The cold was the first sign that the world was ending.
For as long as Cauldron's Apex had hung suspended over the Cinder River, the lower holding cells had been a sweltering, miserable oven. The heat of the magma radiated upward through the basalt floors, keeping the iron bars constantly warm to the touch. But as Torin sat in the pitch black, his back pressed against the stone, he felt a creeping, unnatural chill seeping through the soles of his boots.
The Arch-Duke was bleeding the river dry. Malakor Vance's leviathan-class airships required an astronomical amount of thermal energy to invert gravity, and they were drawing it directly from the deep core.
"The ambient pressure is dropping," the old engineer rasped from the cell across the corridor. His teeth were chattering. "The steam lines... they're freezing up. He's diverted all the primary boilers to the hangar strata."
Torin didn't answer. He drew his knees back to his chest, ignoring the agonizing throb in his shattered, plaster-encased arms, and drove his right heel into the heavy iron lock of his cell door.
The impact was loud, a dull, metallic clang that echoed down the long, empty cellblock, but the door did not budge.
"You're wasting your strength, Spark," the old man wheezed, shifting in the dark. "It's a four-inch deadbolt driven by a pneumatic piston. You could kick it until your leg snaps, and it won't yield."
"You said the pressure was dropping," Torin grunted, dragging his boot back for another strike.
"The lines are freezing, yes. But the residual pressure in the cylinder will hold the bolt in place for hours. Long after the Arch-Duke's fleet is gone. Long after the suspension struts of this city snap from the sudden thermal contraction and drop us into the gorge."
Torin slammed his heel into the lock again. The iron rattled. "I'm not dying in a cage. Tell me how to break it."
The old man coughed, a wet, rattling sound. "You can't break the lock. You have to break the valve. Look at the wall beside the door. There's a brass housing where the steam pipe feeds into the piston. It's covered by an iron grate."
Torin shifted awkwardly, pressing his face against the cold bars. In the dim, dying orange glow from the floor grates, he could just barely make out the square outline of a grate bolted to the exterior wall, about a foot from the lock mechanism.
"If you can dent the housing," the engineer instructed, his voice trembling with a fragile, desperate hope, "you might pinch the release valve open. It will vent the residual steam. The bolt will retract automatically as a fail-safe."
Torin adjusted his position. The angle was terrible. He couldn't kick it straight on; he had to thread his leg through the bars and strike the wall sideways, generating power entirely from his hips without the use of his arms for balance.
He thrust his leg through the iron bars, aimed his heavy brass-plated boot at the grate, and kicked.
His hip screamed in protest. The boot struck the iron, bending the grate slightly, but the brass housing beneath remained intact.
Torin pulled his leg back, closed his eyes, and found the cold, hollow void inside himself. The alchemical aggregate had burned out his kinetic channels, but the sheer, stubborn mass of his body remained. He thought of Malakor Vance, sitting in his immaculate solar, handing down death sentences with a polite, mechanical purr. He thought of Maeve, shivering in the deep-seams. He thought of the Inquisitor, drugged and stolen away as a piece of leverage.
He kicked again.
The brass housing dented. A sharp hiss of escaping steam filled the corridor.
"Again!" the old man urged, his voice cracking. "You cracked the seal!"
Torin threw his entire body weight into the next strike, throwing himself sideways so his shoulder slammed into the stone floor inside the cell while his boot crushed the brass housing outside.
A loud, violent pop echoed in the darkness. A cloud of hot white steam vented directly into Torin's face, scalding his cheek. He dragged himself backward, blinking through the pain.
With a sluggish, metallic groan, the heavy iron deadbolt slid back into the doorframe.
The cell door drifted open an inch.
Torin lay on the cold stone for a long moment, his chest heaving. He rolled onto his knees, used his elbow to push the door completely open, and stumbled out into the freezing corridor.
"The Light be praised," the engineer wept, pressing his scarred face against the bars of his own cell. "Get me out, Spark. The valve for my door is on the right."
