It began not with a roar, but with a silence.
The ever-present hum of the citadel's geothermal heart stuttered and died. The glowing crystals dimmed to a sickly amber. In the training halls, in the libraries, in the royal suites, everyone froze, a primal instinct screaming that the mountain itself had taken a breath and held it.
Then, the screaming started. Distant at first, from the upper market caverns and the outer guard towers. It was not the sound of battle, but of sudden, horrific slaughter.
The citadel's alarms finally blared—a harsh, klaxon shriek that split the dread-filled quiet. Rhys's voice, magically amplified, boomed through every corridor, stripped of its usual calm: "Breach! All sectors! Breach! It's the Witch! She is HERE!"
Chaos, refined and cold, descended.
---
In the family suite, Jonas was already at the door, fire wreathing his fists. "Stay behind me!" he barked at Maria and the twins, who had been summoned from their disrupted training.
But the attack didn't come through the door. The very wall of their cavern melted, stone flowing like wax as a corrosive, shadowy magic ate through it. Through the gap poured creatures of nightmare.
Vampires, but not the Red Caps of folklore. These were Morwen's legion—pale, wiry things with too many joints, moving in a skittering, insectile rush, their eyes pits of void. They ignored Jonas's searing blasts, their flesh sizzling but not stopping as they surged towards the twins with single-minded hunger.
"The bond! Now!" Erik yelled, his voice cutting through the panic. He and Kaitlyn fell into a back-to-back stance. There was no time for finesse. Erik became a sensor-grid, mapping the skittering vectors of a dozen attackers. Kaitlyn became a weaponized vortex. Telekinetic shoves hurled vampires into Jonas's fire-walls. Blades formed from her shifting weapon flew with unerring accuracy, guided by Erik's instant calculations.
They held the line in their suite, a desperate island in the flood.
---
Elsewhere, the citadel was dying. Morwen's main force had materialized in the Grand Atrium, the ceremonial heart of the mountain. Her manticores—hulking, humanoid scorpions with chitinous armour and lashing, venom-dripping tails—were siege engines, shattering stone and hunters alike. Her hellhounds, creatures of smoke and burning cinder, flowed like liquid flame through the ranks, setting alight everything they touched.
Jonas, leading Maria through the chaos towards what he hoped was a safer barricade, ran headlong into one of these manticores. It filled the corridor, its tail lashing out with the speed of a cracking whip.
"DOWN!" he roared, shoving Maria aside.
The barbed stinger meant for his heart struck Maria instead, punching through her side with a sickening wet thunk. She cried out, collapsing against the wall, her face instantly paling as a virulent, blackish poison began to spread from the wound, visible beneath her skin like crawling ink.
Jonas's world dissolved into a single, white-hot point of rage.
"NO!"
The fire around his hands didn't flare—it imploded, then exploded outward from his very core. His clothes vaporized in an instant. His body was no longer flesh, but a living, walking conflagration. A naked, elemental avatar of fury. The stone around him glowed red-hot. He didn't attack the manticore; he embraced it.
The creature shrieked as Jonas's burning form wrapped around it, his fiery hands finding the seams in its chitinous armour and prying, melting, burning. The stench of scorched venom and burning monster filled the hall.
But the manticore was powerful. It thrashed, its claws raking deep, burning furrows across Jonas's fiery torso. It would kill him, even as it died.
From the floor, Maria watched her husband, her love, being clawed apart by flame. A despair deeper than the poison took her. No. Not him. Not after everything.
A strange pressure built behind her eyes.The world seemed to slow. She saw the manticore's tail, raised for a killing blow on Jonas's exposed back. She didn't have strength to move. She had only will.
Stop.
Her mind reached.
With a deafening CRACK, a three-ton block of carved basalt from the ceiling above the manticore tore free and plummeted down, smashing onto the creature's raised tail, pinning it to the floor.
The manticore howled, its killing strike arrested.
Jonas, sensing the opening, plunged a fist of pure solar heat into the monster's gaping maw. There was a flash, a stifled gurgle, and the creature collapsed, its insides cooked.
The fire around Jonas snuffed out as suddenly as it had come, leaving him naked, covered in burns and bleeding gashes, swaying on his feet. He stumbled to Maria.
