The Eclipse Pack left Havenfall at the first bruise of false dawn, three silhouettes against a sky the colour of a fresh bruises. Xavier walked point, shirtless despite the wind that carried flakes of frozen blood from the burning valley behind them. The four-rune mark over his heart glowed soft gold beneath the skin, steady now, but every beat felt like a hammer blow against the cage inside. Roshan hung across his back, wrapped in oil-stained leather; the blade had not stopped humming since Zamiel's soul fused with Lucian. Lyra walked at his left, leather armour patched with strips torn from fallen banners, black hair matted with soot and other people's blood. Her claws had not retracted in seven days; silver fire licked along the edges whenever she flexed her fingers. Lucian brought up the rear, carrying nothing but Wrath's End and the violet ember that lived beneath his ribs. His right eye was still amber, his left the exact shade of Zamiel's old gaze. When the wind shifted he spoke without turning, voice layered the way it had been since the rite. "They're watching us already. Two leagues north-east. Waiting for us to cross the Iron Wastes." Xavier did not slow. "Then we don't give them the satisfaction of waiting."
They walked for three days without sleep, eating only what Lyra killed and dragged back still steaming. The land itself had begun to rot. Trees grew downward, roots clawing at the sky like drowning men. Rivers ran black and thick as tar. Wolves they passed (feral packs, lone stragglers) fell in behind them without a word, drawn by the gold glow on Xavier's chest and the violet fire in Lucian's eye. By the time they reached the edge of the Iron Wastes their numbers had swollen to forty-three broken souls armed with whatever they had scavenged from the corpses of Havenfall. No one spoke of going home. There was no home left.
The Iron Wastes had once been the greatest forge-city of the old wolf empire. Now it was a graveyard of toppled smokestacks and furnaces big enough to swallow houses. The ground was paved with rusted plates the size of fields, slick with frozen oil and blood that never quite thawed. Every footstep rang like a death knell. The air tasted of hot iron and old screams. Xavier led them straight down the central causeway where the plates were widest and the wind howled loudest. Halfway across, the ambush came.
The first Harbinger rose out of the rust itself, a colossus of molten plates and screaming faces welded together, fifteen feet tall, dragging a hammer made from an entire locomotive. Its name, when it spoke, was Gorvox the Forge-Eater. Behind it, two lesser fragments unfolded from the shadows of broken chimneys, one a swarm of bladed chains that moved like serpents, the other a woman-shaped silhouette of living slag whose every footstep melted the iron beneath her. Six had become three, just as Zamiel's ghost had warned. They had grown stronger feeding on the pieces they reabsorbed.
Gorvox swung the locomotive hammer in a flat arc that would have pulped a battalion. Xavier met it head-on. He did not shift fully, not yet. Instead he stepped inside the swing, let the hammerhead graze his shoulder, felt ribs crack like dry wood, and drove Roshan upward under the Harbinger's jaw. The blade punched through molten iron and out the top of the skull in a fountain of liquid steel and violet fire. Gorvox staggered but did not fall; the faces welded to its body screamed in a thousand stolen voices and began to knit the wound closed. Lyra was already moving. She leapt, claws raking across the back of Gorvox's knee joints, silver fire chewing through metal like acid. Sparks the size of wolves exploded outward. Lucian charged the chain-swarm, Wrath's End singing a high, hungry note as it carved living steel into confetti. Zamiel's violet eye flared brighter every time Lucian struck, feeding the blade from inside.
The slag-woman came for Xavier. She did not walk; she flowed, leaving a trail of molten footprints that hardened into screaming statues of the wolves they had once been. Xavier met her with a straight thrust. Roshan slid into her chest and kept going until the hilt kissed slag-flesh. The woman-shape opened a mouth that was a furnace door and exhaled a blast of white-hot gas that peeled the skin from Xavier's face in sheets. He did not scream. He twisted the blade, felt the god inside him stir with greedy interest at the heat, and ripped sideways. Half the Harbinger's torso sloughed away in a molten avalanche. She laughed, a sound like breaking glass, and began to reform.
