The chamber beneath the Crimson Veil pulsed with bloodlight.
Its walls were carved from black stone, etched with runes that bled like open wounds. At the center sat the Eldest—skin like candle wax, teeth filed thin, his gaze locked on the crimson mirror that showed only ashes and smoke.
The Devourer had failed.
He gripped the edges of his throne, talons scraping stone.
"How?"
The whisper echoed across the hollow.
A dozen lesser kin stood below the throne, heads bowed, none daring to answer. They felt it in the room—the scent of fury, old and still hot.
At the edge of the dais, a new voice spoke.
"She was protected," said a woman draped in crimson silk and chainmail. Her eyes were silver, serpentine. "By the lich."
The word tasted bitter in her mouth.
"A lich?" the Eldest murmured, amused and venomous. "You mean the Xerces?"
She nodded once.
"He's no wandering corpse. He fights like one who remembers empires. He wields echoes. Soulfire. He nearly unmade the Devourer."
The Eldest leaned forward, lips curled in thought.
"Interesting. The last soul to break the Devourer wore a crown."
He rose from his throne like a corpse rising from a lake. His spine cracked. Robes dragged along the floor like shadows with weight.
"Perhaps this time," he mused, "we hunt two legacies."
Further below, in the bleeding sanctum of Seer Vhalix, the mirror still wept smoke. Vhalix, half-burned and blind in one eye, watched it shimmer with tension.
"He marked her," he said softly. "The Devourer tasted the girl's blood before it fled. That mark will fester."
He turned toward the Eldest's emissary.
"Let them run. Let them believe they've won. The mark will rot her magic. Corrupt it."
The emissary tilted his head.
"And then?"
Vhalix smiled with what remained of his mouth.
"Then the next time it comes… it won't come hunting her."
"It will come through her."