Torin staggered across the hall. He didn't have the strength for another acrobatic kick. He turned his back to the wall, lifted his boot, and simply stomped backward onto the brass housing of the engineer's door, using the wall for leverage. The casing shattered on the third stomp, venting steam, and the door slid open.
The old man tumbled out, collapsing onto the grates. He was impossibly frail, dressed in rags that smelled of ancient sweat and mildew. His hair was sparse and white, his skin deeply pockmarked from chemical burns.
"Get up," Torin rasped, nudging the man with his knee. "What's your name?"
"Cobb," the engineer gasped, struggling to push himself up on knobby, trembling arms. "My name is Cobb. We have to go up. The lower sumps will already be freezing over. The structural integrity of the basalt depends on the magma's heat. If the core cools too fast, the cliff face will contract. The anchors will pull free."
"I need to get to the Arch-Duke's hangar," Torin said, looking down the long, dark corridor.
"The Obsidian Leviathan is likely already airborne," Cobb said, leaning heavily against the wall, his breath misting in the frigid air. "But the secondary hangars... the supply skiffs. If the laborers haven't rioted and taken them, there might be one left."
"Lead the way," Torin ordered. "I don't have hands. You're going to have to open the doors."
They began to move through the dying underbelly of Cauldron's Apex.
The silence of the city was far more terrifying than its usual deafening roar. The massive smelters and turbines had been choked of their steam. The flickering gas lamps were dying out one by one as the pressure in the lines failed, plunging entire sectors into pitch blackness.
As they climbed the maintenance stairs, the true horror of Malakor Vance's exodus became apparent.
They reached the third tier—the industrial slums where the half-million laborers of the city lived. The heavy iron blast doors separating the slums from the upper spires were permanently sealed, welded shut from the outside.
Crowds of desperate, freezing people were gathered at the barricades. Men were swinging crude iron pipes and pickaxes against the impenetrable steel, their hands bloody and raw. Women were weeping, holding shivering children wrapped in soot-stained rags. The temperature was dropping precipitously. Frost was beginning to form on the iron railings.
"He locked them in," Torin whispered, staring through a grated overlook at the chaos below. "He's leaving half a million people to freeze to death or fall into the gorge."
"They are excess weight," Cobb said, his voice hollow, stripped of all emotion by years of surviving the Arch-Duke's cruelty. "A migrating fleet cannot carry the laborers who built it. Keep moving, Torin. If they see us, if they realize we know a way up... they will tear us apart in their panic."
They slipped past the overlook, entering the service shafts reserved for the Brass Sentinels.
The shafts were narrow, vertical climbs filled with rusted ladders and complex pneumatic tubing. Because Torin's arms were encased in heavy plaster and bound to his chest, he could not climb the ladders. Cobb, despite his frailty, had to rig crude harnesses out of heavy canvas belting left behind by the mechanics. The old man climbed first, dragging Torin up level by level using the manual pulley systems designed for hauling heavy tool-crates.
It was agonizing, slow work. Every time Torin was hoisted up, the heavy canvas straps dug into his broken ribs, threatening to crush the breath out of him.
By the time they reached the seventh tier—the secondary hangars just below the Arch-Duke's primary spire—Cobb's hands were bleeding, and Torin was hovering on the edge of unconsciousness.
The heavy iron doors to the hangar deck were slightly ajar.
Cobb peered through the crack, his breath catching. "Light save us," he breathed.
Torin pushed past him, using his shoulder to force the heavy doors open.
The secondary hangar was a cavernous expanse of reinforced glass and black iron, protruding out over the abyss of the canyon. The massive bay doors were wide open, letting in the harsh, bruised light of the Scorchlands sky.
The Obsidian Leviathan was gone.
Far above them, rising into the thick, yellow smog, were the massive silhouettes of the Arch-Duke's fleet. A dozen colossal airships, their hulls plated in dark armor, drifting slowly toward the eastern horizon. They looked like floating mountains, majestic and utterly untouchable.
