The hours after the second breach passed like a slow-bleeding wound—uncleaned, unclosed, impossible to ignore.
Coalition medics worked without pause, scrubbing gore from armor, stitching muscle and flesh with whisper-thread, scraping off time-burn with blessed salt. Screams echoed across the trench-lines, dull and muffled, as if the very air was ashamed to carry them. Lanterns guttered in the windless dark. Nothing moved beyond the ridge except smoke and old echoes.
They called this time the dead hours. Between midnight and sunrise, when the moons were hung at their lowest, when even the stars refused to look down.
Ilyra Veil did not sleep.
She couldn't. Not just for lack of physical comfort—though the cots were rotting and the dirt was stained with things that should not have been—but because her mind replayed the cannon's corruption over and over. The soldier who aged into bones. The trees that bled upside down. The way Kael convulsed after the chronostasis spell, murmuring names that weren't his.
She sat by the fireless lamp-crystals outside the ruined eastern wall, her eyes fixed on the Dominion camp below.
"They haven't moved," said Lieutenant Morin, her scout-lieutenant and former raider of the Eavespine Hills. His longcoat was patched with symbols of the old empire he once rebelled against. His fingers twitched when he stood too still.
"They won't," she replied.
"How can you be sure?"
She didn't answer. Truth was, she wasn't.
But she'd fought the Dominion enough to know they never wasted a chance to unsettle the soul.
They weren't attacking not because they were tired—but because they wanted the Reach's defenders to suffer the quiet. To stare into the night and see only themselves. To breathe long enough for fear to crystallize in their lungs.
The Dominion's magic—its real power—wasn't the cannon, or the golems, or even the moonslivers.
It was certainty. Their soldiers believed so deeply in their right to rule that the world itself bent around them.
Ilyra felt it now.
Even from a mile away.
Around the third hour after midnight, the first screams came.
Not from the enemy. From the orchard.
The grave orchard had once been a grove of memory trees, planted to honor the fallen of a war now erased from history. But whatever reverence had once lived there had long since curdled. Dominion forces had opened a gate near its roots. The orchard had responded—wrongly.
Ilyra arrived with a dozen soldiers, weapons drawn.
The trees had moved.
Not much. Just enough to be elsewhere. Branches that once bowed north now leaned west. Graves had shifted. Some lay open.
One man sat beside his own name. Hollow-eyed. Shivering. He pointed, over and over, at the grave marker before him. His mouth moved. No sound came.
Ilyra bent low.
The gravestone read:
Ilyra VeilDied Before Dawn
It was written in her own hand.
Kael stumbled up moments later, wrapped in a healer's shawl, pale but alive. "I came as soon as—"
She held up a hand. "You're not fit."
"I'm not here to cast. I'm here to listen."
He knelt beside the man. Whispered a prayer. His eyes flickered with feysilver light. A few moments later, he turned to her, face grim.
"The orchard's no longer neutral."
"Explain."
"The Dominion didn't just open a gate. They let something through. Something older."
Ilyra felt the old chill again, the one she used to get in the caverns beneath Tharim Hold, where the air whispered in languages she hadn't yet learned.
"How bad?" she asked.
Kael shook his head. "We're not at war with just the Dominion anymore."
The orchard incident spread like plague through the camp.
By the fourth hour, half the eastern trenches reported hallucinations. Soldiers spoke of voices speaking in their mothers' tones, of long-lost lovers standing on the parapets, of seeing the moons twist into clocks, ticking down to something unnamed.
Vess summoned a council.
They met in the command cavern, the only stone shelter left intact after the breach. It had once been a mine shaft, and still reeked of old ghosts and quartz dust.
Ilyra, Kael, Vess, Morin, the quartermaster Gerel, and a masked artificer named Senn made up the war council.
"We can't hold another day like this," said Gerel. "The men are dreaming with their eyes open. I've had three try to open their own veins 'to let the time out.'"
"That's not the Dominion's cannon," Senn replied through her mask's vox-grille. "That's seepage. Arcane overlay from the moon-gate near the orchard. The corruption's destabilizing the Reach's metaphysical boundary."
"Speak plainly," Vess snapped.
"She means reality's thinning," said Kael. "What we see might not be what is. And that's not just a morale issue. It's tactical. We might not know when we're breached."
"We hold anyway," Ilyra said. "We let this line break, the midlands fall within days. Dominion troops will ride the river straight to Orvenfall."
"They'll burn every hamlet between here and the Godscar," added Morin.
Silence fell.
Only the low thrum of lantern-crystals remained, casting long shadows against the cavern walls. One shadow looked like it was smiling. No one acknowledged it.
"Then we prepare for illusions," Vess said at last. "And traps. And worse."
Senn produced a sphere of dull iron, etched with anti-phase wards. "I can anchor one perimeter. No more."
"Then place it at the orchard," Ilyra said. "Even if we lose it, I want a record of what came through."
In the fifth hour, just before dawn, Ilyra walked the wall alone.
She stopped at each post, spoke to every soldier by name. A commander's ritual. Not out of duty—but necessity. You only gave orders to the living. The Dominion had a spell that could make corpses obey in silence.
At the final post, she found Morin slumped, whispering to someone.
Except no one was there.
His eyes were wet. Voice soft. "You shouldn't be here…"
"Morin," she said.
He turned, startled. Eyes cleared. "Captain?"
"Who were you speaking to?"
He hesitated. "My daughter."
Ilyra blinked. "I thought she…"
"She did. Five winters ago." He looked at his hands. "But she wanted me to know. That I was forgiven."
She said nothing.
He met her gaze. "I know what's real, Captain. I do. But if the orchard speaks truths alongside the madness… what then?"
Ilyra had no answer.
She left him there, standing between two worlds.
The first sunray did not bring warmth.
It barely pierced the mist. But its arrival, pale and weak though it was, severed the night's spell. Lanterns flickered brighter. Illusions receded.
And yet, nothing felt clean.
Ilyra returned to the central trench. Her boots were heavy with earth. Her lungs hurt. Kael was waiting, a half-rolled scroll in his hand.
"It's happening again," he said.
"What?"
He turned the scroll around. It bore a fragment of moon-signal. Dominion battle-cant, intercepted and translated.
It read:
Primary breach unsuccessful. Secondary incursion begins at nightfall. Object secured. Shard active. Prepare Reversal.
Ilyra stared at the word.
"Reversal?"
Kael nodded slowly. "They mean to turn the Reach against itself."
She looked at the ruined orchard. At the graves that bore her name.
And then she looked toward the horizon.
Where the Dominion still waited.
Smiling.