Siren's Reach - Fallen Lands Book 3

Epilogue

The lair was a palace long shattered. Fragments of mirror glass lay like ice across the floor, reflecting broken slivers of velvet couches and gold filigree walls. Once, the chamber had sung with soft laughter and perfumed incense. Now, shadows clung to every corner, watching their master like spurned lovers.

The Great Devil, Mannak the Whispered Sin, Lord of Temptation, sat upon his cracked throne, one hand wrapped tight around the stump of the other. Black fire hissed as it tried and failed to knit flesh back into the shape of fingers. His wings lay in tatters behind him, the feathers sloughing off in greasy, burned clumps, each fall punctuated by his measured breath.

He had been wounded before. Pain meant little. But humiliation? Humiliation gnawed.

"They tricked me," he murmured, his voice a velvet whisper stretched thin by fury. His servants dared not answer.

Zor'Gomath. Always Zor'Gomath, nudging, advising, wrapping chains of suggestion around him until he'd walked willingly into that den beneath the sea. Mannak's lip curled, exposing the sharp white points of his teeth. Had his "partner" known? Had the bloated schemer seen the trap and grinned as Mannak wasted hounds and flesh alike?

He flexed his ruined hand, imagining the serpent's throat under his claws. A day would come for reckoning. But the true wound was not the betrayal. It was the revelation.

Kitsune. Living, breathing, and powerful. Hidden for centuries, and now one had dared bare her fangs before him. He had gone into that place expecting a [Hero] — fragile, mortal, and blessed by a sick mixture of chance and hope. And what a "Hero" she'd been. Beautiful, radiant, defiant. Everything he wanted in a new toy.

She had cut his hounds down with storm and blade, and for one perfect moment, he had admired her. Admired the tilt of her chin, the fury in her eyes, the petty absurdity that mortals had hung their hopes on a pretty little foxkin girl and called her [Hero].

He would have caged her if the moment had allowed. Not to love, devils did not love, but to break. To twist. To grind that pride into ash until she begged him for purpose. Heroes made the sweetest traitors.

And her companions… four more jewels, glittering with spirit and flesh. They would have been perfect vessels. New bodies for his lost hounds. The thought still made his ruined hand ache. He had reached for them, tasted the moment of victory — and then the trap had snapped shut. Kitsune pouring from every shadow, Sentarith rising like dawn over the horizon. He had escaped only because they let him limp away. Let him live rather than violate the pact of neutrality from a war so long ago. The thought scalded more than the sunfire.

Mannak drew in a slow breath, forcing charm to slide like silk over his rage. His lair's walls shifted in answer, the broken mirrors reforming just enough to show him whole again. A lie, but a pleasing one. His servants relaxed, just slightly. He smiled at the effect.

"So," he said softly. "The Hero is ash. Or banished. It matters little. She is gone. But soon the world will whisper of her fall. And whispers…" His eyes gleamed with reflected fire. "Whispers are mine to shape."

Direct conflict with the foxes would be unwise. He knew that now. But he had no need to draw his blade against them. Mortals were already eager to slaughter each other. They needed only a hand to nudge, a voice to stir, a promise whispered in the dark. He had done it before. He would do it again.

First, though, he needed hounds. His pack was crippled, and crippled beasts were eaten. He rose, wings dragging furrows across the mirrored floor, and strode toward the doors of his palace. Succubi scattered like shadows, bowing low, pressing hands to lips bitten bloody in fear and worship.

"To the slave pits," he said, almost gently. "There are souls waiting to be… reshaped."

His laughter followed him out, velvet over razors. Mannak was broken. He was furious. But he was not finished.

The candles had burned low enough to drown themselves in their own wax. Smoke furred the rafters. Daggers pinned maps to the war table, alongside sea charts, levy rolls, and grain ledgers. Each blade was driven in with a measured violence that kept the room orderly and his temper caged.

Count Alexandros did not shout. Shouting was for men who needed to hear themselves lie.

He stood over the wide western frontier rendered in ink and grease pencil—West Peak, the vast green smear of Nightvale, and the jagged mountain teeth of the Spires beyond. The chart had been redrawn three times already, yet memory still stained the paper: his march on West Peak, his humiliation while surrounded by his own men, the loss of Siren's Reach, the girl who had slipped away like smoke.

The door latch clicked. Boots hesitated at the threshold.

"Enter," Alexandros said.

A courier stepped in at once, as if released from a spell. Salt clung to his cloak. His knuckles were white around a cylinder of oilskin. He dropped to one knee.

"My lord, dispatch from Admiral Krell. The southern passage."