But the secondary hangar was not empty.
Sitting on the launch rails near the edge of the bay was a single, sleek vessel. It was a blockade-runner, a small, heavily armored skiff designed to outrun Sovereign patrols. Its hull was polished brass, its steam-turbines idle.
And standing between Torin and the skiff were twenty heavily armed men.
They were the dregs of Malakor's internal security—guards who had not made the cut for the evacuation fleet, left behind to die with the laborers. They had realized their betrayal, mutinied, and fought their way into the hangar. They were currently arguing violently over who got to board the small skiff, which could only carry perhaps six men at most.
Their uniforms were torn, their pneumatic rifles drawn and pointed at each other.
"We can't fight them," Cobb whispered, pulling Torin back into the shadows of the doorway. "They're feral. They know it's the last ship."
Torin looked at the skiff. It was the only way off the dying rock. It was the only way to chase Cassian Vane, and the only way to eventually reach the Slag-Peaks.
"I can't fight them," Torin corrected, his dark eyes hardening. "But I can give them something else to shoot at."
He turned to the old engineer. "Do you know how to prime the boiler on that skiff?"
"I designed it," Cobb said, a flash of old, buried pride briefly illuminating his sunken face. "It's a rapid-ignition core. Give me sixty seconds at the helm, and I can have the buoyancy field active."
"You'll have sixty seconds," Torin said. "When I move, you run for the ramp. Don't look back. Don't wait for me. Just start the engine."
Before Cobb could protest, Torin stepped out of the shadows and walked directly onto the hangar deck.
He didn't try to hide. He moved with heavy, deliberate steps, his boots clanking against the iron deck plates.
One of the mutinous guards, a man with a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, turned and spotted the massive pit-fighter. "Hold!" he screamed, leveling his rifle. "Nobody else gets on the deck!"
The other guards spun around, their weapons tracking Torin.
Torin kept walking. He didn't have his arms. He didn't have his kinetic Aura. All he had was the sheer, terrifying mass of a man who had survived a lifetime of slaughter.
"You're dead men," Torin bellowed, his voice echoing in the cavernous hangar, deep and resonant enough to rattle the glass. "Malakor left you to freeze. The city is collapsing. And you're standing around pointing guns at each other over a ship you don't even know how to fly."
"I can fly it," a guard spat, though his hands shook on the trigger.
"Then why is it still on the rails?" Torin challenged, closing the distance. He was fifty feet away now. "Because you know the moment one of you steps on that ramp, the rest will shoot him in the back."
Torin stopped. He stood in the open, entirely exposed.
"I have a pilot," Torin said, nodding his head slightly back toward the shadows. "He knows the ignition sequence. Let him on the ship, and he'll fly us all out of here."
It was a lie, of course. The skiff couldn't hold twenty men, and Torin had no intention of letting them board. But it bought him the hesitation he needed.
The guards looked at each other, the fragile, violent tension among them fracturing further.
"Where is the pilot?" the bleeding guard demanded.
"Right here," Cobb screamed, bursting from the shadows.
But the old engineer didn't run toward Torin. He sprinted in a wide arc, hugging the far wall of the hangar, moving with a desperate, frantic speed toward the boarding ramp of the skiff.
"Stop him!" someone yelled.
Three guards raised their rifles, aiming at the frail old man.
Torin moved. He didn't charge the guards. He threw himself directly into their line of fire.
He collided with the bleeding guard like a runaway freight train, dropping his shoulder and driving the heavy, iron-reinforced plaster cast of his arm directly into the man's face. Bone shattered. The guard flew backward, his rifle discharging harmlessly into the ceiling.
Torin didn't stop. He pivoted, using the momentum of his heavy frame to sweep his leg through the knees of the second guard, dropping him to the deck.
The hangar erupted into chaos.
The guards, terrified and angry, opened fire. The loud, concussive cracks of the pneumatic rifles filled the air. Heavy iron spikes ripped through the space where Torin had been a millisecond before.