They fought for hours. The iron plates beneath their feet buckled and ran like wax. Blood hissed when it touched the ground and turned to black glass. Xavier's ribs knit crooked, Lyra's left arm hung useless again, Lucian's chest was a lattice of chain-whip cuts that refused to close because every time he bled Zamiel's fire bled with him. Still they fought. Still the Harbingers reformed. Gorvox had lost both arms and most of its head but kept swinging stumps that sprouted new hammers. The chain-swarm had been reduced to a single length that wrapped Lucian's throat and began to squeeze. The slag-woman had been cut in half three times and simply poured herself back together.
It was Lyra who saw the pattern first. Every time one of them landed a killing blow, the violet fire that should have consumed the fragment instead flowed upward, sucked into the bruise-coloured scar across the sky. The Harbingers were not dying. They were being recalled, reabsorbed, made stronger for the next assault. She roared the discovery across the battlefield. Xavier heard. Lucian heard. They changed tactics without a word.
Xavier pulled Roshan free of the slag-woman's chest, spun, and hurled the blade like a javelin straight into the sky. It punched through the violet scar and vanished. A heartbeat later the scar convulsed, vomiting black rain and lightning. The recall stalled. The Harbingers froze mid-regeneration, mouths open in identical expressions of animal panic.
Lucian used the moment. He dropped Wrath's End, seized the chain wrapped around his throat with both hands, and pulled. Metal screamed. Veins stood out on his arms like cables. Zamiel's violet eye blazed furnace-bright. The chain snapped. Lucian reversed it, whipped it around Gorvox's neck, and hauled. The colossus toppled, molten skull striking iron with a gong that shattered every remaining window in the Wastes. Lyra vaulted onto its chest, drove both sets of claws into the screaming faces, and tore. Silver fire poured into the wounds, eating faster than violet could heal. Gorvox convulsed once, twice, then burst apart in a geyser of molten shrapnel that rained for a full minute.
The slag-woman shrieked and tried to flow away. Xavier caught her by the throat with his bare hand. Skin sizzled. Flesh blackened. He did not let go. He squeezed until the furnace-mouth closed and the body cooled into brittle glass. One punch shattered her into a thousand burning shards that hissed out on the wind.
The chain-swarm, suddenly masterless, writhed like a dying snake. Lucian walked forward, picked up Wrath's End, and carved it into pieces small enough to fit in his pocket. When he was done he looked up at the sky. The violet scar was knitting closed again, slower now, wounded.
Xavier stood amid the cooling metal, chest heaving, blood dripping from his ruined face. The four-rune mark glowed brighter, drinking the death around them, growing stronger. Lyra limped to his side, pressed her forehead to his shoulder without a word. Their scars touched. Gold light met silver fire. Lucian joined them, placed one massive hand on each of their necks, completing the circle. Zamiel's violet eye wept a single tear of white flame that evaporated before it hit the ground.
Forty-three wolves had entered the Iron Wastes. Twenty-nine walked out.
They left the rest burning on pyres of their own armour.
Night fell hard and sudden. They made camp in the lee of a toppled furnace, fireless, eating raw meat because no one had the strength left to hunt properly. Xavier sat apart, staring at the place where Roshan had vanished into the sky. The blade had not returned. He could still feel it, far above, lodged in whatever passed for the heart of the violet scar, holding the wound open. It would not hold forever.
Lyra sat beside him eventually. She did not speak. She simply leaned her weight against his side until he let her in. They stayed like that until the false dawn, two statues carved from blood and exhaustion. Lucian kept watch, violet eye scanning the dark, whispering to the ghost that lived in his chest.
Somewhere above them, the remaining three Harbingers gathered their stolen strength and began to fuse.
The war had entered its next, uglier phase.
And the Eclipse Pack, smaller, angrier, more monstrous than ever, marched on.