The tactical equilibrium lasted only as long as the Umbrae's confusion. The Gentle Dark observed, learned, and adapted. The silent command that guided them shifted again.
The shadow-soldiers assaulting Kaelen's wall did not redouble their efforts. Instead, they began to… smother. They pressed forward, not to climb, but to coalesce. Dozens of them flowed together, merging into a thick, rolling bank of absolute shadow that advanced up the stone like a slow, dark tide. Kaelen's Dawn of Command—the light of order and specific love—washed over it. The leading edge of the shadow-bank blurred, grew fuzzy, but it did not stop. It was too dense, too concentrated. His light could discourage individuals, but it could not define a wall of nothingness. It was like trying to read a ledger by moonlight through thick fog.
The shadow-tide reached the battlements. Where it touched the blazing pitch pots and torches, the fire didn't sizzle or fight. It was simply absorbed. The light was swallowed, the heat vanished. The flames guttered and died not with a hiss, but in perfect, soundless surrender. The defensive fires along the southern wall were snuffed out in moments, plunging the defenders into a cold, lightless dark broken only by the faint, straining glow from Kaelen himself.
Panic, silent and choking, spread. Men stumbled back from the parapet, their weapons useless, their light stolen.
On the east and west walls, the same tactic was employed. The Umbrae massed into light-eating banks, rolling over the defenders' fires. The courageous, chaotic noise of the city's defense was being systematically muted, not by silencing throats, but by devouring the very illumination that gave them courage.
In the courtyard, the great central brazier where Lyssa anchored her pillar of revealing light began to dim. A concentrated stream of shadow, directed by unseen will, poured down from a nearby rooftop like black water, aiming directly for the flame. The brilliant column of light wavered, its edges fraying, the clean clarity it cast becoming murky.
Lyssa cried out, her connection to the flame fraying as the shadow sought to unmake the concept of fire itself in that spot. She poured more of her will into it, but it was a battle of attrition against a nullity. The brazier's flame sank lower, its light turning a sickly orange.
Torvin, seeing the shadow-tide swallow the forges' outer fires, acted not as a mystic, but as a craftsman. "The light's in the heat, not just the flame!" he bellowed to his apprentices. "Get the crucibles! The molten stock!"
They scrambled, using long tongs to pull small, searingly bright crucibles of molten iron and copper from the heart of the main forge. The liquid metal blazed with an intense, white-hot light that was pure, radiant energy. They hurled them, not at Umbrae, but at the base of the advancing shadow-banks on the walls.
Where the molten metal splashed, the shadow recoiled. It didn't absorb this light-as-energy; it seemed to find it indigestible, a too-bright, too-real substance. The shadow-bank flinched back, its smooth advance disrupted, creating momentary gaps. But it was a fleeting reprieve. The metal cooled quickly, its brilliant light fading to dull, dead slag, and the shadow flowed back in.
They were trading their city's bones—its precious metals, its tools, its future—for seconds of light.
Kaelen, his own light shrinking under the oppressive shadow-tide, knew they were losing. His Dawn of Command was being bureaucratically filed away into oblivion. Lyssa was being drained. Their resources were finite. The enemy's were not.
He made a decision. A retreat from defense to desperation.
"Fall back from the outer walls!" he shouted, his voice hoarse but cutting through the muffled panic. "To the inner keep! To the stone!"
It was a confession of failure. They were abandoning the city's skin, retreating to its skeletal heart. The towering inner keep, made of the same dense, mountain granite as Arden's spire, was their last redoubt. It had fewer windows, fewer openings. It could, perhaps, be sealed.
The retreat was a chaotic, scrambling ordeal under the slow, rolling advance of the light-eating shadows. People dragged what they could—barrels of water, sacks of grain, the wounded. The vibrant, defiant city they had built a memory-song around was being surrendered to the silent dark, street by street, square by square.
As the last defenders stumbled through the great iron-bound doors of the inner keep, the heavy beams were slammed into place behind them. The sounds of the dying city—the final crackle of a distant fire being swallowed, the soft, awful shush of the shadow-tide flowing over cobbles—were cut off.
Inside the keep's great hall, lit now by a few precious, guarded lanterns, hundreds of people huddled. The air was thick with fear and the smell of sweat. The vibrant noise was gone, replaced by the quiet gasps of the terrified and the determined, whispered orders of the guards.
Lyssa leaned against the cold stone wall, her body trembling with exhaustion. Her pillar of light was gone, extinguished. Kaelen stood beside her, his own inner light banked to a faint, weary ember, useless against the stone that now surrounded them.
They had traded a living city for a stone tomb. They had light, food, water… for now. But outside, the Gentle Dark was patiently, inexorably wrapping the keep in a cocoon of silencing shadow, cutting them off from the sun, from the sky, from hope.
The flame was guttering. And in the perfect, patient quiet outside, there was no wind left to fan it back to life.