The drums began in earnest as the sun sagged toward the black ridges.

  They did not sound hurried. They sounded certain.

  The square shifted. Traders folded cloth and counted coin. Buyers drifted outward. The faithful pressed inward. Smoke from pitch-soaked braziers rolled low across the stones, stinging the eyes and thickening the air. Above it all, the cage creaked as it swayed.

  Korrak stood in the shadow of an awning and rested his hand upon the hilt at his side.

  For a moment, he closed his eyes.

  He did not pray.

  He listened.

  Deep beneath the noise of drum and chant, he felt it—the low pulse of Cinderbreath moving in the world like heat beneath stone. It answered him faintly, as it always had. Not wild. Not raging. Simply present.

  The sword in his grasp stirred.

  Cold strength flowed from the steel into his palm, then along his arm, slow and steady. Not fire—never fire. Fire consumed. This was something older. A breath drawn from the First Furnace, sleeping in the blade until called.

  He remembered another night of flame.

  His kin had fallen in the courtyards of their hall, cut down by men who wore the sigil of the Varethis Imperium. He had stood in the blood, the sword pressed into his hands by a dying knight whose armor still bore the Emperor’s mark.

  Take it,” the man rasped. “It chooses its bearer. Pray it chooses better this time.”

  The sword had chosen.

  Others who carried such breath rotted from within, their flesh unable to bear it. Driven mad by the power. Much like the dying knight. But Skarnblood ran in Korrak’s veins. His blood did not recoil from Cinderbreath. It endured it.

  He opened his eyes.

  The square seemed sharper now. The ring of guards at the beam. The wardens moving into place. The robed figures kneeling upon blackened stone.

  Korrak loosened a small leather pouch from his belt. He poured ash into his palm and mixed it with dark pigment drawn from crushed root. Slowly, deliberately, he smeared it across his face—brow to cheek, cheek to jaw. The grit bit into old scars.

  It was not for spectacle.

  It was remembrance.

  The drums quickened.

  Beside him, Hollick drew in a sharp breath.

  “You…” the rogue whispered. “I have heard of you.”

  Korrak did not look at him.

  “They call you the Ash-Blood Reaver,” Hollick said, voice thinning. “The one who walks from burning towns. The one who leaves nothing behind but cinders.”

  Korrak’s jaw hardened.

  “The Emperor burned my house,” he said. “I return what was given.”

  Hollick studied him as though weighing a coin whose worth he had misjudged.

  “They say you do not bring hope,” Hollick murmured. “Only reckoning.”

  “If reckoning is what is needed,” Korrak replied, “then hope can wait.”

  The chanting began—low at first, then rising.

  Hollick swallowed. “That means you are Skarnblood,” he said. “One of the Ash Lords.”

  Korrak said nothing.

  “Are you a prince?” Hollick pressed quietly.

  The cage creaked overhead. The girl inside stood straighter now, as though she sensed the shift in the air.

  Korrak’s gaze lifted to her.

  “Titles burn,” he said at last. “Steel endures.”

  He stepped forward out of shadow.

  The smoke parted around him, and the drums did not falter.

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  But something in the square did.

  Hollick exhaled through his teeth. “If I draw breath at dawn, I will claim more coin.” “Agreed,” Korrak said. “Now go.”

  Night settled over Veyra like a funeral cloth.

  Korrak moved where torchlight thinned and shadows gathered thick against stone. Smoke rolled low across the square, heavy with pitch and bitter resin. The drums no longer murmured. They pounded, slow and relentless, until their rhythm seemed to crawl beneath the skin and take hold of the heart.

  The crowd widened into a circle.

  Faces lifted toward the cage. Some were pale. Some flushed with zeal. All were intent.

  At the foot of the beam, the wardens heaped wood and oil into a waiting pyre. A spark was cast. Flame bloomed, thin and blue at first, then yellow, then gold as it took hold. Heat shimmered upward, distorting the iron bars above it.

  The girl swayed as the chain shifted. There was no ladder. No stairs. Only air and fire between her and the stones below.

  The wardens of the Black Skull stepped forward in sable robes, heads shaved smooth, brows marked in white bone sigils. One by one they knelt. Their foreheads pressed to the blackened ground as the chanting rose.

  No mercy in it. No plea.

  Only hunger.