Alexandros extended a hand. The courier placed the tube upon his palm and kept his eyes on the floorboards.

The wax cracked with a small, obscene pop. He slid the paper free and read. His lips did not move. His face did not change.

Fog banks thicker than pitch. Instruments turned useless. Last sighting of the vanguard's lanterns swallowed whole. Then screaming in the night as if the sea itself had found a voice. No wreckage sighted. No survivors found. Only silence where three thousand sellswords and sailors should have been.

He rolled the dispatch back into itself with deliberate care. "How long since this was writ?"

"Two days, my lord. We rode by night." The courier swallowed. "The admiral seeks instructions."

"Of course he does." Alexandros placed the tube upon the edge of the table, not quite letting it roll. "Go warm yourself. Wait outside."

Bootsteps retreated. The door closed.

Three thousand gone. He had bought them with hard coin and a harder promise. He had sold them a city and a cause and a name to carve upon the future. They had vanished into mist like stage smoke at a play.

Another knock, this time lighter. His chamberlain did not wait for permission, which meant the chamberlain had decided that permission was assumed.aa

"My lord." The older man's voice was careful. "Blackstone."

Alexandros didn't look up. "Speak."

"The reinforcements never reached the gates. Routed on the field. Scouts report Blackstone has fallen." A pause as he read the count's shoulders. "There are banners upon the walls that do not belong to us."

He let himself look then. Not at the chamberlain. At the knife stuck through Blackstone's square on the map. The steel had rusted at the hilt from the sea air, leaving a brown crescent stain beneath the name.

"By whom?" Alexandros asked.

"Unknown. Some say Siren's Reach. Others say devils. Others—" The chamberlain spread his hands the smallest degree. "Others say a fleet descended from a storm."

Alexandros almost smiled. "Storms do not take walls."

"Just so, my lord."

He dismissed the man with a nod that was not quite a nod. Alone again, Alexandros took the rusted knife from the table and weighed it in his hand. Siren's Reach, then Blackstone. And now the Shallow Sea had eaten his southern arm. He should feel surprised. He did not. He felt something like relief that his enemies had been obliging enough to declare themselves.

She had done this. The girl from the mountain, all righteous fury and inconvenient miracles. He had not spoken her name aloud in months, not even to curse it. That would make her real. Better to think of her as a problem, of the sort he had solved before: too bold, too beloved. There were ways to unmake such things. You taught people to doubt what they adored. You gave them something easier to admire.

He drove the knife through the map again, just to see the paper jump. Candles hissed. Somewhere in the keep, a clock tolled the quarter. He set the knife down and pulled the Nightvale chart forward.

Nightvale. A duchy vast as a kingdom, all ancient forest and ruined grandeur. Once an elven jewel, its capital Silvanshade still loomed like a broken crown in the heartwood, rich with treasures demons and undead had never cared to plunder. A hundred years ago, the Great Devil Jalmonnoth had conquered it, raising his necropolis capital of Phoz Vazax upon the Eternal Glade. For a century, Nightvale had been chained to undeath.

And then Jalmonnoth had fallen. Slain, if rumor were to be credited, by the same girl who had ruined West Peak. She had toppled his necropolis in the process, leaving Nightvale unmoored, its prize dangling.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Conqueror's Right. The law, old as the system, gnawed at him. Whoever struck down a ruler and routed their defenders could claim the territory. By that ancient reckoning, the duchy belonged to her. He would not admit it aloud—doing so would be an admission of her legitimacy, perhaps even her sainthood. But privately, with maps and candles his only witnesses, Alexandros allowed himself the bitter calculation. If she survived the war and assassins, she could make Nightvale hers by law and blade both. That, he could not abide.

His eyes traced westward, to the narrow coastline along the Everwatch border. The Spire dukes were distracted—House Marwyn gnawed at its own entrails with feuds and betrayals. Everwatch had its eyes on caravans and trade fleets, not forests. Patrols along the border were thin, expecting no more undead after Jalmonnoth's demise. A landing there would go unnoticed until it was too late.

The northern flotilla. His last clean blade. One thousand five hundred elites, already hugging the coast. If they put in at the western marches of Everwatch and struck out into the Fallen Lands, they could reach Silvanshade before any rival standard was planted. No one would be able to rally a force to remove them before her claim expired.

He rang the bell on his desk. The chamberlain appeared as if he'd never left.

"Summon Captain Varo," Alexandros said. "And send for my scribes."

"Now, my lord?"

"Now."

Varo arrived in armor that still smelled of oil. Alexandros gave him orders—landfall at Coldwater Cove, march across the Ashes by night, silence the drums, break councils, buy garrisons before fighting them. Above all, plant his standard before dawn on the fourth day.