She was ice-cold, the poison nearly to her heart, her breath shallow. But her eyes were wide with shock—not at her dying, but at the shattered rubble on the manticore's tail. "I… I didn't…"
---
High on the fortified command balcony of the Grand Atrium, the war was being lost. King Bertram watched, his face a mask of cold fury, as his elite hunters were overwhelmed. Gareth fought like a demon, his great sword shearing through hellhounds, but for every one he felled, two more emerged from the witch's swirling portals.
Morwen herself stood at the atrium's centre, a figure of elegant ruin in a dress of living shadow. She didn't cast spells; she unmade reality around her, twisting space to impale hunters on their own weapons, opening pits to a phosphorescent underworld.
The Dyad fought nearby, a bright, desperate pinprick of defiance. Their bond was a razor-edge, perfectly synced in the storm of death. Erik's shifting weapon was a blur—bow, spear, sword—each shot and thrust guided by Kaitlyn's overwhelming force fields and explosive telekinetic strikes. They were magnificent. And they were doomed.
"Fall back to the inner sanctum!" Bertram commanded, his voice beginning to betray a sliver of desperation. The kingdom was crumbling.
It was then that a figure in healer's grey robes broke through the royal guard line, running not away from the battle, but towards its heart—towards Morwen.
"Mother!"
The word, screamed with a lifetime of grief and longing, cut through the din of battle.
Morwen froze. Her working of unraveling magic stuttered. She turned.
Rebekah stood twenty paces away, tears streaking her face, her hands empty and raised. "Mother, stop! Please!"
From behind a pillar, Mills ran out, grabbing her mother's arm, her young face terrified but defiant. "Grandmother!"
The sight struck Morwen like a physical blow. The elegant cruelty vanished from her face, replaced by a shock so profound it looked like pain. The hell-portals flickered. The skittering vampires paused, confused.
"You…" Morwen whispered, her voice no longer the voice of a queen of hell, but that of a bereft, aging woman. "You live? He told me… Bertram told me he had slain you both. That your line was ended."
"He lied!" Rebekah sobbed, taking a step forward. "He took me! He raised me in this stone tomb! Mildred is your blood! Please… this hatred… it ends with us. Don't make her watch this."
Morwen stared at her daughter, then at her granddaughter. The legions of hell wavered, their connection to their mistress faltering with her certainty. For a fleeting moment, the maternal love she'd buried under centuries of vengeance and rage surged to the surface, raw and terrible. A single, black tear traced a path down her cheek.
It was the moment King Bertram had waited for.
"NOW!" he roared.
Gareth and a cadre of his most powerful knights, who had been flanking slowly under cover of the distraction, unleashed a torrent of binding magic—not at the legions, but at the distracted witch herself. Chains of solidified sunlight and howling runes snapped around Morwen. She shrieked, not in rage, but in betrayal, her eyes locking on Rebekah's horrified face as the magic overwhelmed her.
The second she was captured, her connection severed. The vampires dissolved into ash. The manticores stiffened and crumbled. The hellhounds winked out like snuffed embers.
The sudden silence was deafening.
The atrium was a charnel house, filled with the moans of the wounded and the dead. In the centre, bound in layers of searing light, Morwen knelt, her head bowed, not struggling, consumed by a defeat far deeper than capture.
King Bertram walked down from his balcony, his composure restored, a victor surveying the spoils. He glanced at the weeping Rebekah and the stunned Mills with cold disdain, then at the exhausted, bloodied twins.
"Take the witch to the Oubliette," he commanded Gareth. "The one that can hold a primordial. She will not escape." He then looked at the twins, a new, appraising glint in his eye. "The Dyad performed… adequately. Their bond proved resistant to the witch's chaos. Note that."
As guards dragged a broken Morwen away, and healers began scurrying among the wounded, the twins found their parents. They found Jonas, barely conscious, being treated by a shaken Becky. And they found Maria, pale as death on a stretcher, the poison arrested but her body fighting for life, Mills's hands glowing gold on her wound.
The battle was over. The kingdom had survived, saved by a moment of maternal weakness it had itself created through an old, cruel theft.
But as Jonas gripped Maria's cold hand, and as the twins looked from their poisoned mother to the dungeon where their greatest enemy—a grieving grandmother—was being thrown, they understood.
The siege from outside was over.
But the war within the citadel, the war for their family, their future, and the very soul of the power they wielded, had just reached its terrible, bloody dawn. The mountain had been shattered. And in the cracks, everything was now possible.