needed checking because the cold had long since told it. Then she drew her hand back.

“Recently,” she said softly.

Anadar knelt as well. He did not only look; he listened with his eyes, as he always did when something was wrong. The skin was pale, but not sick. The lips dry, but not discolored. No sign of decay, no swelling, no smell that belongs to death. Only emptiness. Bloodless. As if the body had not died, but had been taken from, removed, until nothing remained that could hold life.

“Like in Salbeen,” Morgut said beside them, his voice harder than he probably meant it to be.

“Yes,” Anadar said.

Rotar walked around the body slowly, and his gaze was not compassionate. It was analytical. “When was he last seen?” he asked.

A guard stepped forward, nervous, bowed too deeply. “This evening, Master. He ate with the others. With his brothers. Then he was to take over the watch.”

“Which posts?” Koscht asked.

“Northwestern round,” the guard said. “He never arrived.”

Shara lifted her gaze. “Whom was he supposed to relieve?”

The guard swallowed. “No one. He was first in the rotation.”

Manador narrowed his eyes. “So an approximate time. A time when he was alone, in the dark.”

Fantor wanted to say something. He opened his mouth. Rotar looked at him. Fantor closed his mouth again.

They searched for traces.

Not halfheartedly. Rotar had the area combed, the sand checked, the bushes, the low scrub, every meter, as if discipline could force reality to be honest. But the ground gave nothing back. No footprints. No signs of struggle. No broken twigs. Nothing in the brush, nothing at the edge.

Only a drag mark.

It was short, only a few centimeters, as if something heavy, barely above the ground, had swayed briefly and then stopped touching the sand again. Not as if the body had been dragged. More as if it had moved ten centimeters above the ground, and only in one moment gravity had grazed it.

“That’s from the discovery,” the guard said quickly, as if he needed to explain what could not be explained. “When we turned him.”

Shara looked at the mark. “That isn’t a trace of hands,” she said.

Anadar followed the line with his eyes, short as it was. Then he looked up.

“The wall,” he said.

The parapet of the fortress rose fifty meters away. Stone, dark, high enough that from there you could see water and beach. Rotar followed Anadar’s gaze.

“He could have come from there,” Intra said quietly.

Fantor cleared his throat. “Or he was brought here.”

“Without traces,” Koscht said. “Without footprints. Without signs. That’s the problem.”

Rotar let his gaze run along the wall. His face stayed calm, but Anadar could see that Rotar felt the unease too, the unease that does not come from fear but from broken rules. In a fortress someone could die. But like this. Without a trace. Without a story. It did not fit.

In the end Sonda was carried, not dragged. Wrapped in blankets, as if cloth could give back anything that had been gone for a long time. The news traveled faster than they wanted. It made its rounds through corridors, courtyards, training rooms.

By afternoon the students were different. Their laughter thinner. Their voices lower. Their gazes lingering longer on doors, on shadows, on every corner where darkness might begin.

Rotar had a rule spoken aloud that one otherwise hears only in besieged cities.

“No one goes alone,” he said, loud enough that everyone had to hear it. “Not at night. Not in corridors. Not in the courtyard. In pairs. At least.”

Guards were doubled. Routes defined. Protective spells spoken. Not spectacular, not visible. But noticeable, like a tension in the air that had not been there before.

That evening Anadar, Shara, and Morgut sat in Anadar’s tower.

The fire burned. It was warm, but warmth did not solve this problem. The room smelled of smoke and of the metallic edge of their thoughts rubbing against each other.

“It’s here,” Morgut said.

“It was here,” Shara corrected.

Anadar looked into the fire. “What matters more is whether it comes back,” he said.

They discussed possibilities. Too fast, too many. Someone from within. Someone from outside. A mechanism. An aversion. A gaze no one notices. A touch not made of flesh.

“We call the Mother,” Anadar said at last.

Shara nodded immediately. Morgut too. Anadar was not a man who liked to ask for help, but he was smart enough to know when pride is only stupidity.

Anadar sat before the fireplace, no longer as tense as the first time, but focused. This time he did not barge into a mind; he felt for it cleanly, like guiding a blade once you have learned too much pressure breaks it.

The Mother was almost immediately there.

Not in form, but in presence. For a moment the room became larger, as if it suddenly had space for something that does not fit into stone.

“That was more elegant,” the Mother said, and you could hear the smile in her voice. “You are learning.”

Anadar let the air out. “Thank you.”

“You didn’t call me to practice,” she said.

“He is desperate,” Shara said, short and dry.

The Mother laughed briefly, bell bright, as if Shara had just said something she liked. Anadar looked at her with narrowed eyes. Then she became serious at once.

“My daughters,” she asked.

The word daughters hung in the room like a claim and like a confession. Anadar had seen the students as students, as tools, as escort, as chaos. The Mother saw them as daughters.

“Are they safe,” the Mother asked, and her tone was not a plea but a demand, only in a voice that never needs to become loud.

Anadar answered honestly. “As safe as is possible right now. We tightened rules. Doubled guards. No one goes alone.”

“Good. What happened,” the Mother said, and you could hear that good was only a placeholder here.

Anadar told her about the body. The features. The match with Salbeen. The trace that was not a trace.

The Mother listened. Then she said, “Nothing new.”

“Nothing,” Anadar confirmed. “Not even in the mind. No memory left you can grasp. Nothing you can extract without finding only emptiness.”

The Mother was silent for a moment, and Anadar felt that she was not only listening but testing, as if she were probing the room itself.

“May I ask,” the Mother said, and though she used the word ask it was not really asking, “that my daughters may use their abilities. Inconspicuously. As they have been taught.”

Shara frowned. “That is complex.”

“That is caution,” the Mother said.

Anadar paused briefly. “Why haven’t they already done it.”

The Mother answered so calmly it made Anadar uncomfortable. “Because you forbade it,” she said and looked him straight in the eyes. “And they did not want to be disobedient. Not even in secret.”

It hit him unexpectedly. He had assumed they would bend the rule somehow. He had not assumed they were serious enough to obey it.

“That surprises me,” he said honestly.

“It should not surprise you,” the Mother said gently. “It should please you. It is a sign of their respect and their recognition of you, and their fear of you.”

Anadar nodded, a little unwillingly. “All right,” he said. “But with restrictions.”

“Not all ten,” Morgut said immediately.

“No,” Anadar said. “Two.”

The Mother stayed silent, but Anadar felt agreement.

“Miene,” Anadar said.

“And Siendra,” Shara said. “They are the most mature.”

They sent for Miene and Siendra; it did not take long. Siendra arrived as if she had already been on her way before anyone called her. Miene came more quietly, with a look that asked no questions but reflected the seriousness of the situation.

Anadar closed the door. “What we discuss now,” he said, “stays with you. Not with the other eight. Not because we exclude them, but because otherwise it becomes chaos.”

Siendra grinned. “So exactly what we always do.”

“No,” Anadar said. “This time with responsibility.”

Miene nodded. “Understood.”

Anadar warned them. Not dramatically. Precisely. He told them what had happened in Tandor: the attack, the aversion, the feeling of air flowing into you instead of out. He did not tell everything, but enough that both understood this was not a game.

“Only if we are nearby,” he said. “We will walk the fortress with you. If something touches you, you stop immediately, and if you do not notice it, then it is already in your head and you call for me, not Shara, not Morgut. Me.”

“Why?” Siendra asked.

“Because I know it,” Anadar said. “And because I do not want you to fight it alone.”

Miene looked at him. “We go only together,” she said.

Siendra rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mother is right. Together.”

“Good,” Anadar said. “And you do not scan from a distance. You must be within sight. Close. Present. Otherwise you find patterns, not traces.” He repeated the warning. “And only when we are nearby.”

Miene nodded again. “Nearby to you,” she said. “And within sight of the person being examined.”

Shara looked at them. “And if you find something.”

Siendra grinned, this time without humor. “Then we are the next ones you’ll have to protect.”

The Mother was still there, as if she did not want to leave the room until this was settled.

“One thing,” she said, and her voice grew quieter, as if it were only a thought she disliked speaking aloud. “The place where he was found. The mark. The wall. Is it possible the body was thrown from the parapet.”

Wood crackled in the hearth, and in that sound there was suddenly a new direction.

