ON THEIR 30TH ANNIVERSARY, THE KING REPLACED HER—THEN THE WALLS FELL

The coastal abbey of Blackwood smelled of salt spray, rotting kelp, and centuries of damp stone.

Perched on a jagged cliff overlooking the churning gray waters of the western sea, the abbey had long since been abandoned by the monastic orders, left instead as a secure exile for disgraced nobles and political inconveniences. The room assigned to Isolde was little more than a stone cell with a narrow slit window that let in the howling Atlantic wind.

Isolde sat on the edge of a narrow cot, a whetstone in her right hand, drawing it rhythmically along the edge of her broadsword. Scree. Scree. Scree.

The metallic scrape was the only sound in the drafty room, drowning out the distant roar of the surf.

She wasn't surprised. When a king governs through vanity, he mistakes the maintenance of the state for housekeeping. Theron believed the Dawnwall was a monument built by ancient kings, a static wall of magic that stood because it had always stood. He did not know—or chose to forget—that the wall was a dynamic circuit, an open-air engine fueled by a continuous cycle of royal blood and lifespan yielded under the cold light of winter stars.

For thirty years, Isolde had traded her youth drop by drop, year by year, so that Theron could sleep in a warm bed and pose for portraits that made him look like a boy.

She stopped the whetstone, raising the blade to catch the faint moonlight filtering through the window. The steel gleamed with a cold, pale blue luminescence—a sign that the magic of the north was bleeding through the ether, searching for its anchor.

Midnight, she thought, looking at the position of the stars.

Across the kingdom, three hundred miles to the north, the transition ritual was taking place. Or rather, the catastrophic failure of it.

Suddenly, the air in the cell grew freezing cold. Her breath plumed white in the enclosed space.

Far to the north, a sound rolled across the continent—not a sound heard by human ears, but a deep, tectonic groan that rattled the very teeth in her skull. It was the sound of bedrock snapping under immense pressure.

Isolde stood up, walking to the narrow window.

She looked up toward the northern horizon. In the dead of night, the sky above Astervale did not remain black. A jagged line of blinding, electric blue fire ripped across the firmament, stretching from east to west like a giant scar being torn open across the face of heaven.

The first tower has fallen, she whispered to the empty room.

Then came the second. And the third.

The blue lattice of light fractured into a million glittering shards and winked out.

With the barriers gone, the ancient seals dissolved. Out of the deep tundras and the black forests of the dead, the Hollow Army surged forward. They were creatures formed of shadow and frost, wearing the faces of those who had died unavenged, moving with a silent, hungry velocity that no mortal army could outrun.

By sunrise, courier riders arrived at the gates of Blackwood Abbey, their horses foaming at the mouth, their eyes wild with terror.

The riders battered against the heavy oak doors until the abbey steward threw them open. They didn't seek the abbot; they ran straight through the cloisters, shouting Isolde’s name until they found her cell.

Captain Vance stood in the doorway, his chest heaving, his armor dented and flecked with frost.

"My lady," Vance gasped, dropping to one knee on the cold stone floor. "The northern border... it’s gone."

Isolde did not look up from the whetstone. She laid her broadsword across her lap, wiped the fine steel dust away with a rag, and calmly buckled the scabbard around her waist.

"I know, Vance," she said evenly. "The sky turned blue at midnight."

"Three border villages—Oakhaven, Miller’s Point, and Crossridge—they’re gone," Vance said, his voice cracking with panic. "Black fog rolled in before the sun came up. The people... the things wearing their faces walked out of the mist. The king’s sorcerers tried to rebuild the wall at the central gate. The magic blew back through their staves. It didn't just kill them, my lady. It branded words into the marble floor of the throne room before the survivors fled."

Isolde paused, her hand resting on the hilt of her sword. "What words?"

Vance swallowed hard, trembling. "THE OATH WAS BROKEN BY THE CROWN."

A grim, humorless smile touched the corners of Isolde’s mouth. "Theron always did lack an understanding of fine print."

"The king sent fifty elite riders," Vance pleaded, looking up at her with desperate eyes. "They rode through the night. They are outside now. He commands you to return as queen."

Isolde walked past him, stepping out into the cold corridor of the abbey. "Tell His Majesty," she said over her shoulder, "that he already has one."

"He says thousands will die without you!" Vance called out, scrambling to his feet to follow her. "The army is marching south! The capital is in a panic!"

Those words—thousands will die—struck the core of her. They bypassed the bitterness, the betrayal, the sting of the crown taken from her head. They reached the soldier beneath the scars.