Page 149 of Of Iron and Moonlight

Cold struck them like a blade as they burst from the prison into the open night. So did the sight of four guards, the redscale scare long behind them, their hands already flying to their hilts.

Njall planted his feet and thrust out his free hand.

He reached for the magic in his veins and felt the familiar hum answer. Then he reached deeper, into the frozen earth itself. Power surged through him so violently his vision blanched at the edges. Snow around the guards quivered, then coiled upward into four gleaming spears of ice, thick as javelins, exactly as he pictured them.

He exhaled.

The icicles shot forward with lethal speed. One drove clean through the nearest guard’s skull. The others punched through throats and shoulders. All crumpled into the snow.

Njall’s head began to spin.

He pushed through it and ran for the rock where they had hidden earlier. Once in its shadow, he lowered Gavriel to the ground and braced a hand against the frozen earth.

Warmth slid over his lip.

Blood.

“Njall?” Elara dropped beside him. “What’s wrong?”

“Pulled too much at once.” The words came with effort.

Elara curled a small hand around his arm, concern plain on her face.

“He will be fine,” Kalaetzu assured her. “So long as he does not wield again for some time.”

She did not look convinced, but the sounds rising from the prison entrance left no room to linger on it. Guards poured into the snowfield, shouts echoing through the night.

“This can’t be the end,” Elara whispered, struck by the impossibility of their situation.

Njall stilled, breath fogging before him. Burnout dragged at his bones. His vision swayed. But he would buy them time. He would kill as many as he could before—

A light tap touched his shoulder.

Kalaetzu stood beside him with a cluster of small vials spread across his palms. “The last of the invisibility draught,” he said. “Three for you.” He pressed them into Njall’s hand. Then he offered one to Elara, which she drank without hesitation, and another to Gavriel, tilting it carefully to his lips. The unconscious man swallowed weakly. Kalaetzu uncorked two more for himself and drank them with a grimace.

Njall looked down at the three vials in his own hand. The green liquid seemed at odds with Selvarath’s moonlight overhead. He swallowed them. They burned like cold fire.

He watched his fingers fade until nothing remained.

They waited. Silent. Hearts pounding.

And they prayed—to any celestial body, any revered deity, any forgotten god willing to hear—that the draught would outlast the guards’ resolve.

Chapter 70

Gavriel

Faith, Gavriel’s father once lectured him, should be a chosen conviction. Anything inherited without examination was a conditioned habit, not belief.

So he taught Gavriel what he knew and left the rest to him.

Though he never bound himself to any one faith, the language of the moons clung to Gavriel’s speech as easily as breath. The Three were the most visible. Lights no one could deny, rising and fading in their appointed cycles, demanding to be witnessed. He remembered how Amerieth’s amber had burned low on the horizon the first morning he slept above the forge, too young to understand loneliness but old enough to feel it. Her orbit and her sisters’ marked planting and vows, mourning and hope, and the Spectrum’s comfort lay in order. However, its weakness lay in how easily it could be accepted without question. No one living remembered why the moons held their domains. Only the patterns that remained.

The Faith of the Three Sisters was older and quieter. Sister of Thought. Sister of Hearth. Sister of Dawn. No pageantry. No celestial authority. Perhaps that was why it faded. Without grand observance to anchor it, its lessons dissolved, and the Sisters themselves became stories.

His father spoke, too, of the fae goddesses. And of those who followed the Dark Brother. Their claim was simple: life was given once and answered for alone. At death one met truth without ritual or appeal. To His followers, that was freedom—a simple road and its end. They lived plainly, holding that if there was no reward beyond life, kindness must justify itself. Yet even this faith had its dangers, when belief hardened into detachment.

If the Dark Brother truly existed, Gavriel certainly never imagined he might resemble an aging Tsuchitsan male with kind eyes and shaking hands.