Anadar looked at Shara. Shara looked at Morgut. Morgut stared into the fire as if searching there for an answer you do not want to see.

“Possible,” Anadar said at last. “But fifty meters.”

And for the first time since the Conclave, it felt as if someone had opened a door behind which no litany waited, but something that truly acted.

22

The days that followed passed so inconspicuously that it almost felt like an insult.

Miene and Siendra were led, unobtrusively, into almost every corner of the castle and the fortress. Staircases one normally used only in darkness, corridors that smelled of cold stone, storerooms where wax and dry wood lay stacked together, small doors behind which only dust waited. They stood beside guards, beside teachers, beside students, and let their attention wander so quietly that no one felt it as touch. They did what they could, and they did it well.

Nothing.

No foreign thought that did not belong. No hook, no echo, no aversion slipping into a voice. No shadow in the minds of people that differed from the ordinary darkness everyone carries.

After the third day even Siendra began to grin less.

“This is boring,” she remarked at the edge of an inner courtyard where the stone was damp from winter and the wind struck the walls in short gusts.

Miene kept her gaze on a door as if patience alone could force something. “Boring is good,” she replied.

“Boring is suspicious,” Siendra countered, rubbing her hands as if she were not seeking warmth, but a sensation.

Anadar listened without intervening. He only felt another suspicion settle in him, slowly and unpleasantly. Perhaps it had never been inside the walls at all. Perhaps it had been outside, beyond the stone, and had reached in only when it wanted. Perhaps the fortress was not a place it needed to enter, but merely a place where people gathered, making them easier to find.

Winter had reached the Fiery Fortress, but in a mild way. By day the air was cold but bearable, like water you can still drink. At night the temperature dropped toward zero and breath hung white if you stood still long enough. No snow, only that damp cold that clings to fingers and refuses to leave.

Anadar kept watch outside more often at night, where he had a view over courtyard and walls. Sometimes Shara sat beside him, silent, eyes on the dark paths. Sometimes Morgut came, and when he did he brought those alert shoulders that look as if they could push the night back. Sometimes the three of them sat together, and in that quiet triad there was more order than in any protocol.

“You look like you’re waiting for a blow,” Shara said once when the wind shifted and came in from the sea.

“I’m not waiting for it,” Anadar replied. “I’m simply counting on it.”

Morgut snorted. “If it’s outside, then it’s outside. If it’s inside, then it’s inside. But if it can be both, then we’re the fools.”

Anadar looked at him. “That’s the first honest thing I’ve heard today.”

By day training continued as if discipline could hold the world together. His own students were approaching their fourth year, and you could feel how their movements had changed. Less childish fury, more directed hardness. At the same time the ten mind students had adapted to the customs of the fortress astonishingly fast. They learned when to speak and when to be silent. When to ask and when only to observe. They learned weapons as if they had been waiting for someone to allow them to be more than thoughts.

All ten.

With blades they were not merely gifted, they were precise. With spells they were not merely talented, they were hungry for form. Pain seemed to bother them little. Anadar sometimes had the uneasy impression they even enjoyed it, not out of masochism, but because pain proved to them the body is real.

Shara proved an excellent instructor. She never raised her voice; she was simply unequivocal. Her instructions were short, her corrections hard, her attention relentless. Morgut, both student and master in this strange arrangement, moved between roles as if it were natural. He supported, he organized, he saw things before they went wrong. And when something did go wrong, he turned it into an exercise.

The days trickled on. No new event. No new body. No trace.

The next Conclave approached, monthly now, and that phrase alone made Anadar sour. He had wanted to go to his brother. Not out of sentimentality, but because Tandor was an open thread that does not vanish just because you ignore it. But he had postponed it, for urgency, and because he had promised the Mother he would look after her daughters.

That promise sat on him like a stone at the back of his neck, not because he regretted it, but because he could feel how it cut him off from the outside world. Too many things were happening somewhere that he did not see.

Once again he was invited to dinner in Rotar’s tower.

This time he did not take Shara with him, but Miene and Siendra.

Shara did not comment, but her eyes made very clear what she thought of it. Morgut only raised his eyebrows and muttered something that sounded like agreement and like warning.

Rotar’s tower was warm in the way rooms are warm where too much thinking happens. The fire burned cleanly. The food was simple and good: bread, meat, a stew that tasted of herbs and time. Rotar sat as always as if he had not taken the seat, but belonged there.

Fantor was there as well.

He looked pale. Not sick in the usual sense, more like someone who had slept badly and refused to admit it. His movements were nervous, his gaze drifted too often to the door. Once he laughed too loudly and stopped at once as if the sound had startled him. Anadar noticed without commenting. Fantor was not the kind of person you stare at directly.

Rotar spoke with Anadar about politics, about the schools, about what they officially knew. He did not ask about Tandor, not about the dungeon, not about things that must not be written. He kept to what could be said in a tower of the Fire School.

“You are restless,” Rotar observed, as if he were commenting on the weather.

Anadar wrapped his hand around his cup, felt the warmth, and did not like it. “I’m cut off,” he replied. “And I do not like not knowing what I do not know.”

Rotar nodded slowly. “You are not cut off,” he said. “You are bound. That is something else.”

“That is just a prettier wording,” Siendra threw in, too fast, too sharp.

Miene nudged her foot with a glance.

Rotar did not look offended. He looked at Siendra as if measuring her briefly and then filing her away. “And yet,” he said calmly, “it is important to choose words correctly. Words are the first weapons.”

Fantor shifted uneasily in his chair. “I’m leaving early,” he murmured, and it sounded like an apology he did not believe himself.

“You rarely leave early,” Rotar remarked without looking at him.

Fantor shrugged. “Tonight I do.”

He stood as if he suddenly did not have enough air in the room.

And in that exact moment Siendra changed.

There was no dramatic scream. It was only as if color were pulled from her face. She pressed a hand over her mouth, gasped as if someone had tightened a cord around her throat, and then bent over the edge of the table and vomited, violently, so suddenly the shift in sound in the room landed like a blow.

Anadar snapped around.

He did not need a thought to know what it was. The body can be faster than the mind when the mind refuses to believe what it recognizes.

“Siendra,” Miene managed.

Miene did not stand. She only thrust out her arm, finger straight, pointing at Fantor, who had frozen mid step. Miene’s breathing went shallow.

“That,” she forced out. “That is not what it pretends to be. That is not human.”

Then Miene broke too. Not like Siendra, not in an overturning spasm, but like someone suddenly having the ground taken away. She sank to her knees, retched, and the nausea hit her so visibly that even Rotar’s face lost its composure for a moment.

Fantor turned his head slowly.

Anadar saw it in the eyes before it happened. Not Fantor’s gaze. Something behind it, as if the gaze were only a thin film.

“Back,” Anadar called, not loud, but with the kind of voice no one ignores.

Rotar shoved his chair back. Manador was already on his feet, hand in the air as if calling heat. Somewhere a cup clattered on stone.

Fantor’s shape did not burst like flesh. It burst like a lie.

The surface that had made him tore open as if it had only been a shell, and from the rupture poured black mass, thick, glossy, alive. It did not scream with one mouth. It screamed with many. Wherever the material bulged, mouths opened: teeth, sharp, too many. Horn like growths rose out of the mass as if they were byproducts of hate.

“Blood,” it shrieked.

The sound was not only in ears. It was in the stomach. It was in the head. Nausea slammed through the room like a wave, not as a feeling but as an order.

Tentacles shot out, whipping, searching. One struck the table, and the marble cracked as if stone had suddenly become soft enough to suffer.

Anadar drew his sword.

He struck, reflexive, precise, but the blade bounced off as if he had hit wet wood. The black mass yielded and gave back, tough and yet invulnerable.

“Not,” Siendra choked from the floor, sounding as if she were fighting the nausea squeezing her throat. “Not like that.”

Anadar understood while he fought. Not metal. Not steel. Not what one is used to.

The tentacles caught him.

Teeth bit into his arms, his shoulder, the air around him, and at the same time the mental attack pressed into his head, that old feeling of air flowing against its natural direction. He had felt it before. He knew how not to break.

He focused.

He became fire.

Not a flame, not a spell you see and admire. He became a blazing sphere of heat and light, so bright the white walls of the room suddenly looked gray, and so hot you could taste the smell of melting stone. The table glowed along its edge. The air crackled.

