The world became full of violence and pitch. Razille's shadow wrapped around Solis's chest like a constrictor squeezing breath. Not an ordinary squeeze: fingers of gloom found the exact open seams where his aura ran closest to the skin and hooked like tiny drains. They drew the heat from him into a thin thread that fed outward into her cloak. Each second the drain tore more of his strength away; tendon and bone did the counting.
Solis screamed once — not with words but with a single, raw sound that scattered men nearby. His knees buckled. He tried to plant them — tried to anchor, to will flame back into his limbs — but the aura that had been his was already funneling away, siphoned through the contact of dark magic against the sword's own strange will. The red blade quivered in his hands as if it were a thing being tempted.
He fought to keep a grip on the sword but his fingers were slipping, numb and wet with the sweat of effort. The world telescoped to Razille's face — black at the edges, pale and human in the middle. For a flash of pure, blinding sorrow he saw her not as a foe but as the girl who had once sat beside him that night. Then the dark remembered itself and the softness vanished.
Razille closed on him with an intent that made the blood leave his tongue. With an almost mechanical motion she called an arc of shadow out and it wrapped the sword's hilt, then the blade. The red halo around its core flared, as if the weapon itself wanted to resist, but Razille's hand moved like a vice and tugged.
Solis felt the world slide. The sword ripped from his hands as if it had wings and a mind of its own, or as if Razille had yanked the hope of a lifetime from him. The blade left a line of heat across his palm that pulsed once, twice, and then was gone.
He fell then, like a tree finding a way out of standing. Darkness took him at the edges. There were sounds — Devon's roar, Ada's panicked curse, a net snapping as if the world itself had been drawn taut. Solis hit the cobbles hard; breath left his lungs like a lamp being snuffed. The last thing he saw before the brown-lights of unconsciousness closed over him was Razille, sword in hand, retreating through the ruined corridors with a ghost of a smile and a purpose that sat heavy in the air.
Ada dove, catching him with the practiced care. She knelt over him, pressed her palms to his chest, and checked his heart-beat — warm, stubborn, but shallower than they should be. "Come on, get up." she hissed, voice close and raw. She gathered him into the hollow of her arm as men around her shouted and fought. She shielded him with her body and drew a line with the edge of her blade. "No one will touche him, as long as I am here."
But Razille was already gone.
---
Meanwhile
The corridors became a thunder of command. Orsic barked orders through the static of the secure house; Airknights painted the sky with arc-lights; Postknights and Borderknights sealed some exits and chased others. Razille moved like a shadow in a city that had been too slow to wake. She slipped through servants' passages and drainage ducts the city architects had forgotten. Having connections with locals in such place gives a special perk; ability to navigate through close areas; no unnecessary flare, no wasted ostentation. She held the red sword at her side and it sung like an animal that had been pulled from a cage and asked to remember.
Her path led not to open freedom but to the place where the world's deepest stitches had been sewn.
---
The Obsidian Reliquary was a place most citizens only heard about in the hush of folklore and the long-winded cadences of court scholars: an underground reliquary beneath the old chapel of Saint Eloin, a vault rimed in black stone and sealed with sigils that drank the light. Crimson fog had been told to creep over its thresholds in histories; the elders swore the air there tasted of old iron and the memory of battle. It was not a prison for thieves so much as a cradle for things that made men hush.
Razille moved into that dark like a key sliding into a lock. The corridor doors were rune-warded; the seals had been chiseled by long-dead master-smiths and blessed in the old tongue. The Blazing Dragon Sword hummed at her hip like a second heart. When she placed it against the central lock, the metal seemed to sigh.
"Father," she whispered — not a plea, but an invocation. The blade's warmth thrummed through her fingers. The ward was clever, a lattice of old prayers and iron and a soft hum of containment magic that had been layered over decades. To break it took more than brute force. It required a will fine as wire.
She slid the sword into a seam of the seal and felt it drink. The blade did not burn the sigils; it read them. Sparks licked along the carvings like fire on parchment. The crimson fog around the Reliquary thickened, smelling like copper and distant rain. Then Razille's voice rose in something that was almost a song. The words were not wholly a language the ears of men could parse; they were half-memories and half-promise. The Blazing Dragon Sword sang in response, and the stone shuddered.
Far above, alarms wailed. Soldiers shouted. Men died and were saved and died in the thin hours. But below, in the reliquary, a seal that had held a single name for an age was beginning to fray.
The center of the Reliquary opened like a can. A figure slumped in a pit of old chains and rusted iron — an outline at first, then shoulders, then the set of a jaw that had been carved by cruelty and time. When the last ward broke the air around the figure swallowed the light and then expelled it in a grin.
"Child." said the voice. It was a sound like weather behind doors; old and patient, touched with the rust of long sleep. "You have my thanks."
Razille dropped the sword into his hands as if it were a gift. The metal did not leave her fingers easily — it slid like a fish into nets and then clung. For a beat no one moved.
The figure rose. Like a nightmare peeled of its last startling detail, he stood tall and whole and terrible. His armor was not black but deep as ruptured night; symbols crawled over it in a language like fingernails on glass. He smiled with a cruelty that belonged to men who had spent time on the other side of law and logic.
"Kreg." Razille said, voice small as a child's whisper and not without something like reverence. The name rolled through the stones.
Dark Knight Kreg drew the sword, and the Blazing Dragon Blade answered like lightning finding a cloud. Heat flared where his fingers closed and the chamber hummed. For a second, Razille looked at him as if she expected a father to be the shape of the world she had been given to carry. Kreg kissed the blade with a grin like a promise:
"So — my daughter returns." he said, voice a thousand-clanged echoes. "You have done well. The chain was tight. The world gets tired and soft. We shall remind it of the laws of hunger."
Razille's face changed then — a flicker that was human. Her shoulders, so straight a breath ago, bowed minutely. Whether the weight of guilt or the weight of relief pressed down, no one could tell. She had freed men from iron, and she had freed a thing that could unmake cities.
Kreg laughed softly, the sound of a bell that wound down and then broke. "You gave me an instrument," he said, holding the Blazing Dragon Sword up like it was a sun. "With this sword and my own Blacknight Dragon Sword I shall show them who is rightfully the ruler of not only this kingdom but also of total humanity."
Outside, the city's lights were a scattered constellation of reaction. Inside the Reliquary, Kreg's smile widened into something that bled through the cracks of the vault — an understanding that had nothing to do with mercy.
Razille watched him, the red blade still in his hand between them, and for a moment the world stilled like a drum before the strike. Her dark aura around her had been a program, a devotion — both a weapon and, perhaps, a kind of despair. Now she had the taste of power and the scent of a father's word.
"Come," Kreg said, voice now butter-smooth. "We have work to do."