Torin fought like a cornered bear. Without his hands, he was a creature of blunt force and brutal geometry. He threw headbutts that shattered noses, drove his knees into stomachs, and used the heavy, unyielding plaster casts binding his arms as battering rams. He took a glancing blow from an iron spike to his thigh, the metal tearing through his trousers and carving a bloody trench across his flesh, but he didn't falter.
He was a hurricane of meat and bone, drawing the entire focus of the mutinous guards, giving Cobb the precious seconds he needed.
Across the hangar, the old engineer scrambled up the ramp and threw himself into the cockpit of the skiff.
"Ignition!" Cobb's voice echoed thinly over the gunfire.
A deep, powerful hum resonated from the belly of the brass skiff. The alchemical boiler roared to life, venting a massive cloud of superheated steam from the exhaust ports, temporarily blinding the guards near the launch rails.
"It's leaving!" one of the guards screamed, realizing the deception. "Kill the pit-rat! Board the ship!"
They abandoned Torin, turning their rifles toward the skiff.
Torin swept the legs out from under a guard aiming his rifle, but there were too many of them. He was bleeding from a dozen minor lacerations, his breathing ragged, his body bruised and battered.
The skiff began to levitate, the gravitational inversion field lifting it off the heavy iron rails. The boarding ramp began to slowly retract.
"Torin!" Cobb yelled from the cockpit window.
Torin turned and ran.
He sprinted toward the rising ship, his heavy boots pounding the deck. Two guards chased him, firing wildly. An iron spike grazed his shoulder, another sparked off the deck near his foot.
He reached the edge of the launch bay. The skiff was lifting, drifting out over the terrifying void of the canyon. The boarding ramp was halfway closed.
Torin leaped.
He threw himself into the empty air, aiming for the narrowing gap of the ramp. He hit the heavy steel incline hard, sliding backward. Without the use of his arms, he couldn't grab the edge. He was slipping back toward the abyss.
A pair of frail, scarred hands shot out from the interior of the ship, grabbing Torin by the collar of his shirt.
Cobb strained, his face purple with exertion, hauling the massive pit-fighter upward with everything he had left. Torin twisted his body, hooking his heel over the lip of the closing ramp, and dragged himself the rest of the way inside.
The ramp locked shut with a definitive, metallic seal.
Torin lay on his back on the cold metal floor of the skiff, staring up at the brass ceiling. He was bleeding, exhausted, and broken. But beneath him, the deep, steady vibration of the engines promised distance.
Cobb slumped against the bulkhead beside him, coughing violently, a thin trickle of blood running from his nose.
"Where to, Spark?" the old engineer wheezed, his hands trembling as he rested them on the brass steering yoke.
Torin turned his head, looking out the reinforced glass porthole. Through the thinning yellow smog of Cauldron's Apex, he could see the massive, dark silhouettes of the Arch-Duke's fleet, moving slowly eastward across the sky.
"Follow the Leviathans," Torin said softly, his dark eyes hardening into cold, unyielding obsidian. "He has my sister's freedom. He has the Inquisitor. And I am going to burn his ships out of the sky."
The small brass skiff banked sharply, its steam-turbines screaming, and shot out of the dying city, a lone predator stalking a fleet of floating mountains.
The defoliant gas did not simply burn; it unmade.
Where the heavy glass canisters from the Arch-Duke's bombers shattered against the upper canopy of Lysera's Hollow, the corrosive green cloud expanded with terrifying speed. It was an alchemical nightmare designed specifically to target the rapid cellular growth of the Deeprot. The massive, petrified dusk-wood trees—structures that had stood for millennia—began to literally weep, their bark turning to a foul, bubbling sludge that rained down upon the inverted city below.
Rook stood in the center of the swaying rope-bridge, the chaos of the apocalypse exploding around her.
Mummers were screaming, their voices tearing through the damp air as the acid rain ate through their fungal cloaks and blistered their skin. The pale blue and green lanterns were extinguishing, replaced by the angry, hissing orange glow of localized fires as the volatile spore-wine reserves in the taverns ignited.