The tentacles held him, but they burned.

Anadar pushed.

He drove the thing away from the others, centimeter by centimeter, and each centimeter felt like a decision that cost him a piece of himself. He was fire and will at once. His thoughts were a whip, not elegant but compelling. He forbade the creature closeness, forbade it access, forbade it to be here, as if prohibition had weight in that moment.

The creature did not retreat the way an opponent retreats. It only yielded, unwillingly, and screamed the same thing again and again.

“Blood. Blood. Blood.”

The walls began to melt.

Rotar shouted something, Anadar did not hear it. Manador sent a wave of heat that made the tentacles recoil for a moment. The room turned into an inferno of light, smoke, and revulsion.

And then, after a stretch that was no longer time, help came from outside.

Shara was suddenly there, as if she had heard the tower through the wall. Behind her more masters, more students. The door flew open, cold air rushed in and became warm at once, poisonous at once. Voices shouted, spells struck the creature, fire, form, force, everything you can throw when you do not know what works.

Tentacles lashed again, struck into the crowd, and where they hit, not only a body fell, but a mind. People retched, collapsed, braced themselves against walls as if they had suddenly forgotten how to stand.

Smaller creatures split off from the great mass.

Like detachments. Like droplets turning into their own mouths. They sprang, crawled, tore into corners, searched for faces, searched for blood.

Out in the courtyard someone screamed, and Anadar saw it as through a veil of light. A smaller creature jumped onto a student and ate into his face, not from hunger but greed. Weapons bounced off. Screams became noises you no longer recognize as human.

Chaos.

Destruction.

Death.

And again and again that word cut through the night.

“Blood.”

Anadar was exhausted. He felt his heat was not infinite, his will fraying at the edges. He saw another small creature rush a student, and the student instinctively raised his sword to defend himself.

He thrust.

The blade struck.

And this time it did not rebound.

It pierced the creature through the middle, as if it did have an order there after all, a core. The demon split, and two black twitching heaps lay at the student’s feet, writhing, dying, like something that had suddenly become real and could not bear it.

Anadar stared for a heartbeat at the blade.

Then he understood.

“Mind,” he gasped, and the word was not a concept, it was a key.

The student’s blade was already marked. An old mind charm, one of the many small things one forgets in daily life. And precisely because it was forgotten, it had survived.

Anadar did not simply shout. He commanded.

He threw the command not only into the room, he threw it into minds. He pressed it into the will of the fortress, mentally and physically, so that even those who did not understand suddenly knew what to do.

Mind onto the blades.

Not fire. Not form. Mind.

“Mark it,” he cried, and his voice almost broke because it had to fight nausea. “A sign. With your finger. A name. Your blade has to belong to you. Now.”

Those who could did it. Those who could not did it anyway, because panic sometimes releases more magic than training.

Shara jerked her dagger up, ran her thumb along the edge, a quick cut, blood, then a symbol, not pretty, but true. Her eyes narrowed and she stepped forward.

Rotar laid a hand on his sword with his last strength, his gaze suddenly so clear that winter seemed harmless beside it. Manador did the same, faster, grim, as if he needed to prove he could. Loon, Vaslat, Intra, Koscht. Students. Guards. Everyone who could still stand laid mind onto steel, the only thing that seemed to injure the creature.

The blades began to bite. They no longer bounced away. They hit. The smaller demons were cut apart. The great monster was driven back.

They did not hack through flesh. They cut through lie. Pieces of the black mass fell, steamed, twitched, as if at last something hurt it that was not only heat. The creature screamed, and the scream was different now. Not greedy. Angry. Uncomprehending.

It retreated.

Not orderly. Not tactical. Like an animal that has just realized it can be stopped.

It tore itself free, dragged parts of itself over the floor, flung its tentacles once more through the room, shattered stone, and then climbed down the outer wall of the tower as if stone were only a surface to it, and merged with the night, across toward the peninsula where it withdrew.

“Blood,” it screamed one last time, and this time it did not sound like demand, but threat.

Then it was gone.

What remained was smoke, melted stone, screams slowly turning human again, and the realization they had barely held it off, barely survived.

They had unmasked something.

And Anadar, in the heat of his own exhaustion, knew this was only the beginning, because the fortress now had a name that worked. It did not kill the thing, but it seemed to drive it off, for today.

23Formularbeginn

Silence.

It was not truly there, not in a tower where stone still tasted of heat, where stone still burned from unleashed energy, and where somewhere outside people were still screaming. But inside Anadar it was suddenly there, like a wall all sound collided with.

He sank to his knees as if someone had softened his bones. An endless fatigue rolled over him, not like sleep, more like a weight deciding the body had played enough for now.

For a heartbeat he allowed himself to close his eyes.

There was only a whistling, a thin tone that did not come from the room but from inside him, as if his head had held the world too loud for too long and now had to retreat to a single frequency. Sweat ran down his face, hot and salty, and he barely felt it. His hands were no longer trembling because they were tired, but because they had not yet understood they were allowed to be hands again.

Then he opened his eyes.

Slowly the noise seeped back in. First as pressure, then as sound. Voices, hurried, clipped, orders no one fully formed because there was no time. Wood crackled. Somewhere a piece of stone fell. The fire breathed.

Anadar lifted his head and stood.

He had been gone only seconds, but he stood at the center of the chaos as if he had never left. And the first thing he saw was that the training was working.

Without new commands they had begun to deal with what mattered most. Not dignity, not names, not grief. The things that prevent an attack from becoming annihilation.

Fires were put out. Not with panic, but with routine: water, sand, blankets, spells one otherwise only practices. The wounded were dragged away, not gently, but efficiently. The dead were ignored at first, not out of coldness, but because you only stay alive if you count the living first.

Anadar turned slowly, as if he had to prove to himself his sight was still true.

Rotar lay on the ground.

The dean had not simply fallen. He was smashed, as if something had seized him and struck him against stone until no body was recognizable as a body. A tentacle had hit him late, perhaps in the moment Rotar thought the room was already lost. And Rotar had still fought. You could see it in the set of his hands, in the way his sword still lay nearby, the blade skewed, but not let go.

Saltor knelt beside him, motionless, as if his breath had been taken away. His hands lay on Rotar’s shoulder as if he could hold the dean back so he would not leave completely, even though he had already gone.

Manador knelt beside them, blood on his face, not his, perhaps his as well, hard to tell. His eyes were open, too open, and his voice was a hoarse whisper repeating itself as if it were the only thing holding him together.

Anadar felt something in him pull downward. Not grief, not yet. More the cold, clear shock that says: this is real. This happened. This will not be undone.

He forced himself to look away.

Shara and Morgut were with Miene and Siendra. Both lay where they had fallen, faces gray, lips dry, eyes closed. Shara had her hands at Miene’s temples as if she could nail the world in place there so it would not break further. Morgut knelt by Siendra, a hand at her neck, checking, not tender. He looked up as Anadar came closer.

“They’re alive,” Morgut said, as if he had just wrested it from death.

Shara nodded without looking up. “They’re young,” she murmured. “And strong. But that was…” She broke off because she had no word that did not feel too small.

Anadar let his gaze follow the door out into the courtyard. Below, only a few bodies no longer moved. Too few to call it victory, too many to endure. In the middle of the courtyard melted stone lay like frozen water, and in the corners something black clung to the cracks as if night itself had briefly lived there.

Of the demon remnants almost nothing remained, as if they had evaporated, as if the world had not wanted to keep them.

A new wave of exhaustion struck him. He stayed upright not out of strength, but out of stubbornness.

It functioned without him. In shock everyone worked exactly as they had been trained.

Still, someone had to hold direction.

Anadar turned toward the wall, searching for his students. He saw them down there in the courtyard, bent, smeared with blood, exhausted, but still there. They did not stand beautifully. They stood.

He barked the order before his body could turn fatigue into thought.

“To the walls. Now. Fire ready. Night sight. I want no surprises.”

His voice cut through the sounds like a blade. Heads turned below, and although the students looked as if they were about to collapse, they reacted by instinct. They spread out. They grabbed torches, embers, the glasses, anything that gave them sight. They did not do it because they were strong. They did it because it was the only way not to be surprised again.

Anadar turned to the people in the courtyard. “Get the wounded to the infirmary. Now. Everyone who can walk carries. Everyone who cannot walk is not left alone. Not today.”

