Once again, Dain found himself dropped into the same soundless, lightless void he’d seen the first time he died—that vast hush where even his thoughts seemed to echo back at him a half second late—but as he hung there, completely weightless, the first thought he had was that the Dreamer had actually done her job. He would’ve been pissed if they paid her ten thousand curons for a nap and a practical joke.

  Then color bled into the void around him. Streaks of multicolored paint swirled and coalesced and funneled past him. When the watery sounds of a world forming started rushing into his ears as well, he closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath.

  Here comes the nausea.

  This time, he didn’t panic. He didn’t try to look for a way out. He tightened his jaw, held his breath, and didn’t open his eyes until he felt the world around him snap into place.

  He was… inside a small house. It was so small and cramped that he was floating with his back against the underside of the slanted roof, pressed close enough to see the grain of the wood and tiny gaps where cold air seeped through. It was dark, too, and not the cozy kind of dark in a hearth-lit room in the middle of winter.

  The hearth was unlit. The lanterns were extinguished. If not for the moonlight falling through the small cracks in the roof, he wouldn’t be able to see the small family of three huddled behind the closet beneath him.

  A mother in a thick, ragged cloak pulled her two young children into her, and her hands were shaking. Her voice was a thin thread. She muttered an Auralinese prayer to the gods above, and it was barely audible above whatever chaos was going on outside. Shouts. Metal screeches on metal screeches. Screams that rose and cut off so sharply they made his stomach drop, and destruction that raged so closely that dust drifted down from the rafters timidly.

  Then the front door was kicked in, and two figures stepped into the room calmly through smoke and broken wood.

  Dain’s scowl formed on instinct.

  Even with full black cloaks and plain iron masks sealing their faces away—even with blood dried dark along their sleeves and hems—he knew they were the sisters immediately. Stonewraith still wore her stonescale mantle over her cloak, while Gargantyr’s hammer hung in her grip loosely, the head nicked and stained with blood.

  Both of them looked… tired.

  And when Dain strained to see outside through a crack in the roof, he understood why.

  The village outside was burning. Auraline’s golden banners burned from poles melting in the heat. Bodies littered the streets. Villagers were torn and eviscerated, body parts strewn across the roofs, while soldiers in bright golden mail lay twisted and broken, their helmets split in half. Some were still moving, crawling, and trying to get away with hands missing fingers, but the stone golems—crude, thick-limbed things with hands like mallets, likely birthed from Gargantyr’s hammer—patrolled around and finished off the survivors with casual cruelty. One fist down, a head turned to pulp. One foot down, and another skull crushed.

  Dain felt his stomach lurch.

  Below him, the mother realized the three of them couldn’t hide anymore, so she stumbled out from behind the closet and dragged her children out with her, droppping to her knees.

  “Please,” she choked. “Please, just… Obric wants me, right?” Her voice cracked on the word. “I am the Lady of Drouselle. That’s why you’re here. Take me. Just… don’t hurt Lorelai and Lorien. They have nothing to do with—”

  Stonewraith took out a knife and flicked it horizontally, decapitating the mother so cleanly it took her a breath to realize she was dead.

  “... Run,” the mother whispered.

  The children screamed. They tore free of their mother’s falling body and ran, stumbling to the shattered doorway, then out into the burning street, heading towards anything that wasn’t this village.

  Stonewraith lifted two small knives and turned around, facing the children. Her arms rose. Her posture locked. Then…

  She hesitated.

  It was unmistakable—that tiniest falter, that fraction of a second where her hands refused to commit to the kill—and even behind that iron mask, Dain felt like he could see it: a face stuttering.

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t put the knives into the backs of the children.

  For a moment, Dain, too, didn’t know what to do with that information—but then Gargantyr lifted a hand and pushed Stonewraith’s shaking arm down gently.

  “I got this,” Gargantyr murmured.

  With that, she lifted her hammer and pointed it after the fleeing children. Fifty meters down the street, a stone golem stepped out of an alley and simply swung its fist once. Both children’s heads were crushed at the same time, and they folded forward just as quickly as their mother had.

  He looked down again despite his own scowl. Stonewraith was still shaking, like her body was trying to reject what it’d done and couldn’t find a way to, but Gargantyr reached back and grabbed Stonewraith’s hand.

  She held it tight.

  “We’re in this together,” Gargantyr whispered gently. “Anything you can’t handle, I’ll handle.”

  Stonewraith stayed frozen for a breath longer—knives still in her fingers like forgotten tools—but she finally found the strength to nod, and they walked out of the house hand in hand.

  The world bled into colors.

