Chapter 734: Shadows at Ironleaf (3)
A few scattered mercenaries burst from the shattered gate like spooked deer, boots thudding over churned mud and shattered timber. Panic whipped their senses raw—every groan of charred beam sounded like a pursuing demon, every flutter of ash a hidden blade. They ran blind, desperate to escape the nightmare they'd awoken to: comrades raised as skeletal thralls, command tents aflame, and a silent thing in black stalking through corridors where even sound dared not linger.
Draven stepped from the narrowing shadows between two leaning towers, the crimson of a half-risen sun washing his cloak in dull embers. He lifted one gloved hand, the gesture unhurried, almost conversational—as if signaling a waiter instead of condemning men to death. Runes beneath the leather kindled, their lines glowing a cold sapphire that bled into the creases of his palm.
At the motion, the fortress walls seemed to breathe. Dark bands uncoiled from mortar lines and arrow slits, slick as oil, stretching like taffy under invisible pull. They slithered across broken cobble, converging on the fleeing soldiers. One mercenary—a youth whose helmet still bore the fresh shine of a new recruit—looked back at the drag of boots behind him and stumbled. Shadow-limbs coiled around his ankles, yanking him off his feet with a cry that died in his throat. Another tried to hack at the writhing dark with a dented cutlass; the blade passed through with no resistance, and the shadows answered by twining up his arms, locking joints until steel slipped from his grasp. Within heartbeats, a half-dozen men hung suspended like insects in web, faces flushed with terror, veins in their necks bulging as they strained against the vice of living night.
Draven's eyes were flat glass behind stray ash drifting from the burning stables. He watched each prisoner test the bindings, measured how long it took before panic yielded to the numb stillness of hopelessness. Precisely seven seconds—the same tonic of despair he'd observed in a deserter line years ago during the Siege of Ternholt. Shadows responded to fear nearly as well as blood.
His task complete, he lowered his hand. The runes guttered out, and the black tendrils held fast but stilled, prisoners left breathing—barely. Mercy? No. Calculation. Interrogation fodder had its uses.
The clang of distant steel rang once more, a final cymbal crash of conflict, then tapered into silence marked only by crackling fires and the slow groan of collapsing timber. The fortress of Ironleaf, proud pillar of Valaroth's slave trade, now lay gasping in its own smoke. Draven felt the after-pulse of necromantic resonance ripple across the courtyard like a receding tide. It carried with it the flavor of cold iron and scorched sigil—evidence the Goblin King's rampage had ended. Good. Residual energy at safe levels for retrieval.
He whispered a single word in Old Gob—guttural, sharp, a syllable older than empire.
Across the eastern courtyard, the undead monarch jerked as if the sound yanked an invisible chain. Armor plates slumped inward, releasing a belch of dust-dry air that billowed through rents in blackened mail. Emerald coals in the skull-helm faded to dull cinders; the rotted cleaver dissolved grain by grain, drifting away like ash shaken from a forge. Limbs unraveled, joint pins uncoupling in slow, deliberate sequence until the colossal corpse became a loose cloud of gray mist. It whirled once around the shattered flagstones—an enormous, voiceless sigh—then shot toward Draven in thin threads that quivered through morning light. Every filament found a seam of his sleeve, vanished beneath dark leather, and was gone.
The courtyard looked instantly smaller, as though a granite cliff had melted while no one watched. A single helm, cracked clean through, rolled in a lazy circle where the Goblin King's foot had stood, then toppled onto its side with a sound no louder than a sigh.
Draven exhaled, letting the lingering tremor of binding magic roll out of his chest. Control re-established, resources reclaimed. He pivoted into the treeline, flitting between saplings whose new spring leaves still glistened with dew. The young beeches screened him from the chaos inside the walls—a living curtain of green and gold. Through narrow gaps in the foliage he observed the human scramble.
Smoke from collapsed granaries wrinkled up into the pale sky. Lanterns jerked in frantic hands, painting the yard in stripes of sour yellow that quivered with each fearful step. Shouts overlapped: "Form up!"—"Help the captain!"—"Find the mage, curse you!" But the calls lacked spine. The garrison had broken the moment its torch-bright certainties guttered. Now the survivors were simply noise clinging to routine.