No one argued. After something like this, you do not argue. You act.

He turned back into the tower, to the masters still standing, to those who remained upright though inside they had already fallen.

“Get an overview,” he said, and this time it did not sound hard, only forcedly calm. “How many dead. Who. How many wounded. How severe.”

Manador slowly raised his head. His gaze met Anadar’s, and in it was not only exhaustion but something Anadar rarely saw in him: fear.

“Morgut,” Anadar added, “you take care of the other eight immediately. I want to know how they are.”

Morgut nodded, but his eyes stayed on Siendra for one more moment as if he did not want to leave. Then he stood quickly and vanished with the gait of a man refusing to regret later that he was too late.

Anadar knelt once more beside Miene and Siendra. Miene moved. Not much. Only a twitch of the hand as if somewhere in a fever dream she was reaching for something she could not find.

“Miene,” Anadar said softly, closer than he usually allowed. “Stay here. Can you hear me.”

No answer.

He reached out with his mind by reflex, searching for the Mother, for that presence that is otherwise like a hand in the dark.

Nothing.

He tried again, more careful, cleaner, the way she had taught him.

Nothing again.

Shara looked up and understood at once. “You can’t reach her,” she stated, not as a question.

Anadar slowly shook his head.

Shara brushed a strand from Miene’s forehead, a motion rare for her because it was too gentle. “They’re alive,” she said, as if she had to say it to herself too. “They’re young. And they’re tough. But it broke them. It hit them from the inside.”

Anadar stood and went to Rotar.

Saltor looked up, and in his eyes was shock that wanted to become anger but did not yet know where to throw itself.

“He fought to his last breath,” Saltor said, his voice rough as if he had swallowed too much smoke.

Anadar nodded, because anything else would have been too much.

Manador stared at Rotar’s body as if he could assemble him again by looking. Then he looked up at Anadar, and this time his voice was louder, not out of strength, but because otherwise he would have fallen apart.

“What in all names was that,” Manador burst out. “Something the hell spat out. Incredibly evil. Incredibly powerful.”

Anadar did not answer at once. He looked at the burned walls, the split table, the marks of teeth in stone as if something had eaten through material never meant to be food.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Powerful.”

Manador shook his head as if he could shake off the thought. “Will it return,” he asked, and in the question was a sliver of hope, as if no could be an option.

Anadar looked at him. “Yes,” he replied. “Today. Tomorrow. Soon. It is awake. And it is hungry.”

Manador swallowed. “And now,” he said more quietly, “it doesn’t hide anymore.”

“No,” Anadar said. “It has been unmasked.”

He took one more step, to where Fantor had been.

Hardly anything of Fantor remained. Only a shell, empty, like a bloodless corpse torn in two down the middle. It did not look as though he had been killed. It looked as though something had used him and then thrown him away.

Like a coat that no longer fits.

Anadar felt his stomach tighten. Not from nausea, not this time. From the sense that this was worse than a monster coming from outside.

“It wore him,” Shara murmured behind him. She had stood, swaying, because even she cannot fight without cost. “Or it replaced him.”

“Or it was never him,” Anadar said.

Shara fell silent because every version was ugly.

It took hours before anything like order could be restored in the Fiery Fortress. Not real order. Only enough structure that no one died of their own panic.

Nine students were dead.

Rotar was dead.

Almost everyone was injured: cuts, bites, bruises, burns, mental aftereffects you cannot wrap in bandages. Some simply sat and stared as if they had forgotten how to end a thought.

Miene and Siendra were in critical condition. Their unconsciousness slid into fever dreams, their breathing grew shallow, their foreheads hot. Healers came, earth students, life mages, everyone who could keep a hand steady. They did what they could, and still it looked as if the two of them were fighting somewhere else, in a place no one could follow.

The other eight, Morgut reported later, had come through comparatively well. Shocked, tired, injured here and there, but not broken. Morgut said it plainly, but his eyes showed he himself was surprised how well they had made it.

Anadar tried again and again to reach the Mother.

Nothing.

He sent his mind out, felt, searched, pulled it back because he feared the silence was not only absence but blockage. He tried so often that Shara finally laid a hand on his arm.

“Stop,” she said calmly.

“I can’t,” Anadar replied.

“Yes, you can,” Shara said. “You have to. If you chew yourself into emptiness now, you’ll be lying beside Rotar tomorrow.”

He looked at her, and in her gaze was no hardness, only truth. He forced himself to stop.

Then the Mother was suddenly in the room.

Not announced. Not through the door. Not like a normal person. She was simply there, as if the room had decided it now had space for her.

Anadar and Shara were in the infirmary tower, near the beds of the two girls. The fire in the hearth was low, the air smelled of herbs, blood, and fear.

The Mother looked at Anadar.

Then she looked around as if listening. One eyebrow lifted, minimal. She breathed out slowly, and in that exhale there was something like calculation.

For a moment she narrowed her eyes.

Then she exhaled again, and this time it sounded relieved.

“They are strong,” she said softly. “And young.”

She turned her head as if hearing voices no one else could hear. “I can hear their minds. They are there. They are…” She hesitated as if searching for a word that was not too soft. “They are okay.”

It sounded as if she was saying it more to herself than to Anadar.

Shara cleared her throat, and it was the first time the Mother truly looked at her, not only registered her. “They are not okay,” Shara said, and you could hear she did not mean it as contradiction, more as correction. “They are alive. That is something else.”

The Mother held her gaze. “Yes,” she said. “That is something else.”

Then she asked, and her voice grew harder without becoming loud. “What happened.”

Anadar told her. He did not make it pretty. He did not make it dramatic. He told it the way you tell a power you should not lie to. Fantor, the shell, the black mass, the nausea, the tentacles, the mouths, the word blood like a whip. The blades that did not bite at first, then bit once marked with mind. The creature’s retreat to the peninsula.

The Mother nodded slowly, as if confirming something she would rather not confirm.

“You do not know what attacked you,” she stated.

“Not by a name,” Anadar answered.

“I think I have heard rumors of it,” she said. “A thing infinitely old. One of those that should no longer exist.”

Shara asked softly, “Why should it no longer exist.”

The Mother looked at her, and for a moment something like regret lay in her eyes. “Because there were rules,” she said. “And because once someone believed rules were stronger than hunger.”

Anadar pressed a hand to his forehead. “It will come back.”

“Yes,” the Mother answered without hesitation. “It is awake. And it is hungry. And it does not hide anymore. It has been unmasked.” The same conclusion.

Anadar waited until the silence was heavy enough to carry the next question. “Can you help.”

The Mother was silent. Not for effect. For honesty.

“I cannot help you,” she said at last. “Not the way you mean. Not with our means. This thing is not a knot in a mind I can untie. It is…” She searched briefly, and Anadar noticed that even she was careful with language. “It is an antiquity that does not listen to us. You can drive it away. Today. Perhaps tomorrow. But banish it.” She shook her head. “No. And when it comes again, it will be prepared. It thinks. It is intelligent. Very.”

Anadar felt her gaze return to the beds. To Miene. To Siendra. It was not the gaze of a dean. It was the gaze of a mother.

“You want to go to them,” Anadar said.

The Mother did not answer, but her steps did.

Anadar looked to Shara. “Help her,” he asked softly. It was not an order, but an admission that at this moment he was not the right one to carry it.

Shara nodded once. She stepped to the Mother, not submissive, not defiant, only present. “Come,” she said quietly, and for a moment it sounded as if Shara were leading the Mother, not the other way around.

The Mother went with her.

Anadar sank into an armchair as if someone had cut his strings. He stared into the fire that barely burned, and in his gaze there was not emptiness but work.

In his mind an idea formed, slowly, reluctantly, like a stone pushing up from depth.

If mind could unmask it but not kill it, if fire could not kill it but mind could drive it off and touch it, then the question was not whether it could be killed.

The question was what could stop it.

24Formularbeginn

Anadar withdrew into his tower, as if stone were the only place left that could still hold him. Not out of fear. Not out of defiance. More out of the instinctive knowledge that some decisions do not arise in conversation, but in silence that lasts until it cuts.

He buried himself in scrolls.