  Korrak watched from the edge of shadow.

  “You will go to the gates,” he said quietly.

  Hollick stiffened beside him. “What?”

  “The gates must stand open when I leave.”

  “They will know it was I,” Hollick hissed. “I am known here. I drink here. I owe coin here.”

  “You are a rogue,” Korrak said. “You walk unseen when you wish it. Why do you think I chose you.”

  Hollick gave a thin smile that did not reach his eyes. “And what do you intend?”

  Korrak’s gaze lifted to the cage.

  “I will take the girl.”

  Hollick stared at him as though he had spoken blasphemy.

  “She hangs above flame,” he said sharply. “There are near two hundred souls in this square, and a dozen wardens with spears. Three temple blades stand ready. You cannot carve through a city.”

  Korrak placed a heavy hand upon the rogue’s shoulder.

  “You trouble your mind too greatly.”

  “And you,” Hollick muttered, “have lost yours.”

  A faint curve touched Korrak’s mouth.

  The drums rose higher. The fire cracked and spat sparks into the night.

  Hollick hesitated only a heartbeat longer. Then he slipped away into the press of bodies, vanishing with the ease of a man who had survived by not being seen.

  Korrak remained.

  The heat from the pyre washed over him. The chanting thickened. The chain creaked.

  He stepped forward out of shadow.

  And the square did not yet see him.

  Korrak circled wide along the outer edge of the square, where pillars and sagging awnings cast deeper shadow. He moved like a hunting wolf along a ridge, Unseen, unhurried, certain of the kill. The drums thundered. Smoke thickened until the world seemed half-dreamed, half-drowned in firelight.

  He found the chain.

  It rose from the cage through an iron ring set high in a timber beam. The links were thick and dark, forged for burden and permanence. Wardens stood at its base.

  Korrak counted without turning his head.

  More men waited beyond the first ring. Hardened ones. Temple blades at their hips.

  Not impossible.

  He drew his sword.

  It came free without song or scrape. Yet the air seemed to tighten as the steel bared itself. A cold sheen bled along the edge, faint at first—like moonlight caught in frost—then steadier. The breath within the blade stirred.

  Cinderbreath answered his blood.

  It flowed from steel into his palm and up his arm, slow and deep. Not wild flame, but a buried furnace opening its eye. The ache of travel fell from his limbs. The world sharpened.

  He remembered another fire. Another ring of watchers. His people screaming beneath Imperial torches.

  He let the memory harden him, but not rule him.

  The chain swayed slightly above the pyre, heat shimmering around it. No man could reach it alive. The temple blades would cut him down before his second step.

  Korrak did not move toward it.

  He planted his feet upon the stone and stilled his breath.

  The blade hummed softly in his grip.

  He closed his eyes—not in prayer, but in command.

  He did not reach with muscle.

  He reached with will.

  The Cinderbreath within the sword answered. It flowed into him, through him, not as flame, but as pressure. As weight. As a force that bent and pressed and strained against the world.

  The drums dulled. The chanting thinned to a distant echo.

  In the silence beneath the noise, he felt the chain.

  Cold. Taut. Resisting.

  He pressed.

  At first there was nothing. Only iron and the stubborn strength of seasoned wood sunk deep into stone. Sweat gathered at his brow. The faint glow along the blade deepened.

  He pressed harder.

  A tremor ran through the links. One guard frowned and glanced upward, but a burst of sparks from the pyre drew his attention away.

  Korrak’s jaw tightened.

  He remembered helplessness. He remembered being small. He was neither now. He drove his will like a hammer strike into the heart of the iron.

  The chain groaned. The beam above shuddered in its sockets. The wardens shifted uneasily, sensing something amiss though they saw nothing yet.

  Korrak opened his eyes.

  The glow along his blade flared cold and fierce.

  With a single wrenching pull of his mind, the chain snapped with a crack like splitting rock.

  The cage dropped.

  It struck the stones and skidded clear of the flames, iron bars bending, rivets bursting. Sparks leapt. The girl curled in on herself as metal screamed and twisted.

  The drums died mid-beat. Chanting fractured into shouts. Robed heads snapped upward. Smoke parted.

  Korrak stepped forward into the heart of the square.

  The blade burned in his hand, not with warmth, but with a cold fire that promised reckoning.