"The girl will not claim it," Alexandros told him flatly. "She is trapped in her king's politics or defending Siren's Reach. It matters little. She is gone. We will arrive with a standard and a charter, and the law will remember itself the moment the system releases the claim."

Varo bowed and departed, already measuring the miles.

Scribes came next, ink-stained and weary. Alexandros dictated: proclamations promising stability and lowered tariffs, letters to select nobles of The Spires offering "temporary stewardship," whispers seeded in taverns about how heroes destroyed but never built. Truths bent under his hand until they curved like drawn steel.

When all was finished, he stood alone again in the smoke and wax of his war room.

"She took what was mine," he said softly. Siren's Reach. Blackstone. Now Nightvale. The pattern was too clean to ignore. It was arithmetic, and arithmetic must balance.

"You are not a plan," he told the absent girl. "You are an obstacle. Obstacles are removed."

Below the windows, a horn marked the changing of the watch. In the harbor, mooring lines creaked as the tide turned. Somewhere in the city a rumor was being born. Alexandros would choose which rumors grew teeth.

He didn't need the world to whisper yet. He needed it to listen. Nightvale would belong to someone soon. He had decided that someone was going to be him.

He called the place by its old name, the Ashes, though a century of necromancy had tried to rename it a dozen times. Wind combed the dead grass. Bone fragments clicked underfoot. The ruins of the necropolis lay cold, its sigils blackened and its pylons toppled into the mud like rotten teeth. No ward-lantern guttered. No watch-wraith paced the perimeter. The air smelled of charcoal and old prayers.

Kael of the Umbral Dynasty crouched beside a half-buried skull and listened to the night. He did not breathe. He tasted the air. Four heartbeats. Close. Warm.

"South edge," he said, and his voice carried no farther than the skull's ear. His retinue unfolded from the ruin like longer shadows. Two pale riders in quiet mail. A feral thing stitched from shade and sinew that moved on all fours and wore a bit of a priest's stole as a collar. Three thralls in dark leathers with ash smeared under their eyes.

They had come hunting Jalmonnoth's remnants. Kael had expected sentries in bone masks and knots of death-priests arguing over whose sigil outranked whose. He had expected resistance. Instead, he had found silence.

He rose, a ripple in the dark, and ghosted toward the heartbeats. The adventurers had chosen a shelf of broken stone for their camp, backs to a tumble of old wall, a cook fire no bigger than a helm, its smoke trapped under the low branches. Sensible. They had posted a watch and strung little bells on a wire between two stumps. Clever. They had set their bedrolls so nothing could slither up behind them without scraping its skin on rock. Experienced.

Kael watched them with the mild curiosity you might give to birds on a branch. He marked the fighter by the way he slept with his hand on the spear haft, and the priest by the cinched leather of a book pouch under his cloak, and the archer by the habit of touching each arrow fletch in order before she sat down. The last was a mage of some kind. The air around her bent in faint, wrong ways. She kept her ring hand under her cheek to hide its glint.

He put two fingers to his tongue. The thralls moved.

The first took care of the wire. He loosed a tiny blade from his sleeve and clipped it taut near the stump, then lifted the bell with a gloved fingertip and set it quietly on the ground. When some instinct told the archer to look up, wondering why she had not heard the bell in her head that warned of danger, he was already behind her. Kael liked the little gasp she made when leather pressed over her mouth and a knife found the seam below the ribs. Efficient. Quiet.

The fighter woke to fingers pressing his shoulder, colder than his own. He twisted free, rolled hard, and came up on one knee with the spear. Good instincts. Kael stepped into the thrust rather than back from it, so the blade bit his ribs and lodged, and he could lay his hand on the man's face. He gave him a gift. The fighter's pupils widened until his eyes were all black, and he saw the night as Kael did. He froze for a heartbeat at the beauty of it. That heartbeat was enough.

The priest had already risen, book open, lips shaping the first bars of a warding hymn. The shade-beast hit him from the side. It did not bite. It pinned his hands and simply leaned until bone gave way at the wrist. The hymn broke. Kael heard the faintest click of teeth as the man tried to bite his own tongue and pass on quickly. A thrall put two fingers against the priest's throat and hummed a calming note. The priest slumped. There would be time to drink later.

The mage jerked free of her meditation. Her hand flashed from under her cheek with the ring bright as a fallen star, and the air folded around her into a shield that seared anything without a pulse. Kael smiled. She had prepared. He liked that, too.