Parchment. Wax tablets. Books that smelled of dust and leather. Lists of spells he himself had once written, as if his own craft had suddenly become a foreign language he had to learn again. He worked feverishly, and the fever was not only exhaustion. It was a kind of compulsion.

He thought. He wrote. He struck things out. He wrote again. He devised new formulas, not elegant, but binding. He laid enchantments on objects, tested whether the spell seated properly, whether it held, whether it anchored in the material or only lay over it like a wish. He built small mechanisms that did not strive for grandeur, but for precision. If the creature was old, then fire would not impress it. Then it would need something that gripped differently.

Morgut and Shara tried to help.

Morgut set water down for him and said nothing, because he knew words sometimes only get in the way. Shara brought him food, set it down as if it were a weapon she had thrown at his feet, and left again without asking whether he would take it. Sometimes she paused in the doorway and looked at him as if checking whether he was still Anadar, or only work.

He was absent.

Not gone. Not lost. Only pulled inward, so far that even his presence in the room grew thin.

“You should sleep,” Shara said once, late on the second evening, when the torches outside were already flickering and the wind from the sea carried cold into the fortress.

Anadar did not meet her gaze. “I will sleep later.”

“Later is a word for you that never means anything,” Shara replied.

Morgut stood beside the table and looked at one of the blades Anadar had just marked. “He’s right,” he said. “But so are you.”

Anadar kept his fingers on the wax tablet. “It’s awake,” he murmured, as if turning the word in his mouth to see whether it sounded different if you said it often enough. “And it learns, it adapts.”

Shara snorted. “Then we should learn faster.”

He did not answer, but his hand moved again, faster.

The cremation of the dead was a public moment, and Anadar was there. Not as a man who mourns, but as a man who functions, because he knows that function is sometimes the only thing that keeps a community from breaking apart.

Nine students were burned. Names were spoken. Voices broke. Some wept, some only stared. It was not solemn. It was necessary.

Rotar’s funeral was different.

The dean no longer lay like a person. They had wrapped him in cloth, as if fabric could restore dignity to a body, though dignity in that moment was not in the body, but in the eyes of those who remained. Saltor stood so still he looked like a shadow, and Manador held himself upright as if he would otherwise fall.

Anadar delivered the funeral speech.

He did not speak of heroism, not of legends. He spoke of duty. Of Rotar’s calm. Of the way Rotar held order, not because order is beautiful, but because it saves people.

“Rotar guided our world with his skill,” Anadar said into the cold. “He led us. Breath by breath. For one more hour, for the next day. For the moment when we understood.”

He looked into faces that did not know whether they could follow him.

“He fell because he was steadfast,” Anadar continued. “And because he fought bravely.”

The fire ate through the wood, and the smoke rose straight up, as if even the air in that hour had discipline.

After the ceremony came words Anadar did not want to hear.

Some of the masters did not say it outright, they only hinted. Others were more direct. A vacuum had formed, and vacuum draws power the way fire draws oxygen.

“You have to take over,” someone said.

Anadar stood there, his hands still smelling of smoke, and looked at the person as if they had just said something incomprehensible.

“No,” he answered simply.

“The fortress needs you.”

“The fortress needs protection and continuity,” Anadar cut in. “Not a title. It would bind me too much. There are better choices.”

The thought of making him dean existed. It was like a shadow in the conversations, lying in corridors, clinging to glances. Anadar let it stand, let the idea starve in the air, because he knew he must not lead now if he wanted to lead what was truly coming.

Manador took over leadership.

Provisionally. Hard. Dogged. Clever enough not to wear it like a crown, but like a burden. Loon moved closer to the center than usual, as if he had understood that superficiality in days like these is only a mask you eventually have to take off. He was new in the front row, and he smiled less.

They did what was possible.

By day they turned into eagles and flew over the peninsula and the surroundings. Circles over coast and dunes, over rock and scrub, over the lines where the sea eats the sand. They searched for tracks, fissures, anything that showed where it had withdrawn.

Nothing.

They sent out patrols. By day and by night. Fires burned on the walls. Glasses gave night sight. Blades were prepared.

Nothing.

And yet everyone knew it would return. Not as a feeling. As a fact that simply had not chosen a time yet.

Miene and Siendra recovered slowly.

They woke like people returning from a dream they cannot tell, because it will not fit into words. Miene was quieter than before. Siendra grinned again, sometimes, but it was no longer the same mockery. It was a smile proving to itself that it was still here.

They would never be as they were before.

Never innocent again. Never only young.

Shara visited when she found time, sat by the bed, said little. Morgut brought them water, called them by their names, as if names in days like these were an anchor. Anadar came rarely, but when he did he stood in the doorway a long time, as if checking whether they truly lived.

Miene looked at him once, longer, clearer, and said hoarsely, “It saw me.”

Anadar did not answer at once. Then he said softly, “Yes. And you saw it.”

Siendra turned her head toward the window. “That was the mistake,” she murmured. “Now it can’t pretend anymore.”

Anadar went back to his room.

He sank deeper into theory, as if digging himself into a tunnel where there are no voices, no responsibility, only logic. He ignored sleep. He ignored hunger. He ignored the ache in his muscles because pain is only body, and body was too slow these days.

Now and then he went out, checked everything, inspected the walls, asked about the wounded, had numbers recited to him, because numbers can be soothing even when they lie.

Then came the day of the Conclave.

Anadar was there. He went into the white room not because he wanted to, but because staying away would have been a decision he could not risk.

Manador led the delegation, provisionally, and you could feel how much it rubbed against his pride because he knew pride counts for nothing here. Loon sat beside him. Anadar sat as the third, silent, with a gaze already elsewhere.

When the other delegations entered, the room paused for a moment. Not literally, but in the air. The silence was not ceremonial. It was horrified.

“Rotar,” Sinadie said, and the word was no longer a name, but weight.

Hokn’f stood stiffer than usual. Tranda closed his eyes briefly, as if calculating how many dead a code can bear before it becomes a lie. Fontal leaned forward as if she could see through the table into the wound now gaping in the Fiery Fortress. The Mother did not look surprised. She looked very awake.

Manador reported.

He described what had happened as well as one can describe something when one still does not believe it happened. Fantor as a shell. The unmasking. The creature. The nausea. The tentacles. The cry for blood. The effect of mind on the blades. The retreat to the peninsula. Rotar’s death.

In the room there were shocked cries, brief outbursts, sentences that broke off mid way because no one knew how to place such a thing.

“That contradicts the Code,” Hokn’f said at last, as if that were his way of turning fear into rules.

“It contradicts life,” Fontal shot back at once.

Sinadie pressed her hand onto the staff as if forcing it into reality. “We didn’t see it,” she said quietly. “We didn’t… think it possible.”

“That is no comfort,” Koscht said dryly from the Fire School side, and you could feel his tone standing on the edge of rage.

Anadar held back.

Not because he had nothing to say, but because he sensed this circle was searching for the same pattern again. Protocol, classification, waiting. Words. And words were too slow right now.

He looked to Slonda.

Slonda met his gaze and nodded, almost imperceptibly. It was not comfort. It was a sign: I am here. I see it.

And then they spoke without opening their mouths.

Not like students trading secrets, but like brothers who have stood side by side long enough that they no longer have to explain where it hurts.

Slonda sent the thought that Tandor is not quiet. That he is searching. That the library reacts as if it is afraid to be read.

Anadar sent back that mind works. That it can be driven off. But that the creature learns and is intelligent.

Slonda said he would keep searching. He would go deeper. He would risk what is risky, because there is no time now for clean caution.

Anadar confirmed, and in the confirmation was more than agreement. There was responsibility. If Slonda falls, more than one person falls.

The days passed.

And at night they heard it.

Not always. Not loudly. But sometimes, when the wind was right, when the sea withdrew and the peninsula lay in darkness, a call came through the cold.

“Blood.”

It did not sound like a scream. It sounded like a memory burning itself into the air.

Now and then the small demons came up to the walls. Not in masses, more like feelers. Like tests. They crawled out of the dark, searched for a crack, a careless glance, one second when no one watched the parapet.

They could be driven off with mind.

That soothed no one. It only proved they were not free.

Anadar understood what that meant.

Their opponent was experimenting. It was out there and doing the same thing he did in here. Preparing. Learning how mind works, how fast people react, how they react. It learned, it tested, and that made it far more dangerous.