"Elara!"
A massive hand grabbed her shoulder, spinning her around.
It was Bram. The scarred Illusionist's leather apron was already singed, his face streaked with soot. He had a heavy cloth tied over his mouth and nose, and he thrust a similar piece of soaked linen into Rook's chest.
"Breathe through this!" Bram roared over the deafening sound of melting wood and screaming engines. "The gas sinks! If you breathe it raw, it will dissolve your lungs!"
Rook didn't argue. She tied the damp rag over her lower face. Her silver eyes were wide, taking in the absolute destruction of her home. The Arch-Duke's bombers—three jagged, black iron airships—were circling slowly overhead like carrion birds, dropping canister after canister into the dense foliage.
"The Matriarch!" Rook shouted, pointing toward the Heartwood. The massive central root was already smoking, the purple sap boiling inside its basins.
"She's fighting back," Bram yelled, pulling Rook forward as a burning piece of debris crashed through the bridge a dozen feet behind them. "The deep roots are waking up!"
As if on cue, the entire Hollow shuddered. It was not a localized tremor; it was the terrifying, coordinated flex of a continent-sized organism.
From the depths of the Somber Chasm below, massive, thorny vines the thickness of Sovereign galleons shot upward. They moved with a speed that defied their immense size, tearing through the hanging architecture of the city, shattering taverns and bridges as they reached for the sky.
One of the massive vines surged toward the lowest bomber.
The airship's alchemical cannons swiveled, firing desperate blasts of concentrated fire, but the wood of the Deeprot was ancient and dense. The fire scorched the bark, but the vine did not slow. It struck the black iron hull of the bomber, wrapping around the midsection with the crushing force of a titan constrictor.
The sound of the airship's hull buckling was a horrific, metallic shriek that drowned out the screaming Mummers. The steam-rotors violently sparked, chewing into the vine, but a second root shot up from the darkness, completely enveloping the rear engines.
With a sickening crunch, the heavy iron airship was snapped entirely in half.
The two halves of the burning bomber plummeted, dragged down by the massive roots directly into the heart of Lysera's Hollow.
"Run!" Bram screamed, shoving Rook toward the cliff edge.
The severed front half of the airship crashed into the residential tier of the inverted city. The impact detonated the remaining alchemical payload. A massive shockwave of concussive force and green defoliant gas ripped through the caverns. Thousands of homes, carved into the hanging bulbs, were instantly vaporized.
The shockwave hit the bridge Rook and Bram were running across.
The thick hemp ropes snapped like rotten thread. The wooden planks disintegrated.
Rook felt the sudden, terrifying absence of gravity. She was falling. The boiling, green-tinged mist of the chasm rushed up to meet her.
Time slowed. The Fourth-Ring mana in her blood roared to life, demanding action. She couldn't fly. She couldn't cast a shield strong enough to stop the fall. She was an Illusionist. Her magic manipulated perception, not physics.
But perception was reality, if forced hard enough.
Rook twisted in the air, her silver eyes flaring with blinding intensity. She looked at the sheer rock wall of the cliff face rushing past her.
She reached into her mind, grabbed the absolute, terrifying panic of falling, and inverted it. She cast the Shroud outward, but instead of hiding herself, she imposed a localized hallucination of absolute solidity onto the mist directly beneath her.
She didn't create a real floor. She simply convinced her own body, and the ambient magical field of the Deeprot, that she was standing on solid ground.
She hit the illusory floor.
The impact did not break her legs, but the metaphysical whiplash of imposing a lie onto physics nearly tore her mind in half. Her nose erupted in blood, the crimson drops instantly vanishing into the illusory mist. She dropped to her hands and knees on the invisible platform, gasping through the damp rag, suspended in thin air hundreds of feet above the bottom of the chasm.
"Elara!"
