The night did not fall over the wasteland; it bled into it. Fog pooled in the rib-valleys, the gray sky lowered like a lid, and the Dark Crypt breathed once, a long, cold exhale. Lucas stood beneath the arch of bone at the gate, eyes half-lidded, feeling the domain's nerves tremble through stone. Beside him, Selena slid her gloves on—black, thin, useless against cold, perfect for ceremony. The bone dogs paced behind her, tails of vertebrae ticking, and the ghouls waited with an obedience that was more geometry than loyalty.
"Targets," Selena asked, voice silk on glass.
Lucas didn't point. He pushed the map into her mind through the Command Link+: a camp to the north-east, tucked in the lee of a broken spine of rock, forty men, a quarter armored, the rest spears and nerves. Fires banked. Sentries lazy. One banner: the iron fang of Ramius, punched through a strip of leather.
Selena's grin showed the polite edge of a knife. "Ten minutes."
Lucas's mouth moved a fraction. "Nine is better."
She laughed quietly, like a good secret. "Then let the night begin."
He touched Night Orders: Stillness. The domain inhaled and held. Sound thinned. The ghouls' breathing faded. Even the bone dogs' claws learned not to speak.
Selena stepped into the fog and was gone.
Mirk and Var led the pack at a loping creep, bone dogs flowing around them like hungry punctuation. They left almost no print in the powder of old bones. Selena was a white seam in the murk—hair like the memory of light, eyes banked coals. The crypt's aura followed her like a cloak. It made shadows more interested in her than in anything else.
They traversed the rib-valleys without hurry. Speed was not measured in legs tonight, but in timing. When the wind turned their faces cold, Selena raised a hand. The file sank into a hollow, breath held. Above them, a sentry's silhouette crossed a ridge—too relaxed, spear trailing. Selena's gaze found the angle between his footfall and the next patch of black. She did not signal. She simply existed where she should be when the man arrived.
The bone dog under her hand surged without sound, leap becoming shape becoming result. Teeth slid over the sentry's ankle, not to kill, only to invert balance. He toppled with a bark of surprise he did not have time to commit to. Selena's fingers found the hinge under his jaw. A whisper of pressure. The spine yielded with a soft, surprised click. She set him down in the stone weeds as if laying a lover to rest. The spear did not fall.
"One," she breathed. Not counting for Lucas. For herself.
They reached the lip above the Ramius camp in six minutes and change.
Below, forty men stoked the wrong kind of courage. The fires were low, the talk lowlier. The hill cupped them, holding whatever hope they had left. A captain sat with his armor open at the throat, chewing something that bled dye. Two sentries walked a loose figure eight between three stakes where prisoners once would have been—now empty, because Ramius sent his ultimatums, not his patience. A bell hung near the captain's knee. It was unpolished and heavy. It was the kind of bell that assumed it would always have time.
Selena lowered her body along the ridge until the world watched with her eyes. She inhaled the camp. Smoke, sweat, unwashed fear, iron. She exhaled Lucas into the night—now—and the link answered, a clean pulse in her ribs.
Night Orders → Sunder Step.
The domain obliged. Space wrinkled, just a breath, just the width between two heartbeats. Selena dropped from the ridge into the camp's mouth, landing in the thin draft between two sleeping men. One of them opened his eyes. He had time to wonder whether he was dreaming.
Her blade wasn't steel; it was a negative, the absence of something that should have stopped her. She drew across his throat with a single efficient line. The blood tried to rise and didn't. The second man breathed in to scream and found nothing to breathe. Selena's glove cupped his mouth; her other hand indexed his larynx. Bone dog number one slid under the captain's stool and tugged. The stool kicked. The captain's knee banged bell metal.
It did not ring. Stillness held like a palm over the world's mouth.
The ghouls came in on four points, Mirk and Var taking the heavier shapes, the newer two folding around the edges. The bone dogs cut lanes through cloth and tendon. It looked like water learning knife work. Two men on the far edge saw a pale face and swung too high. Selena wasn't there. She was already turning under a spear meant for someone taller, blade writing a short answer up through a sternum. She did not watch him die. She didn't have to. Death is a tidying instinct.
"Five," she murmured.
A flare of heat in the link—Lucas sending a sliver of timing. She pivoted three degrees. An arrow flew through where her heart would have been. It tapped the post behind her like a polite guest.
She found the archer in the shadow of a cart. He was young enough to need a mentor and old enough to die without one. She stepped into his draw. His breath left his mouth against her palm as she pushed his head back gently, like showing him how to look at the stars, and cut him open where the chest is most honest.
"Seven."
A man with a hammer twice as loud as his courage came from her left. Darkblood Sentinel number one met him, red eyes shedding slow light. The hammer rang once against the Sentinel's Crimson Aegis and learned the concept of regret. Blood Cleave bisected both hammer and hope. The man tried to stay standing out of habit. His top half discovered falling first.