And Anadar kept thinking.

He slept little. He ate because Shara forced him to, and because Morgut practically pressed food into his hand as if it were a weapon against stupidity.

He did not only write spells, he wrote a strategy.

Not pretty. Not safe.

One that put everything on a single card.

Everything on the hunger of this demon.

One single strike.

No plan B.

And when that realization stood fully inside him, Anadar felt for the first time since Rotar’s death something that was not fear.

Clarity.

Because if you have no second attempt, the first has to hit.

25

Anadar did not wait until his plan felt like a beautiful thought inside him. He waited only until it was stable enough to be spoken aloud without breaking.

He summoned Shara and Morgut to his study. Not to the great hall, not to a chamber where words could carry outward. To the narrow room with the hearth, the scrolls, the inkwells, the blades hanging on the wall like silent questions. Outside, winter lay over the fortress. Inside, work lay.

Shara remained in the doorway as if she first had to decide whether she wanted to enter. Morgut sat down without asking and took the liberties of someone who had long ago stopped being polite in moments like these.

Anadar laid a wax tablet on the table. Then another. Then a piece of metal that looked like nothing and yet had weight. His dark blade leaned against the chair, and even in firelight it looked as if it disliked light.

“You want us to tell you why this won’t work,” Shara noted dryly.

“I want you to tell me where I’m blind,” Anadar replied, sounding more tired than he wanted.

Morgut raised an eyebrow. “Then begin.”

Anadar drew a breath as if forcing himself into a rhythm. “It will come back,” he began. “Not someday. It will come back because now it knows we can touch it. It won’t be cautious anymore. It will be greedy.”

Shara folded her arms. “And you want to use that greed.”

“Yes,” Anadar confirmed.

Morgut looked down at the tablets. “You want to pull it into here.”

“Into the courtyard,” Anadar corrected. “Into the center. Not at the walls. Not in the corridors. There, where we can surround it.”

Shara stepped closer, but did not sit, as if she did not want a chair too near his thoughts. “You want to be bait.”

Anadar was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. “I want it to see me. I want it to want only me.”

Shara did not laugh. Anadar laid out his plan in full detail. They listened. She gave a short snort, and in that sound was everything she thought of it. “That isn’t bravery,” she said. “That’s suicide.”

“Maybe,” Anadar conceded. “But it’s also the only way to defeat it.”

For a heartbeat only the crackling of the hearth could be heard.

Then Morgut said very calmly, “That is suicide.”

Anadar shook his head. “It’s risk,” he said. “And it’s the one strike that decides everything. If we only drive it off, it comes back. Smarter. Harder. With answers.”

Shara picked up the wax tablet, read, pushed it back. “You have no plan B,” she stated.

“No,” Anadar said.

Shara leaned in. “And you need an exit,” she said, her voice turning harder. “For you.”

Anadar looked at her. “No. No exit. If we fail, there’s no other way but destruction.”

Shara held his gaze. “That is a brutal reality.”

Anadar said nothing. He only drew a new line in his notes, as if Shara had just named the price he had so far only suspected.

Shara exhaled.

Morgut tapped the table once. “And now you explain this to Manador in a way that makes him do what you need without telling him too much. He will never agree.”

Anadar lifted his eyes. “I’ll tell him only what he needs to know.”

Shara smiled briefly. “So almost nothing.”

Anadar let it stand.

That same night he went to Manador.

Manador had not taken Rotar’s place. He had only occupied it, the way you occupy a wall when you know it will fall otherwise. He stood over maps, over lists, over names, and his face looked thinner than it used to. Not from hunger, but from responsibility.

When Anadar entered, Manador raised his head. “You look like someone who refuses to sleep,” he remarked.

“I look like someone who has no time,” Anadar replied.

Manador allowed himself a short, bitter smile. “All of us.”

Anadar did not lay out tablets. He laid out sentences: clear, targeted.

“We need drills,” he said. “Groups. Roles. Repetition. We need to react before we think.”

Manador narrowed his eyes. “You want a regimen.”

“I want them not to die in shock,” Anadar answered.

Manador nodded slowly. “Specifically.”

Anadar gave him enough: the tactics that would lure the demon, the lines that would close, the spells that had to be tested when the smaller demons came. Variations, so no one died of routine.

Manador looked at him, and for a moment it seemed he wanted to object simply to prove he could. Then he let it go, because he was clever enough to know the difference between pride and leadership.

“Good,” Manador said. “You’ll get your exercises. And you’ll get your roles. But you’re keeping something from me, I know it…”

“Then you’ll hate me,” Anadar finished calmly.

Manador narrowed his eyes further. “Then I’ll carry you out of this tower dead if it doesn’t work, right?”

Anadar gave a small nod and smiled.

The students were divided into groups. Each group received a function. There were carriers, there were blades, there was fire, there was mind. There were people who were only meant to observe, because observation is the beginning of survival. There were healers who were not allowed to wait until someone screamed. There were runners who carried messages without asking whether they mattered. And most important, there were new parchments with new spells, with variations of spells.

They held small maneuvers. In the courtyard. In the corridors. On the walls. Again and again, until legs grew heavy and the mind still knew where it belonged.

The nightly attacks increased.

Almost every evening.

At first it was the small creatures, feelers, droplets that became mouths. They probed, crawled, leapt, screamed for blood, and each time they were driven back it felt as if they took something with them. Not flesh. Information.

It grew harder to drive them off. Not because mind no longer worked, but because the demons became better at avoiding mind. They no longer came blindly. They came faster. They came by detours. They came through angles that yesterday still felt safe.

And the Fire School made it look as if it was harder still.

Deliberately.

They no longer fought at maximum. They fought in measured doses. They showed the enemy that they were tired, that they were too slow, that they had gaps. They let it believe it would break them soon if it only pressed a little more.

Miene and Siendra helped again.

Not as before. Not with cheeky eyes and light voices. They were more careful, and precisely because of that they were better. They sensed the small creatures earlier. They saw where shadows were not only shadows. They learned when you do not read, but simply remain present so you do not become a door yourself.

The other eight mind students also became good at tracking the small monsters. It turned into a cat and mouse game. The demons crept less because they were discovered more often. So they came more brutal, faster, greedier. And the cries for blood grew louder, as if hunger grew because it was kept at arm’s length again and again.

Anadar heard those cries at night and no longer thought of fear. He thought of rhythm.

Hunger is a lever if you set it correctly.

The night of nights did not arrive with a sign. It came like any other. That was what made it so dangerous.

Everyone knew their role. Everyone stood at their position. The walls were manned. Preparations made, spells set. Blades prepared. Groups placed so they could see each other without interfering.

The first attack came, as by now almost every evening.

It was repelled at the walls. Short fights. Twitching shadows. Mind on steel. A few screams. Then wind again.

Nothing that should have shaken the courtyard.

And yet Anadar felt the air change. Not colder. Heavier. As if something large was moving without being seen.

He stood in the middle of the courtyard.

Alone.

Not truly alone. Around him, invisible to the night, stood positions. Eyes. Blades. Spells waiting. But the only thing visible was him, and that was the point. He held his dark sword in his hand and felt how dry his mouth was.

He had had no chance to test it.

No trial, no small practice spell, no harmless exercise. Only theory, only sharpness, only trust in rules that had never been proven.

Then he heard it again.

Not from the courtyard. From outside.

A desperate, greedy cry slicing through the night like a blade.

“Blood.”

Anadar lifted his head.

He knew this was the moment when you either stand or die.

He meant to give the demon what it wanted.

His hand slid slowly along the blade. He did not pull it away when the metal was sharp enough to cut. He let it happen. He felt the skin split, the warmth run out, something deeply human suddenly made visible.

Blood dripped.

He raised the sword, and the blood ran over the steel until the blade no longer glinted darkly in torchlight, but looked dull and red. His wrist burned, but pain was only a signal now, not an obstacle.

He let the blood drip into the sand and wrote a word.

Not pretty. Not clean. Heavy, as if each letter were being torn out of him.

“Blood.”

The ground vibrated.

Not strongly, not like an earthquake. More like a breath moving through stone.

And outside something slid in front of the stars.

It became dark, not because light went out, but because a vast body pressed itself between sky and fortress. A shadow that did not belong to night because it covered the night itself.

It began.