He drew a line with his nail across his own wrist and let a thread of black pour into the world. The shield took it and faltered, distorting, struggling with the impossible mix of life and death. The mage's mouth was already open for the word that would harden the spell. Kael touched his finger to her lower lip and lifted. The word caught. The spell died with the dignity of a candle pinched out between careful fingers.

He took her memory with the first mouthful. He always did, when he could. People were stories, and stories were worth more than blood. He tasted road dust and the salt of the northern coast. He tasted a tall house flying blue and silver above Everwatch and a woman with a strict mouth who paid in clean coin. He tasted a tavern rumor of a [Hero] who had burned a devil's city to ash and a map sketched on the back of a tax ledger showing a way between patrol routes. He tasted certainty that Jalmonnoth's spawn would be waiting here in droves.

He lifted his head and looked around the ruin again, the dead grass, the toppled pylons, the bone, and the dark where the necropolis had tried to grow itself into a god. Nothing stirred.

"Empty," one rider whispered. The word was a small shock. They had not said it aloud yet.

"Not empty," Kael said. "Unheld."

The thralls dragged the bodies into a neater line. The shade-beast sat like a dog and watched Kael with its head slightly tilted. Its eyes were coins without minting.

He knelt beside the fighter and turned the man's face toward the starlight. Sweat had carved clean threads through the soot on his cheek. Kael pressed two fingers to the man's temple and felt the pulse slow. He imagined for a moment lifting him back by that pulse into some obedient half-life, but the man deserved better than to be a poor echo. Kael did not waste brave things on low work unless the tally demanded it.

"Burn them," he said. "Leave no gifts for carrion."

The thralls frowned, as much as thralls could. Fire meant work, meant time. He let them have the frown. They had eaten well tonight. They could carry wood.

While they gathered branches and the rider with the calm hands stacked stones for a proper bed, Kael walked the perimeter. He paced the old paths where bone-wardens had once stood in iron frames, where altar carts had squealed under weight, where smoke had climbed to feed a sky that never wanted what it was given. He stepped over a circle of melted glyphs and traced the air where its rhythm would have struck the ear.

He smelled no devil's oil. He heard no low chant in a dead language. He saw no bone moths clustering to a priest's wet breath. Jalmonnoth was gone. The Unclean One had finally found an end. The necropolis was not merely broken. It was finished.

Kael set a hand on a toppled pylon and let his will pool in the palm until frost gathered. When he spoke, it was for his riders, and for the ruins, and for the quiet itself.

"The Ashes never belonged to him," he said. "They do not belong to any devil. They are ours."

A bell chimed, far off. Not from any camp. A ship bell. The wind had shifted, and with it came a thread of pitch and salt and tar. North and east. He turned his head and felt the sea like a weight against the edge of his hearing. He filed the scent away. It was not yet for him.

The fire caught. Fat hissed in the flames and then burned without smoke. Kael watched until the small work of this hunt had been made tidy. He did not often allow himself the small luxury of a full hearth when they were deep in enemy ground. Tonight, the flames made sense.

The rider with the calm hands stepped up beside him. "Their route marks match the Everwatch border," she said. "House Marwyn's stamp on the coin in one purse. They have paid patrols east of the old lines."

"They were not a patrol," Kael said. He turned the mage's ring in his fingers, watching firelight crawl across the band. "Treasure hunters. Or mercenaries who wanted to be treasure hunters when their work was done. The forest is loud with that kind of hope."

The rider thought about that, and he liked her for needing to think. "If they are hunting here," she said slowly, "others are hunting near. If others hunt near, someone feeds them maps."

"Perhaps," Kael said. "Perhaps they simply listened to the same taverns we did."

He put the ring in his pocket and looked east. The heartwood rose there, a dark wall, the place where Silvanshade's bones still curled around their fountains and halls. Most of the elven work had long since been taken or ruined, but elves built vanity like granite, and granite held more secrets than men ever learned to ask about.

"Word travels," he said. "Devils die. Old laws wake. Mortals will come to measure what they can touch."

"And us?" the rider asked.

He did not answer at once. He imagined the neat rows of the Umbral Dynasty's legions unfurling like a ribbon through the trees. He imagined their standards standing tall over the old plazas while the living whispered outside the gates. He imagined the slow restoration of a proper order, where breath and blood paid tithe, and currency was clean again.

He imagined, too, the possibility that the Ashes would answer the wrong name if he called too loudly.

"We are scouts," he said. "We are not a banner. Not yet."

The shade-beast padded over and laid its head on the fighter's boots, as if hoping for a pat that would never come. Kael scratched the creature once between its faceless ears. It hummed without a mouth.

