Rank F Demon King

Rank D, it turned out, mostly meant I could weed reality's gutters faster.

That's the unglamorous truth of a rank-up nobody tells you: the world doesn't get easier, you just get better at the same job. The deep-circuit wards were more dangerous than the shallow ones — older, hungrier, further from any help — but we were better now, too. Bruno had stopped getting thrown into things and started throwing things. Lila had learned which reagents in the deep groves could be brewed into something useful over a campfire. Vera moved through the wilds like she'd been born under the leaning trees. And I could trickle-feed a ward in half the time, raise a Warding Shroud to hold off a curious predator while I worked, and lower it again without breaking a sweat.

The Shroud had become my favorite thing in the world. After Blackfen — after the fire that wanted the whole world on its knees — there was something profoundly healing about a power whose entire purpose was to stand quietly between my friends and the dark and simply hold. I'd catch myself raising a little wall of shadow just to lean on it. Bruno had started calling it "the fort," as in "Adrian, put up the fort," and I did not correct him because I liked it too.

So the days had a rhythm, and the rhythm was good, and I should have known that meant something was about to go wrong.

It was Vera who found it. Of course it was Vera.

She'd been building her map for three weeks now — every ward, live or dead, plotted against the stolen sheaf, annotated in that fierce cramped hand of hers. And one night by the fire she went very still over it, and then she went very quiet, which from Vera was the loudest possible alarm.

"The dead ones aren't random," she said.

I looked up from the fort I'd been idly leaning on. "What?"

"The wards that have failed. Blackfen. The two before it Yrsa found gutted this season. The one at Cinderfen edge." She turned the map so I could see, and traced a line between the little inked X's of the dead circles. "Age doesn't do this. Age kills them scattered, here and there, whoever's oldest. But look." Her finger drew the line, and the line was straight, or near it — a path of dead wards marching in one direction across the Wildmarch, deliberate as footprints. "Something's not just draining the weak ones. It's draining them in order. Walking a path. Opening a road." She looked up, and the firelight caught the fear she rarely let show. "Roads go somewhere, Adrian. This one's pointed at something."

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Yrsa had been mending a snare across the fire, and she'd gone motionless the moment Vera said in order. Now she leaned over the map, and her weathered finger followed Vera's line to where it aimed — a spot near the deep heart of the wilds, unmarked, that I'd never heard her name.

The color went out of her face.

"No," she said, very quietly. "No, no, no."

"Yrsa." I'd never heard her afraid. "What's there? What's the line pointed at?"

She sat back on her heels, and for a long moment she just looked at the fire.

"There's one ward I never put on any Warden's circuit," she said at last. "Never taught its place to an apprentice. My mother didn't either, nor hers. We keep it in our heads and nowhere else, and we tend it alone, because it's the one that matters." Her green eyes found mine. "Ashmoot. The first ward the King ever sank. The anchor. Every other circle in the net hangs off it, like a tent off its center pole." She swallowed. "The wards fail one at a time on their own, slow, and even then we've got till the moons. But if something reaches Ashmoot and pulls that one—" she made a small, terrible gesture, a tent collapsing "—the whole net drops at once. No waiting for the sky. The Unmaking comes early."

The fire popped. Somewhere out in the dark, my Beast Sense caught nothing at all, which was somehow worse.

"Something in the deep," I said slowly, "is trying to cheat the clock."

[Warden's insight: the drained wards form a directed path.][Projected terminus: Ashmoot (Keystone). Cascade risk: catastrophic.]

"Then we get to Ashmoot first," said Vera, already rolling the map, already moving, because that was what Vera did with a disaster. "How far?"

"Four days," Yrsa said. "If the wilds let us." She got to her feet, older than I'd ever seen her, and whistled her wolf-thing up out of the dark. "We leave at first light. And boy—" she looked at me "—pray it's slow. Pray whatever's walking that road is slow."

It was not slow.