From the walls spells flew: fire, light, force, everything you can see and want to believe in. It struck the darkness and showed little effect. Exactly as planned. They drew back, seemingly broken, seemingly overwhelmed, seemingly too slow.

The demon climbed over the wall.

Not like an animal. Like a catastrophe.

Stone ground. Towers shuddered. A piece of parapet broke away as if the demon carried the weight of centuries. Fires flickered and died as if the air itself recoiled.

Anadar did not roar. He exhaled, as if venting his fear as steam, and walked toward it.

It lashed out with tentacles, and the tentacles had teeth. Mouths everywhere. Horns sprouting from the mass like false crowns. It was larger than anything that belonged inside the fortress, and yet it was there as if it had a right.

“Blood,” it shrieked.

“Yes,” Anadar answered, and his voice was calm enough to be almost absurd. “Blood.”

He flared.

Not in body, but in presence. Fire gathered around him, light, heat, and yet he did not burn everything away this time. Not now. Now he held back. He parried. He defended. He bought time.

Tentacles struck him, seized him, tried to tear him apart. Teeth snapped in the air around his throat. He held against it with fire, with mind, with will, but he did not drive forward. He could not win too early. He could not show what more he could do.

He had to remain bait.

Outside, the mages abandoned the castle in all directions, exactly as drilled. No battles with the small demons, only brief, hard defenses, then withdrawal. Their concentration lay elsewhere, in the center of the fortress.

In the courtyard.

With him.

He did not hear Shara, but he felt her. He felt her taking position outside, felt Morgut moving, felt Manador placing his people, felt Loon closing the gaps. He felt the air around the fortress slowly change, as if something invisible were being drawn taut.

Then the trap snapped shut.

Above the fortress a lattice closed.

A net of mind and lightning, fine lines that did not look like ropes, but like rules written into the air. The spirit net stretched over wall and tower, courtyard and roof. It flickered once as if testing itself, then held: hard, clear, cold.

The demon noticed in the last moment.

It jerked its head up as if a creature without eyes could still see what had closed above it. A tentacle struck the net and burned. Black mass hissed. The demon screamed, not from pain, but from rage.

It wanted to flee.

It could not.

Anadar smiled, small, bitter. So far, so good.

“Blood,” the creature snarled.

“Yes,” Anadar answered, feeling his strength already grinding down. “Blood.”

He flared once more, not as threat now, but as decision.

He cast the spell he had carved out of nights and days of scrolls until only the core remained. He laid it onto his blood soaked sword. The blade vibrated once as if protesting, then went still in a dangerous way, like water that no longer ripples just before it freezes.

Tentacles struck again. One hit his shoulder. Another wrapped his waist. Teeth bit. They did not pierce the layer Shara had laid on him, not what Morgut had forced into place, not his own discipline. And yet they drained him. Every touch took.

The net above them wavered.

Not much. But enough that Anadar saw it. Enough that he knew: time was no longer something you buy. Time was a knife sliding toward your back.

“Blood,” the creature screamed, greedier now, more desperate.

“Yes,” Anadar rasped back, and the price was in his voice. “Blood.”

He did not leap. He did not step carefully. He did the only thing left.

He drove the blade into the center of the mass.

Where he saw no body, only density. Where hunger was strongest.

The creature reacted at once.

It drank.

Not symbolically. Truly. It pulled at the blood on the blade as if blood were an invitation it could not refuse. And in that drinking, what Anadar had hoped for and feared happened.

The blade pulled back.

Not blood.

The creature.

The spell caught. The vessel became the mouth. The black mass began to writhe, not because it was struck, but because it could no longer be everywhere at once. It became direction. It became current. It was drawn in against its will, and in its screaming there was suddenly something other than greed.

Panic.

The mental struggle was catastrophic.

The demon drove into Anadar’s mind, not probing, not cautious. It tore. It tried to rip him apart to get free. Nausea became only surface. Beneath it was violence.

Anadar felt his thinking thin, the world breaking at the edges. He saw images that were not his: hunger older than cities, cold that was not weather, a litany of blood, blood, blood until no word held meaning.

He was close to giving in.

And exactly there, in the last moment, he released his plan.

Not to the people.

To the demon.

He showed it what was happening. He let it see the trap, the net, the blade, the future that was not long but was certain. He let it understand it would not win even if it tore him apart. That it would be drawn in anyway. That it would not escape.

The demon hesitated.

Only a breath.

Only a tiny crack in greed.

But the crack was enough.

In that moment it lost.

It thrashed. It pushed. It tried to cling to the world. Tentacles burned at the net. The castle trembled. Stone splintered. The courtyard became a wound.

But the blade kept pulling.

The creature was drawn in, layer by layer, scream by scream, until only a last remnant of darkness trembled and then vanished, as if a hand had been plunged into cold water and never pulled back out.

The plan worked.

What was not planned was what remained.

The demon was in the sword, yes. But a part, a thread, a barb, had anchored itself in Anadar’s head. Not as a voice, more as pressure, as foreignness, as something that said: I am not gone. I am only different.

Anadar staggered.

He tried to tear himself free from the inside, tugging at himself as if you could pull a thought out of a skull with your fingers. He felt the net above them twitch again as if it might tear. He felt Shara somewhere outside, Morgut, Manador, the others, all at the edge of their strength.

And then it suddenly went dark.

A crack.

Not a fire crack, not stone breaking. Something else. A sudden end, as if someone had cut off the demon’s last essence without Anadar commanding it. For a moment there was only emptiness, a clean, dangerous emptiness.

Then Anadar collapsed onto the floor of the ruined fortress.

He lay in darkness and everything was quiet.

Not the quiet after victory.

The quiet after a cut.

A peace swept over him, unexpected, heavy, and he had no strength left to resist it. His hand did not let go of the blade, though he no longer noticed. His breathing deepened. His eyes closed.

And for the first time since Rotar’s death he slept as if the world had decided it did not need him for a moment.

26

He awoke only reluctantly.

Not from a dream, not from a faint, more from a state in which the body had decided that thinking was too much. His eyes opened a slit, and at first he understood nothing. Only sand under his cheek. Cold in his breath. The dull taste of smoke on his tongue.

He was still in the courtyard.

The sky above him was no longer night, but not yet morning either. A gray light hung over the Fiery Fortress like damp cloth. It smelled of burned wood, of melted stone, of metal that had grown too hot. The wind did not carry the smell away; it only kept it moving, as if it wanted to spread it across the whole grounds so no one could forget.

Rubble lay around him.

The fortress was not merely damaged. It had been torn open. Walls still stood, but they stood crooked, as if they themselves were tired. The great courtyard where drills were usually held and voices ran across stone now looked like an opened book whose pages had been torn apart by force. Black fissures ran through the ground. In places the marble of the inner rooms had melted and flowed out into the courtyard and hardened again, as if smooth surfaces had suddenly turned liquid and then been ashamed of it.

Where torches had once hung, empty brackets now remained. Where doors had stood, there were openings that looked like wounds. Statues were broken and shattered. Wood had turned to charcoal. In some places stone had melted so smooth it looked like glass, and in others it had burst so violently you could see its inner structure, as if the fortress had been cut open to check whether it still lived.

Above everything the lattice still hung.

It stood in the air like an alien sky. Fine lines of mind and lightning, barely visible and yet tangible, as if the air caught on them. A net that had survived the night. It no longer crackled loudly, but it was there, like a taut memory.

And over everything lay a strange peace.

Not the peace after a clean victory. More the peace you feel when something has stopped breathing. The air was lighter, as if a weight had been lifted out of it. Even the fear that usually clings to walls felt diluted.

From far away he heard noise.

Footsteps. Shouts. Commands. Voices that were not screaming from panic, but because they were coordinating work. The sounds of buckets, of stone being cleared away. The sound of a fortress trying to piece itself together again before it fully understands how broken it is.

Anadar moved his fingers.

Something pulled.

He felt that his hand was holding something, and when he lowered his gaze he saw his sword.

It was not simply lying in his hand. It was as if it lay in his grip and at the same time in him. As if between skin and metal there was no clear boundary anymore. The blade was no longer the same. Not in material. Not in light. Not in feeling.

It felt warmer.

Not warm like a sword that has been lying by a fire. Warm like something living that has been near blood and has not forgotten it. The metal had taken on a tone that did not belong to steel, more depth, more density, as if the blade had absorbed something that did not want to come out again.