He crouched again and dipped a finger into the drying pool of blood where the priest had slept. He touched it to his tongue and let images come. A wooden pier under gray dawn. The chatter of a broker counting sacks of barley. A border gate warded by three old women and a prayer wheel. A council hall in Everwatch where men argued about tariffs and road menders, while a boy at the back of the room drew ships on the edge of a ledger. Nothing of devils. Nothing of necromancers. No hint that any power had laid a lawful hand on the Ashes since the necropolis fell.

Something had changed. The food chain had snapped. There was no butcher at the block.

"Send a raven," he said at last. "To the Matriarch in the High Vaults. Tell her the Ashes are unheld. Tell her Jalmonnoth is meat in the earth and the devils have lost their leash here."

The rider nodded and stepped away into the dark. Feathers rustled. A coal-winged shape rose into the night and vanished between the branches.

Kael watched the fire. The thralls worked without complaint, their eyes bright and hands careful. He let them drink when the flames finished their duty. He took nothing more. He had tasted enough. When the bodies had become only ash that matched the ground, he smoothed the stones with his boot.

"Mark nothing," he said. "Leave the bells. Let the next ones wonder why they never rang."

They slipped away from the camp and moved east along an old road nature hadn't quite reclaimed. The forest leaned in around them, and the stars narrowed to a strip between black crowns. The night air was perfect—poised between seasons, cool and steady, good for a long journey. He could have walked it until dawn without setting foot on the same dirt twice.

On a rise, he paused and looked back. The wind had shifted again. The sea scent was stronger now, a smear of tar and rope and oiled wood. Ships. Far off yet, but coming.

"Mortals will come," he said, and the shade-beast made a pleased little noise that had nothing to do with words.

He felt no haste. The Ashes did not need to be taken at a run. They needed to be named. He thought of the old elven letters carved over Silvanshade's broken gates and how they might look with fresh paint. He thought of coin minted with proper heads and dates. He thought of law.

He thought, too, of the girl the living called [Hero], and of the storm-taste that clung to the rumor of her. He did not know if she mattered to him yet. He would find out when the wind changed again.

Kael set his hands behind his back like a polite man on a balcony and walked toward the heart of Nightvale. The Ashes had offered no challenge. That was the horror, if one wanted to name it. Not the hunt or the blood or the soft sigh a neck gave when it broke. The horror was the open door.

It would not stay open. Someone would think to close it. Someone would arrive and plant a standard and call the ruin by a new word. Kael smiled to himself, a neat, private thing with no heat in it at all. He intended to be here when that someone arrived. He intended to see which word they chose.

And if it was the wrong word, he intended to teach them another.

The sky was too big.

For a heartbeat I thought I was back in Mezesh's void, tumbling through nothing—but this wasn't nothing. This was everything.

Air slid useless over my lips, thin as silk. Too little to breathe. My throat was raw, blood slick at my collar, and [Windbound Resilience] stitched me together in stubborn, ragged pulses. Not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.

My mouth still tasted of blood. His as much as mine. I dimly remembered dragging my tongue across my claws, swallowing something hot and wrong. A shard of him. A soul's splinter. It burned all the way down.

The fall should've torn me apart, but it didn't. Gravity pulled, yes, but the thin air slowed me, too. Perhaps the world itself couldn't quite decide whether to keep me or cast me out. I floated and plummeted both, every heartbeat stretched into forever.

Below, the world sprawled so wide I could barely see its curve. Oceans and storms, broken cities clinging to mountain ridges like barnacles on stone. Above, stars glittered bright and sharp, closer than they had any right to be. One shifted, movement deliberate and alive. Wings like continents beat once, and I realized it wasn't a star at all.

A dragon. A real one, flying so high it'd be invisible from the ground.

My breath caught—or maybe that was just the fall. It was faster now. I'd thought myself small before, but never this small. Falling again, always falling. Always alone.

Darkness pressed at the edges of my vision. How had I even gotten here? One second I was fighting, clawing, bleeding—But no. We'd won. Hadn't we? We were waiting. A hand closing on me? A hungry smile breaking the world open… and then nothing.

Now there was only sky.

And then—not.

A sharp gust. Arms wrapped around me, warm and solid, breaking the endless plummet. My lungs convulsed, dragging in what little air there was, and a voice I'd know anywhere shouted in my ear.

"Whoa, Evelyn! No wonder Sebastian was so excited! What're you doing up here?"

Shiori. Of course it was Shiori.

And below her, Sebastian's golden wings flared like the dawn, holding us steady in the impossible sky. I coughed out a laugh that hurt more than it should. I wasn't dead. I wasn't gone. I wasn't even far away. Just… up.

And I wasn't alone. Not anymore.