Chapter 210 Seraphine

Chapter 210 Seraphine
The Death Serpent didn’t vanish with a flourish. No flash, no dramatic swirl of ancient power. One moment, he stood beside me in the moonlight, skeletal, hollow-eyed, shadows clinging to his scaled skin like sorrow. The next, he was simply gone. The cold he carried seeped away so suddenly that the air felt almost warm by comparison, and the absence of him left a ringing silence in my ears.

I stood frozen, still half-expecting the ground to open or the sky to split. Instead, the only thing that moved was the wind, picking up, threading through the ruined edges of my coat, tugging at stray strands of hair. I hadn’t noticed how much of the cold belonged to him until it was gone, leaving only the natural chill of the mountain night.

For a long moment, I didn’t move. I just stood there, at the boundary of Kael’s territory, staring into the dark. This was the place I’d spent weeks trying to reach. The line I’d bent all my hopes around. Getting here had cost me a king. A mate. A future I thought I wanted.

Now, the ward was gone. The shimmering, impossible wall that had defined my life for what felt like forever had simply dissolved. No more barrier. No more impossible. Just me and the darkness ahead and nothing at all between me and Thane.

I waited for the surge of terror. It never came.

Instead, what I felt was emptiness. No, not quite. Not empty.

Free.

The realization bubbled up, wild and unexpected, and I actually laughed, a short, brittle sound that vanished into the wind. For the first time in what felt like forever, there was no one here to tell me not to go, no one here to urge caution, no one left to protect me. No Dante.

The ache in my chest tightened. The pain was still there, God, how it still burned, but it wasn’t consuming me anymore. It was just another scar. Another ending. Another thread, finally burned out.

I looked back, just once, at the mountains stretching behind me. Silver ridges glowed under the moon, silent and eternal. Somewhere on the far side of those peaks, the cabin waited. Amara, Lucian, the voidbinder, my makeshift family, my home, my safety. I could go back. I could tell them everything. We could make a plan, prepare for what was coming.

But by then, Thane would be gone. Kael would be dead. The women would still be imprisoned. The rot would keep spreading, unchecked and unchallenged.

No. No more running. No one else was dying because I was too afraid.

I turned my back on safety and started toward the darkness.

The first thing I noticed about Kael’s territory was the silence. Not peaceful, not even hostile... just wrong. The hush pressed in, thick and unnatural. No birds sang, no insects hummed, no small creatures rustled in the tangled undergrowth. Only my own breathing and the muted crunch of my boots on leaf litter broke the stillness.

The trees themselves looked sick, bark mottled and dark, branches twisting skyward like broken fingers. Even in the heart of summer, they stood bare, stripped of leaves, as if winter had staked a permanent claim here.

I lifted my eyes and saw the threads.

God.

So many threads.

Thousands of luminous strands wove through the forest around me. Some bright, some flickering, some blackened with rot. The rot was everywhere. Not advancing, not devouring... waiting. Like a sickness holding its breath, lurking beneath the skin.

I could hear it, too. Not screams, something softer, older. Whispers. The faintest voices, buried beneath centuries of decay and grief.

A shudder crawled up my spine.

My dragon stirred, restless and alert. We’re being watched, she murmured inside my mind.

I froze. The forest remained silent, but the sensation of eyes, dozens, maybe hundreds, prickled across my skin. The black fire flickered over my fingers, instinctive and sure.

“Come out,” I called, my voice carrying into the darkness. It echoed, sharp, then faded.

Nothing moved.

Of course not. Why would anything be easy?

I pressed forward. The deeper I went, the worse it became. The ground shifted from rich brown earth to a dull gray, leached of life. The trees shrank, stunted and crooked, their roots clawing desperately at dead soil. The very air felt wrong here, thick and sour on my tongue.

And then... Pain. It hit me so suddenly I staggered, gasping. Not fear. Not rot. Pain, raw, overwhelming, feminine.

I froze, heart pounding. Not one pain, hundreds. Thousands. I saw them, all the threads, stretching beneath the ground, beneath the mountains, beneath cities and rivers and everything I knew. Young threads. Female threads. Terrified threads. Alive.

My stomach dropped.

“Oh my god.” The words escaped, soft and startled.

The women. They were still alive, not all, but enough. Enough to make my chest ache, to twist the world sideways, to explain the Death Serpent’s horror.

I stumbled forward, then climbed, the path steep and treacherous, slicing through black stone and dead trees. At the summit, I reached the edge of a cliff and looked out.

Below, the city sprawled in the moonlight, a fortress ringed by walls of obsidian and rivers that shimmered silver under the stars. Beautiful, from a distance. But I could see the truth.

The threads.

Thousands upon thousands of them, weaving through soldiers, dragonborn, citizens. But beneath them, deep below the city, cages. Not metal, not stone... thread cages, magical prisons, hundreds of terrified female threads knotted together, hidden and suffering and forgotten.

My knees buckled. I was right. All of it. Every awful thing, every impossible rumor, every death and lie.

I stared down at the city, at the prison beneath it, at the place where Thane was hiding.

And for the first time since Dante walked away, I didn’t feel heartbroken.

I felt angry. Not the wild, flaring anger that burned out fast. Something colder. Sharper. Dangerous.

I had come here to kill Thane.

Now... I was here to save them.

And God help anyone who tried to stop me.