She looked up. Bram was dangling from a thick, severed vine thirty feet above her, his massive muscles straining as he held on with one hand. The rock wall was sheer. He had nowhere to climb.
"Drop!" Rook screamed, her voice tearing her raw throat. She forced more mana into the construct, widening the invisible platform beneath her. "I have it! Drop!"
Bram looked down. He couldn't see the platform. He only saw Rook, kneeling in empty air, blood pouring down her chin. He trusted her.
He let go.
Bram fell, his heavy body plummeting toward her. He hit the invisible floor beside her. The illusion groaned under his immense weight. Rook shrieked, the pressure in her skull spiking to agonizing levels. The air around them rippled violently, the silver light from her eyes flickering like a dying candle.
"Move!" Rook gasped, the illusion fracturing beneath them. "I can't hold his weight!"
Bram scrambled on his hands and knees across the empty air, reaching the solid rock of the cliff face. He jammed his fingers into a narrow fissure, anchoring himself. Rook lunged forward, grabbing his belt, and pulled herself onto a narrow, two-foot ledge of actual stone just as the illusion shattered behind her with the sound of breaking glass.
They collapsed against the cold, wet rock, breathing heavily.
Above them, the Hollow was a vision of hell.
The remaining two bombers were ascending rapidly, trying to pull out of the range of the Matriarch's grasping roots. They continued to drop canisters of defoliant, bathing the dying city in a toxic green glow. The Heartwood was completely engulfed in alchemical fire, the massive central root groaning as the acid ate through its core.
"The Matriarch," Bram wheezed, pulling the rag down from his mouth. He looked up at the burning canopy, a complex mixture of horror and relief on his scarred face. "She's burning."
"The whole city is burning, Bram," Rook said, her voice hollow. She wiped the blood from her nose with the back of her trembling hand. "Malakor Vance knew we were coming. He struck first."
Bram looked at her, his dark eyes narrowing slightly. "How did he know? The Matriarch's summons only went out hours ago. Even a fast-rider couldn't have reached Cauldron's Apex and returned with an armada in that time."
Rook didn't answer immediately. She looked at the falling embers, the burning bodies of the Mummers plummeting past them into the dark. She had sent the warning to save the world from the Matriarch's madness. But she had paid for the world with the blood of her own people.
"It doesn't matter how he knew," Rook lied smoothly. The words came out easily, perfectly insulated by the returning apathy of the Shroud. "The Deeprot is broken. The army is scattered. The Spire is safe from the Matriarch."
"Safe from the Matriarch," Bram agreed grimly, looking out over the boiling mist. "But not safe from the Arch-Duke. If Vance has a fleet of airships that can cross the continent in a day, he isn't just defending his canyon. He's making a play for the Zenith Throne."
Rook leaned her head back against the stone.
Cassian Vane, Torin, Malakor Vance, Serafina Raine. The pieces were moving faster than she could track. The cage of the world was broken, and the monsters were pouring out, armed with ledgers and airships.
"We need to leave the Hollow," Rook said, pushing herself up, her joints aching with the residue of over-channeled magic. "Before the gas settles in the chasm. Do you know a way up to the surface?"
"The old smuggler trails," Bram said, hauling himself to his feet. "They cut through the northern caves. But Elara... where do we go? The Wold is closed. The Scorchlands are at war. The capital is starving."
"We go to the Isle of Oaths," Rook said, her silver eyes reflecting the burning ruins of her home. "The Arch-Duke is flying his fleet toward the Spire. The Wold is going to hold its grain hostage. Everyone is converging on the Panopticon. That's where the power is. And that's where the lie ends."
She reached down, touching the hilt of the glass dagger at her belt.
"I broke the Matriarch's plan," Rook said softly, speaking more to herself than to Bram. "Now I have to break the Arch-Duke's."
Together, the two rogue illusionists began the treacherous climb up the cliff face, leaving the burning, melting ruins of the Deeprot behind them. The shadows were lengthening across Verdah, and for the first time in five thousand years, the night was going to be long, cold, and utterly merciless.