Anadar sat up slowly. His muscles protested, not with pain, but with weight, as if every part of him were saying: let me lie. Let me have one more breath in peace.

He lifted the blade a little and studied it more closely.

The light, gray as it was, reflected differently in it. No clean line. No cold sharpness. More a surface that swallowed light and returned only part of it, as if deciding what it would reveal.

He tried to let go of the sword.

Not out of disgust. Out of the sober reflex that after a fight, after a binding, after a night in which the world broke, you want to open your hand to prove to yourself you still have control.

It cost him strength.

Not physical strength. Inner strength.

Letting go felt like loss. Not like giving up an object, but like giving up a part of himself. His hand did not want to open. His fingers tightened as if something behind them were saying: no.

Anadar forced it.

He breathed in slowly and did not think of will. He thought of technique, of all the moments he had learned that the body follows the mind if the mind stays calm enough.

His fingers released.

For a heartbeat the blade hung as if refusing to fall, then it was free.

And immediately there was that emptiness in his palm, as if something had been torn out. Not painful. Only wrong.

He lifted the sword and slid it into its sheath.

Even that felt less like a movement than like a closure that was not clean. The metal slid in, and for a moment Anadar thought he felt resistance, as if the sheath did not want it. Then the blade settled, the strap held, and still the feeling remained that nothing is truly gone just because you hide it.

He raised his head.

Only now did he notice the footsteps growing faster. Voices called his name, first uncertain, then more certain, as if someone had recognized him in the courtyard.

“Anadar.”

“There.”

“He’s alive.”

Shara, Morgut, and Manador came rushing through the wreckage toward him. Not elegant. Not dignified. Like people who had been held together for hours by a single question and were now finally seeing an answer.

Manador reached him first. He stopped a step too close, as if he had forgotten how to keep distance. His face was smeared with soot, his eyes reddened, and his voice sounded at once like command and relief.

“What did you do?” he asked, and there was no criticism in it, only the need to press reality back into words.

Anadar looked at him as if he first had to remember that language exists. “I…” he began, and realized his voice was rough. “It worked.”

Morgut gripped his arm, not rough, but tight enough that Anadar felt it: you are really here. Morgut’s gaze moved over him, searching for wounds, for signs, for anything foreign.

“Can you stand?” Morgut asked.

“I’m sitting,” Anadar replied dryly, and it was the first time something like humor slipped through again.

Morgut snorted once, and there was so much relief in the sound it almost hurt. “That counts.”

Shara came last, and when she saw him something broke open in her face that she usually never shows. Her eyes were wet, and she did not even seem ashamed of it. She said nothing at first, as if she had to check whether words would break it.

“You idiot,” she finally managed, and it sounded like accusation and prayer at once.

Anadar wanted to answer, but she was already with him.

Shara hugged him.

Not briefly. Not politely. Not the way she touches someone when she wants to make a point. It was a hug that revealed she had already lost him in the last hours and was now getting him back, against all logic.

Anadar held still. He did not return it at once, as if he first had to understand that he was allowed to. Then he slowly raised a hand and placed it against her back, careful, as if in that moment Shara was the most fragile thing in the entire courtyard.

Morgut looked away, as if he suddenly respected something that was not his language. Manador cleared his throat too loudly and pretended to look at the rubble, because leadership was needed again now.

Shara finally pulled back, wiped her face with the back of her hand as if punishing herself for showing that she felt.

“Is it gone?” she asked then, and the question was sober because she needed it that way to function again.

Anadar nodded slowly. “Bound,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Manador stared at him as if Anadar had turned into a grave. “And it’s not alive anymore?” he asked softly.

Anadar hesitated for a heartbeat. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But it’s not outside anymore.”

Morgut looked up at the sky. “The net,” he said.

Anadar followed his gaze. The lattice was still there.

Manador lifted a hand, made a short, clipped gesture, and somewhere on the walls spells responded. Lines flickered. The net trembled as if it disliked being released, and then it released, collapsing into itself like light that suddenly has no form.

The air sighed.

It was not a dramatic moment. It was physical, as if a clamp that had held the night together had been loosened.

Students came back from corridors and courtyards. Not all of them. Many walked slowly, leaning on each other as if they had forgotten how to stand alone. Some carried the wounded. Some carried rubble away simply because they did not know what else to do.

They returned into the castle, or rather into the ruin.

And still some laughed.

Not out of joy. Out of that inappropriate, shocked laughter that comes when the body realizes it is still alive. Somewhere wine was brought. Someone found bread as if bread had suddenly become a feast. A few students began to sing, softly and off key, then fell silent because they realized someone beside them was crying.

They celebrated.

Not as triumph. As relief.

No one could sense anything. No further demons. No cries. No shadows that did not belong. The peninsula lay quiet in the morning as if nothing had ever been there.

The next steps still had to be spoken, because peace without direction is only a pause.

Later they sat in a half destroyed room that had once been a meeting chamber. A table still stood. Two chairs were broken. They sat anyway, because sitting is a form of order.

Manador spoke first, because now he had to lead whether he wanted to or not. He counted damages, counted wounded, counted supplies, counted everything that can be counted because counting soothes.

Then he looked at Anadar. “What now?” he asked.

Anadar felt his body trying to become tired again, but he held it together with thought.

“I have to go to my brother,” he said. “To Tandor. I have to understand what that was. Where it came from. Whether it was alone. Whether it is part of something bigger.”

Shara leaned forward. “And the north,” she added at once, as if she had already carried the sentence inside her. “That isn’t over just because we bound one here.”

Anadar nodded. “I have to go north. And to Zoordak. I have to know what the Mother knows, and what she doesn’t say.”

Manador snorted. “And the fortress,” he said. “It’s a ruin.”

“It has to be rebuilt,” Anadar said. “But not by me.”

He heard himself how hard it sounded, and he said it anyway, because truth mattered more than comfort in moments like this.

“You’ll be missing,” Manador said. “For a while.”

Shara and Morgut looked at him at the same time, like two blades turning in the same direction.

“You’re not going alone,” Shara said.

“Yes, I am,” Anadar replied, and he did not mean it as an assertion of power, but as a plan. “You’re needed here.”

Morgut folded his arms. “I’m not needed here,” he said.

Shara nodded. “You can’t leave me here.”

Manador lifted a hand. “This isn’t—”

“This is exactly what it is,” Shara cut him off, and this time her voice was cold. “We’re needed elsewhere. That’s the reality.”

Anadar rubbed his forehead. “The fortress needs you,” he said. “The students need you. The daughters need you. I promised it.”

“You promised the Mother,” Morgut said. “Not yourself. And not us.”

Shara leaned in. “You want to go alone because you think you have to carry it alone,” she said. “That’s your flaw, not your strength.”

Anadar looked at her. “And if I’m right?” he asked softly. “If that thing wasn’t alone, if it isn’t truly bound, if it comes back.”

Shara held his gaze. “I want to understand it,” she said. “I don’t want you doing it without me.” She sounded stubborn.

The argument lasted a long time.

It got louder. It got quieter. It was not elegant. Things were said that you regret, and things were said you can never take back. In the end Anadar did not get his way.

Not because he was weaker. Because on one point he had to be honest.

He did not want to be alone.

Later, when the ruin slowly turned into sleep, Anadar sat again in his tower, in the room that was only half standing. The hearth had been relit. The fire burned small and hesitant, as if even fire first wanted to check whether it was allowed to stay here.

He was alone.

Shara and Morgut were somewhere in the fortress, in conversations, in plans, in work. Manador was holding the ruin together as best one can hold ruins together.

Anadar took up his sword.

He drew it from the sheath slowly.

In the firelight the blade did not look like steel. It looked like a promise no one wanted to make. It was warm. Too warm.

And as he held it, something suddenly swept over him that was not his hunger.

Greed.

It did not come from his stomach. It came from his head, from a point behind his eyes that tightened and then opened as if there were a mouth there that is never full.

Anadar held his breath.

Inside him, very close, as if the voice were his own, something whispered.

Not softly.

Not pleading.

Commanding. Greedy.

“Blood.”

And Anadar knew, even before his grip tightened, that this fight was not over, that the demon was not bound. It had only changed the battlefield, and no one was allowed to know.