Draven's gaze slid across the refuse of the night: splintered crates stamped with the seal of Valaroth's Treasury, twisted cages that had once held shackles keyed to elven lifeforce, scorch marks where blood wards had cracked under necrotic pressure. A slave master rocked on his knees by the kennels, pressing linen to a stump that sparked blue where a suppression rod had exploded in his grasp; the man's mouth worked soundlessly, the brain still issuing orders the body could no longer obey. Two yards away another overseer lay on his back, eyes wide but unseeing, a single black-fletched arrow sunk through the soft pallet of his throat—Sylvanna's mark, precise as the stroke of a calligrapher's pen.
A gust scattered hot ash across Draven's boots. He flicked it off with a downward shake, the motion neat, almost dismissive. Triumph was wasteful. He stored only the meaningful metrics: number of able-bodied defenders remaining, tempo of their shouted counts, the direction of triage lines—each detail another bead on an abacus.
Brush behind him whispered. He relaxed just enough to keep his blades low, turning half a step as Sylvanna slipped between two mossy trunks. Lightning still clung to the silver filigree on her bracers, dim sparks crawling like sleepy fireflies. Her cloak smelled of ozone and singed hair. Soot painted a crescent beneath one eye; crimson flecks dotted her cheeks where close-range kills had splattered. She stopped when the ruin came into full view.
"By the winds…" Her voice thinned to a reed-whistle. The words drifted into silence, swallowed by dawn's hush. She stared at the tethered mercenaries swinging like grotesque marionettes from columns of shadow, at the half-collapsed archer tower still dripping molten rune-stone, at the yawning gate whose portcullis lay folded like paper.
"You did this… alone?" she asked after a breath, pitching her tone low—as if the ruin itself might overhear and take offense.
Draven stepped from the bole's shadow. First light gleamed off the ragged hem of his cloak, revealing burnt threads curling like dead ivy. He brushed a hand down one sleeve; gray motes broke free, danced upward on a warming breeze.
"Not alone," he said. His voice held no vanity, only fact. "Merely unseen."
The phrase settled between them, heavy as an anvil set upon glass. Sylvanna's jaw tightened. Her gaze leapt to the distant chain yard. Already she noticed subtle changes: the way elves pressed tentative fingers to metal collars, finding them cold instead of scalding; the way hushed exclamations spread along cage rows like grassfire. But none of the freed dared leave their pens. Freedom offered unseen teeth.
"This… wasn't just liberation," she breathed. It was a statement, but also a test: would he deny it?
"It never was." He reached beneath his cloak and drew forth a length of broken chain the color of extinct stars. The glyphs along its surface flickered, fighting against fracture lines spidering through every rune loop. A muted whine—half sigh, half slither—escaped the metal as it touched open air. Draven balanced it by one link, letting it spin slow enough for Sylvanna to read the runes of Subjugate and Silence now cleaved in half.
"A bargaining chip," she concluded, voice steadier, intellect already racing ahead. Her storm-touched eyes reflected the chain's weak pulses like mirrors catching lightning at sea.
"Trust must be built carefully, quietly," Draven replied. He held the chain up to the sunrise. Pale gold seeped through the cracks in its sigils, scattering sickly turquoise sparks that died before hitting earth. "Symbols matter more than speeches. A flaw in the collar speaks louder than a promise from a stranger."
A whistle shrilled from the inner yard—desperation masquerading as discipline. Draven watched as a sergeant with a bleeding scalp wound tried to corral twenty survivors into a ragged phalanx. The sergeant's voice cracked on the third command, terror bending syllables into brittle things. Behind him, scattered torch beams prowled corridors, hunting shadows already long gone.
Sylvanna observed too, shivering despite the warmth creeping into the air. "They'll guess soon enough," she murmured. "That someone engineered this, not chance."
"They'll guess," Draven agreed. "They won't know." He coiled the chain fragment and slipped it into a leather tube, sealing the cap with a thumb-press of wax that hardened at his rune-heat. Evidence secured.
Ash whirled on a playful gust, dusting their boots. An ember landed on Draven's gauntlet, glowed, then winked out. He did not glance down.
Sylvanna's shoulders lifted with an unasked question, then fell with the weight of many answers. She studied him—his unruffled calm, the geometry of his posture, the faint echo of necromancy still dilating his pupils—and something like reluctant admiration crept into her tired smile. "So, what's next?"
Draven's gaze drifted back to the smoldering fortress, calculating possibilities stretching across his mind like a vast chessboard. "We watch. Now, the kingdom must move first."