The trail had long since gone cold.
Lucien stood on the high cliffs of Dareth's Spine, wind slashing across his cloak, eyes fixed on the horizon where the trees blurred into mist. The sea of pines below stretched for miles, and yet, in all that vastness, he felt the emptiness beside him more than anything else.
Selene was gone.
No trace. No echo. No lingering spell residue to dissect or undo. One moment she'd stood beside him—fierce, frightened, determined—and the next, she was ash and wind.
And not even her magic had done it. That was what gnawed at him most. She had never wielded magic. Never once in all their time together. The girl with fire in her blood had never struck a spark. So whatever had taken her… wasn't hers.
Which meant it was theirs.
Lucien clenched his fists. The Witch Tower.
He didn't know how they'd found her, or why now, but he knew the signs. Cloaked magic. Silent sigils. Vanishing without sound or struggle. It had the Tower's rot all over it.
And if they had her—if they'd stolen her for what they suspected lived in her blood—then they were closer to something terrible than he had ever feared.
He had waited too long.
A cold wind twisted past him, carrying the scent of snow and charred wood. Lucien didn't flinch. He had climbed higher than this. Fallen harder. And if the Tower thought they could take her without consequence…
He turned.
The war wasn't coming. It had already started.
•
Lucien's camp had moved since Valmoura. Tents now nestled between the ruins of an old battlement buried beneath vines. The loyal few who had remained after his return were hardened, silent types—mages who'd followed him before his fall, warriors who remembered the First Collapse, even a few rebels from the Western Fringe who remembered his name like a forgotten spell.
But they weren't enough. Not now.
He needed more.
Lucien crouched over a low fire, unrolling a brittle parchment on a scorched tree stump. Ink flared blue against the creases—names that once commanded armies, alliances forged in blood and silence.
Some of them would be dead. Others worse—bound, imprisoned, turned. But if even a few remained…
He tapped the edge of a name: Kael of Redmoor.
"I'm going to wake the old oaths," he said quietly.
Across from him, Myren—the blind seer who had once followed him into the Maw of Kith—tilted his head. "You'll need more than names to find her."
"I'm not looking for her," Lucien said.
A pause.
"You're lying."
Lucien didn't respond.
Myren leaned forward, white eyes glowing faintly. "You think the Tower took her."
"I know they did."
"And yet you do not ask why."
Lucien's gaze darkened. "Because I already know. Her blood."
Myren nodded slowly. "She was never just a girl to you."
"She still isn't."
The silence between them grew brittle.
Lucien rose, folding the parchment. "The Tower moved against me once. I survived. I won't let them do it again."
He looked toward the dark horizon.
"And this time, I'm not going to wait for their next move."
•
That night, he sent word to the edges of the continent—coded messages to dead channels, whispered calls across the Weave, blood-inked tokens cast into sacred fire. One by one, he tried to awaken what had once been buried with him.
The world would remember the name Lucien Rave.
And when they did, they would remember it with fire.
He didn't know Selene's exact location. He didn't know how they took her.
But he knew this:
She would not be lost.
Not to them.
Not to the Tower.
And no matter who had taken her—Gwen or ghost or god—they would learn what it meant to steal from the last king of flame.