Panic changes time; it makes it untidy. In the ninth minute, time became a handful of broken teeth in the mouth of the camp. Selena moved through it smoothly, not fast—fast is the poor sister of precise. She chose. The man running for the bell got a dog at the knee and a hand at the throat. The one fumbling at the tinder bucket got Mirk's weight and the lesson that ghouls can be patient if you are slow to die. The captain got to his feet with a curse, found his sword, found Selena. He was not a coward; he was just late.
He came on with a smart angle, not telegraphed, not reaching. Selena acknowledged the competence by taking him apart the way you take apart a lock you enjoyed solving. Two cuts to expose, one to remove, one to remember. He put his chin down at the end, a soldier's instinct, and put his throat where her blade already waited.
"Thirteen."
The bell finally found voice. The Stillness had faded; Lucas released it to feed Rally. The sound was dull and frightened, one note before a bone dog took the rope and tore it down. That note rolled into the ribs of the hills and fell over, unimpressed.
In the tenth minute, numbers were meaningless. The camp was a diagram of red lines intersecting with choices. The Sentinels held the mouth and the back, a pair of doors that killed what tried to leave and what tried to enter. The ghouls harvested the edges. The bone dogs learned the tuning of fear—Scent of Fear drew them to pulsing ankles, to the thin meat around knees where men devolve to crawling. Selena did not get blood on her boots if she could help it. She preferred it on her gloves, where the warmth said something poetry could not.
"Twenty-four," she said to nobody, and nosed a spear aside with her wrist to gift its bearer a shorter life.
A cluster of five tried to make a wedge for escape. It was a good idea. Selena let them have it for half a breath. They reached the gap between two tents. She sent Sunder Step like a thought flick, and the gap shortened to a narrow disapproval. She appeared at the throat of their wedge, smiled as if she were about to forgive something, and forgave nothing. Three strokes. A body fell with a surprised apology. A fourth, bleeding from the ear, stumbled back into a dog's mouth.
"Thirty-one."
One man threw down his weapon and stumbled to his knees. "Mercy," he pleaded, bile in his voice. He put his hands up like a man begging a storm to stop raining.
Selena tilted her head. The moonlight of her hair did not make her look kinder. "Mercy," she repeated, tasting the unfamiliar word. Her blade didn't move.
Behind him, another man lunged while she was talking. Selena let her arm drift backward without looking. The tip of her blade found the lung that was getting ready to shout and convinced it otherwise. She looked down at the kneeler again.
"You used the wrong language," she said gently, and broke his neck with two fingers. It sounded like a door closing in a careful house.
Forty was a boundary more than a count. The camp emptied of movement until the night could hear itself again. The ghouls panted with clean, dry mouths. Bone dogs worried strips of leather from cooling legs as if practicing success. The Sentinels stood as they had at the beginning—pillars. Selena stopped counting at thirty-nine because the last man was not for her blade.
A horn sounded from the far ridge, not to rally this camp, but to mourn it. A cluster of mounted shapes sat deathly still against the horizon, making no attempt to hide. A figure among them wore a coat that did not fear rain and a helm glinting with the iron fang. The distance, the fog, and the night were kind enough not to tell Lucas what he looked like. They told him what he felt like.
Selena wiped her glove across her palm, smearing someone else's life into a glossy black. She turned her face toward the ridge without lifting her chin. Her eyes found the helm with a predator's ease.
Lucas stepped down from the ridge where he had watched, his cloak unruffled, his breath neatly filed away. He did not need to ask for a count. The crypt knew. It offered the number to him as a courtesy anyway.
He sent the bone dogs to drag two bodies and prop them like dolls where the ridge could see. He sent the ghouls to heap the rest into a tidy grammar. He sent nothing else. Words were not required.
The mounted cluster did not move for a dozen heartbeats. Then the horn sounded again, shorter. The figures pivoted. The ridge became dark again.
Selena's laugh drifted up the slope, soft and bright. She looked sidelong at Lucas, eyes catching the thin dull sheen on his knuckles—blood dried there earlier, not tonight's. "Nine minutes and thirty-one seconds," she said. "You were wrong. I took my time."
He nodded. The corner of his mouth let the smallest thing happen to it. "Acceptable."
She swept a hand at the camp like a hostess showing an empty ballroom. "Shall we hang their weapons on our walls or melt them into uglier things?"
"Ugly has uses," Lucas said. He glanced toward the ridge where the horn had sounded last. The domain breathed in through the wound the raid had made in the night and breathed out a message.
Somewhere beyond that ridge, beyond a fold of land and comfort, a tent flap snapped open. Men shouted names of men who wouldn't answer. A hand shook a lord awake.
The night carried a scrap of sound back over the ribs and the fog. It was not meant for Lucas. It arrived anyway, thin with distance, sharpened by fear.
"It's not a Queen… it's a demon!"