  Dain’s stomach dropped again as the colors swirled—bleeding, twisting, dragging him out of the house like someone yanking a rug out from under reality. He wasn’t ready for it this time. The nausea hit him in full force, making his head ache, pulse, and burn until the swirling stopped as abruptly as it’d begun.

  It took him a few good blinks to see where he was now: in a gilded manor’s hallway. Tall windows. It was night outside. The glass shook faintly with distant impacts, and beyond it he could hear carnage: shouting soldiers, stone grinding, and screams swallowed by something heavy. Something beastly, yet man-made.

  Below him, a fat, unkempt old man in tattered regal wear was running down the corridor, panting, eyes wild. He was a noble—if the rings flashing on trembling fingers and the coat embroidered with gold thread was any indication—but he kept glancing over his shoulder as if the darkness itself had teeth. Dain followed his gaze. He didn’t know what the man was so scared of.

  But as the old man reached the door at the end of the hallway, an inch away from the doorknob, a knife flicked across the hallway and sank into the back of his leg.

  He cried out and collapsed. A second knife hit the back of his knee, then a third hit his thigh, quick as thought, pinning him down in a way that wasn’t meant to kill.

  The sisters pushed open the door at the back of the hallway and stepped in. They were even bloodier than the last time Dain had seen them, and the old noble scrambled, sobbing, pleading for his life.

  “Please—please! I can pay! Obric can have—”

  Gargantyr slammed her hammer into the floor. The marble cracked like a spiderweb, and the shattered stone rose up, taking the forms of golems that immediately started charging forward.

  The world changed again.

  The sisters were knee-deep in yet another slaughter—another Auralinese street, another scattering of civilians trying to flee as stone fists fell from above. The details blurred together. Torches guttered, gold-threaded banners torn and trampled, blood soaked into cobblestone until it looked almost black.

  Change again.

  The sisters were killing again, but something was wrong this time. Gargantyr’s stride was uneven. Her left leg was a stone prosthetic reinforced with runes. Whatever had happened to her, though, it hadn’t slowed her down. If anything, she fought even angrier than before, smashing through shields and bodies alike while Stonewraith followed closely behind, quieter than ever.

  Change again.

  Another locale. Another slaughter.

  Change again.

  Another. Bodies. Smoke. Stone fists. Black cloaks moving through it like they belonged.

  Change again.

  The sisters stood in a narrow courtyard washed in torchlight. A man knelt in front of them, hands shaking, his eyes white and sightless, scarred beyond saving. Stonewraith raised one knife, then froze. The hesitation was unmistakable once again, sharp enough that Dain felt it in his gut. Her arm trembled. She couldn’t do it. Not again.

  Gargantyr lowered Stonewraith’s hand gently, and after the man’s head was crushed, she hugged her younger sister tightly.

  Change again.

  Now the sisters were crouched behind a splintered supply crate inside a fortress corridor. The stone walls rang with shouts. A dozen Auraline soldiers thundered past them in a line, voices overlapping.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Find them!”

  “The assassins are here!”

  “Seal the west stairs!”

  Stonewraith was shaking badly, seemingly in fear of being caught, but Gargantyr grabbed her head and pressed their masks together.

  The fear wasn’t about killing—it was about being seen. About being caught. Gargantyr leaned close, forehead nearly touching her sister’s mask, and squeezed her hand hard enough that Dain imagined bruises forming.

  “I’m here,” Gargantyr whispered. “Whatever we do, we’ll do together.”

  Stonewraith nodded once. Just once. It was enough.

  Then the world smeared once more, and this time, it didn’t just blur past another moment in time. Months compressed into a single breath. Years compressed into heartbeats. Faces flash and vanished; villages burned and rebuilt; knives struck, hammers fell, blood splattered snow, sand, marble floors, temple steps. The Black Exhibit War tore across the continent in fragments, but so did the sisters as they carried out assassinations in candlelit chambers, ambushes in rain-soaked passes, and executions beneath banners that’d only be raised again the next day as if nothing had ever happened.

  Dain clutched his head, nausea clawing up his throat.

  This is… too much.

  Gods, this is too—

  But just as the pressure threatened to tear him apart, the smearing stopped. The swirling ceased. The noise died. The world held still.

  And Dain realized he was looking at the very final vision in this part of the sisters’ lives.

  He was floating in a forest. It was a dark sprawl of pines and jagged underbrush with thin pillars of moonlight falling through the canopy. The air looked cold. The shadows were clean. Even the wind seemed to move like it was afraid to disturb something, and that alone made his skin crawl.

  He looked straight down.

  A smear of blood cut across the grass like a dragged ribbon. It wasn’t old. The trail ran between a litter of roots, caught on a few thorns, and then widened into a messy pool near the base of a thick pine.

  Dain followed it with his gaze and eventually found Gargantyr sitting slumped against the tree, head tipped forward. Stonewraith knelt before her. Their iron masks lay discarded beside them, half-buried in the grass. Without the masks, the sisters looked… strange. Not weaker, exactly—just more human than he’d realized they were, though they’d never been anything but human.

  Gargantyr’s face was grey-pale. Her lips were parted slightly, and each breath she pulled looked like it hurt her. A great, bloody hole yawned in her chest. Under her torn clothes, the faint veins around the wound glowed with a sick, yellowish-white light, spiderwebbing out as if the lightning-type relic that struck her refused to let her die peacefully. Stonewraith’s right arm was gone from the shoulder down, too. It was evident she’d wrapped the stump in cloth so tight that she’d successfully prevented herself from bleeding out, but…

  It was obvious their last mission had gone wrong, and that Stonewraith had dragged Gargantyr here where nobody could possibly find them.

  “... Stay,” Stonewraith whispered. “Don’t… don’t go.”

  Gargantyr’s eyes fluttered. Her blank stare seemed to catch on nothing in particular, then drifted towards her younger sister as if following a thread. Her mouth moved. Sound came out, but it wasn’t fully words as much as it was half-breathed fragments. Thoughts leaking out because holding them in took too much strength.

  Stonewraith leaned closer like she could press her will into Gargantyr’s lungs.

  “You… you said we’re in this together,” Stonewraith begged. “Don’t leave. Don’t close your eyes. Anything you can’t handle, I’ll… I’ll handle.”

  Gargantyr’s hand rose, cupping Stonewraith’s cheek with surprising gentleness.

  “You’re… filthy,” Gargantyr murmured, thumb smearing off grime and dirt on Stonewraith’s face. “Don’t move. I’ll… get it all… off…”

  Her fingers dragged across Stonewraith’s face clumsily, managing to wipe off about half of the blood, but—halfway through the other half of her face—Gargantyr’s arm slipped down.

  Her head sagged.

  Her eyes stopped focusing.

  The glow in the veins around her wound pulsed once, like a lantern being snuffed… and then nothing.

  For one heartbeat, Stonewraith didn’t move at all. Not even a shiver. Not even a breath.

  Then her body caught up to reality. She reached out and shook Gargantyr, gently at first, then harder, and harder, fingers digging into cloth and armor as if she could rattle life back into her sister by force alone. When that failed, the shaking turned frantic—violent, uneven, desperate—until her strength finally broke and she collapsed forward, wrapping herself around Gargantyr’s body and pressing her face into her older sister’s chest.

  Stonewraith wasn’t one to scream. Dain knew that well by now. She simply held on, shaking, because letting go would make this final in a way she wasn’t ready to accept.

  Then Dain felt a pressure shift in the air, brushing against his senses like a fingertip against the back of his neck. His Common Hollowbreath stirred, warning him of motion before sound ever followed. He whirled at the same instant Stonewraith did, her head snapping towards the trees with predatory speed.

  From the shadows behind the sisters, a man stepped out calmly.

  Golu.

  The sisters’ mentor stopped beside Gargantyr’s fallen body. His dull iron mask still hid his face, but his straight-backed and utterly composed posture was more than familiar, even to Dain.

  “... So the older sister has fallen,” Golu said evenly, looking down at Gargantyr. “At the very least, both of you finished your final mission before retreating in this state. The reputation of the Ironshade Corps remains intact.”

  Then he reached behind his back and drew a plain knife, tossing it onto the ground beside Stonewraith.

  She looked at it without expression, as if it were a foreign object she didn’t recognize.

  “Kill yourself,” Golu said.

  Stonewraith froze.

  So did Dain.

  The forest seemed to hold its breath as Stonewraith slowly lifted her head, eyes traveling upward until they found Golu’s mask. The disbelief in her stare was stark—almost childlike—as though she were waiting for him to laugh and tell her this was just another cruel test.

  Golu didn’t laugh. He unsheathed his own knife from his belt instead, checking its sharpness with the pad of his thumb.

  “Eleven minutes ago, the Autonomous Land of Obric signed a formal peace treaty with the Kingdom of Auraline at Stormearth Serenity,” he said matter-of-factly. “The treaty was presided over by High Guildmaster Cassian, Orland the Everbright, and various senior ranks of the Seeker’s Guild. Even the Curator Church bore witness. With this treaty, the Black Exhibit War has officially ended, for Obric and Auraline were the last two countries still spilling blood. From this moment on, Obric shall enter an age of trade as it navigates this new world of cold, cold diplomacy.”

  His blade gleamed faintly as he turned it in his hand.

  “And for that future to remain clean,” he said, “the Grand Minelord has ordered the immediate and complete disbandment of the Ironshade Corps. There shall be no records. There shall be no survivors. There shall be no shame attached to Obric’s reputation.”

  Golu raised his knife to his own throat.

  “... Farewell, Stonewraith,” he said quietly. “Obric will not remember you, but perhaps the three of us will meet again in the realm beyond.”

  Then he flicked his knife across. The motion was clean. Blood spilled darkly across his collar as his body folded forward and collapsed onto the ground without ceremony.

  Stonewraith still didn’t react as she knelt there between two corpses, moonlight washing over her bloodied face and bandaged stump, utterly still.

  Dain almost felt he could hear her thoughts, looping and breaking apart.

  ‘... It’s over?’

  ‘After everything… it just ends?’

  But training had drilled it into her bones to obey. Slowly, she reached down and picked up the knife Golu had thrown beside her. Her grip trembled as she brought it up toward her neck. She closed her eyes and drew in a shaky breath, forcing herself to hold the blade steady—to obey just one last order.

  Dain felt the knife pressing into his own neck as he watched her shake, swallow, and clench her jaw—

  And then she broke.

  Stonewraith screamed—a sound torn straight from her chest—and hurled the knife away with all the force she had left. The blade struck a nearby tree and split the trunk clean down the middle, wood cracking and splintering as the tree collapsed with a groan.

  She gasped for air, shoulders heaving. She was unable to finish it. Unable to die. She folded back over Gargantyr’s body, clutching her sister once more, and grief, fury, betrayal—all of it bled outwards until Dain felt the world begin to twist again.

  ‘I’ll kill you.’

  ‘I’ll kill—’

  Dain came back to himself with a sharp gasp, lungs dragging air as if he’d been drowning. The floor was cold against his palms as he jolted upright. His heart hammered so hard it made his vision pulse. Sweat slicked his skin from scalp to spine, soaking his collar and sticking his hair to his forehead.

  For a moment, he couldn’t tell if he was still dreaming or if the dream had followed him out.

  Then he focused around him, and realized he wasn’t in the glass bowl anymore. Shards of glass were scattered everywhere, crunching softly when he shifted his weight, and the silver liquid had spilled across the floor in glimmering puddles.

  The room wasn’t empty, either.

  Sahlir held his serpentine blade low but ready. Ilvaren’s twin shortswords were already out, her stance aggressive and forward-leaning. Kargun braced his massive gauntlets together, shoulders squared like he was ready to cave something in if it so much as twitched wrong. Rena stood before the Dreamer, arms spread slightly as if to block Dain from her—or her from Dain.

  There was blood on Rena’s forearms, and it was only when he heard his silverplume owl shrieking at him from atop Sahlir’s head that he finally realized they were all surrounding him, looking at him like he was the threat.

  What are you all…

  …

  No.

  Not him specifically.

  His silverplume wings were swirling and undulating with a mind of their own, hovering before him as they screamed territorial fury. The feathers bristled with defensiveness, and in an instant, he understood what’d happened.

  “Easy,” he whispered, reaching out with shaking fingers and stroking the feathers of the left wing. The other wing immediately turned as though it finally realized he was awake, so he started stroking that one, too. “Calm down. They’re friends. You know them. You’ve met them.”

  The wings were still visibly agitated, but they slowly began to draw in at his whispered reassurance. One wing folded first, then the other, until they wrapped around him in a loose, instinctive cocoon.

  “... Incredible,” the Dreamer murmured, her voice threaded with old awe. “The moment you began convulsing in your body like you were having a nightmare, they immediately snapped out and did everything they could to protect you. We couldn’t even get close to you to wake you up. What kind of relic is that?”

  Dain swallowed, chest still tight as he took in the sight of the others. The failure four hadn’t lowered their guard yet. Sahlir’s grip on his blade was tense, Ilvaren’s posture was coiled and ready, and Kargun’s massive gauntlets were still half-raised like he was bracing for impact. Rena watched him the closest, worry etched across her face as she flicked between him and the shattered remains of the bowl.

  He felt guilty to Rena the most, but… he still couldn’t shake off the memories he’d just witnessed.

  He couldn’t shake off the drive in her that he felt in his own chest.

  “I… sorry,” he said quickly, forcing his voice steady as he pushed himself onto his feet with his wings still curled close. “I’ll pay for the mess. I swear I will. Just…” He looked at the failure four sternly. “I figured out what Stonewraith’s trying to do.”

  After all, if an assassin who was trained by Obric, bled for Obric, fought for Obric—gave everything they had for Obric—and was then discarded by Obric had to kill one person in the entire world, who would that person be?

  The parade is tomorrow.

  She’s going after the Grand Minelord of Obric.