The sky over Orestes didn't turn black; it turned a bruised, electric blue. The Dread-Airships of the King's Royal Guard were massive silhouettes of enchanted iron and humming mana-turbines, their spotlights sweeping the city like the eyes of angry gods.
"They're not here to arrest us, Leona," Kaelen hissed, pulling her into the deep shadow of a stone archway as a spotlight hissed past, bubbling the paint on the wall. "They're here to sanitize the city. The King can't let those frost-images reach the Southern Kingdoms. He's going to burn Orestes to the ground and blame it on a 'mana-leak' in the Telegraph Company."
Leona leaned against the damp brick, her breath coming in ragged, shallow plumes. Her mana-core felt like an empty well, the edges of her vision flickering with static. Channelling the entire Gray Book through the kingdom's nervous system had cost her more than she had anticipated.
"My mother," Leona managed to say, her fingers twitching. The Mithril Weave on her wrist was dull, the silver threads retracted deep beneath her skin. "And Bram. We have to get to the Hollow Guild."
"The Guild is already sealing the bulkheads," Kaelen said, his eyes scanning the rooftops. "If we don't move in the next five minutes, we're locked out in a city that's about to become an oven."
A low, vibrating hum shook the ground. Above them, the lead airship—the Invictus—opened its ventral hatches. Glowing red orbs of alchemical fire began to descend, tethered by grav-chains. These were 'Cinder-Bombs,' designed to incinerate organic matter while leaving the stone foundations intact.
"Go," Leona commanded, her voice regaining its iron edge. "I'll slow them down."
"With what? You can barely stand!"
Leona looked up at the falling fire. She reached into her tunic and pulled out the small vial of purple catalyst Bram had given her. There was only a drop left.
"I don't need to stand," she whispered. "I just need to breathe."
She didn't use her hands. She used the Breath of the Void. She inhaled the freezing night air, filtering the moisture through her lungs and infusing it with the last of her internal frost. When she exhaled, it wasn't a mist—it was a Glacial Needle.
The needle struck the nearest Cinder-Bomb mid-air.
In a world of modern alchemy, fire was a chemical reaction powered by mana. Leona didn't try to douse the fire; she attacked the mana-tether. The purple catalyst on the needle acted like a virus, jumping from the ice to the grav-chain.
The red orb flickered, turned a sickly violet, and then plummeted—not into the residential district, but directly into a City Watch barracks.
The explosion was a silent, freezing shockwave that turned the barracks into a sculpture of jagged obsidian.
"Move!" Leona barked at Kaelen.
They sprinted through the labyrinthine back-alleys, the city above them erupting into chaos. The "modern" world was screaming. Mana-carriages collided as their guidance crystals shattered in the cold; automated streetlamps exploded; and the noble district was a cacophony of sirens.
They reached the secret entrance to the Under-City just as a squad of Alchemical Enforcers dropped from a low-flying scout craft. These weren't the "Hounds" Leona had faced before. These were the 'Executioner' models—ten feet tall, encased in anti-magic plating, their arms replaced by rapid-fire mana-cannons.
"Target identified," the lead Enforcer droned. "The Weaver. Priority One. Eradicate."
"Get inside, Kaelen! Protect my mother!" Leona shoved him toward the crevice.
"Leona, no!"
She didn't look back. She slammed her hand against the stone wall, sealing the entrance with a six-foot-thick slab of reinforced ice. It would take them an hour to melt through it from the inside, but it would take the Enforcers even longer to break in.
She turned to face the three Executioners. She was a ten-year-old girl in a tattered librarian's tunic, standing in a rain of ash and snow.
"You know," Leona said, her eyes beginning to bleed that terrifying, opaque white again. "I spent my first life reading stories about heroes who died for a cause. I always thought they were idiots."
She flexed her wrist. The Mithril Weave didn't just slide out; it exploded outward, the threads weaving themselves into a complex, rotating shield of silver and frost.
"I'm not a hero," she whispered, her voice carrying across the silent alley. "I'm a librarian. And I've decided your story ends on this page."
The lead Enforcer raised its cannon. Whirrr—
Before the mana-bolt could fire, Leona vanished.
She didn't teleport. She used her threads to grapple the high-pressure steam pipes lining the alley, swinging herself upward with the speed of a pendulum. As she moved, she released a cloud of Prismatic Frost.
The Enforcers' sensors went haywire. The "modern" tech relied on heat signatures and mana-detection. Leona had turned the entire alley into a zero-degree vacuum, filled with microscopic ice-prisms that reflected the Enforcers' own targeting lasers back into their lenses.
"Sensor blindness detected," the machine rasped. "Switching to area-denial."
The Enforcers began firing blindly, the mana-bolts melting the brickwork and turning the snow into scalding steam.
Leona dropped from the ceiling like a falling star.
She landed on the shoulders of the lead Enforcer. She didn't use a knife. She grabbed the brass cooling-ducts on its neck and channeled her frost magic directly into its "heart"—the central mana-core.
In the modern world, power was everything. But power generated heat.
"Thermal shock," Leona muttered.
The Enforcer's core, running at 500% capacity to maintain its shields, couldn't handle the sudden drop to absolute zero. The metal didn't just crack; it disintegrated. The machine's head fell off, rolling into the gutter with a dull thud.
The other two Executioners turned, their cannons glowing.
Leona was out of mana. Her heart felt like it was being squeezed by a frozen hand. She slumped against the headless chassis of the first machine, her vision blurring.
Is this it? she thought. Chapter Eight? A bit short for an epic.
Suddenly, the ground beneath the remaining Enforcers erupted.
A massive, rusted iron anchor tore through the cobblestones, followed by a shower of sparks and the smell of sulfur. Out of the hole climbed Master Bram, clad in a suit of steam-powered plate armor he must have been building in secret for decades. Behind him, Kaelen and a dozen "Scrappers" from the Hollow Guild emerged, armed with jury-rigged mana-rifles.
"You really thought we'd stay behind a wall while the Princess had all the fun?" Bram's voice boomed through his helmet's speaker.
He swung his massive hammer, a relic of the Old World, and flattened the second Enforcer like a tin can. Kaelen moved like a shadow, sliding his obsidian daggers into the cooling vents of the third.
The threat was gone, but the sky was still full of airships.
Bram walked over to Leona and picked her up with one massive, armored arm. He looked at her wrist—the Mithril Weave was glowing with a faint, steady pulse.
"You did it, Leona," he whispered. "The news reached the Southern Continent. The King of the South just declared the 'Noble Accord' void. The Duke is a dead man walking."
"My mother..." Leona gasped.
"She's safe. She's already on the Iron-Crawler," Bram said, gesturing to the massive, multi-legged transport machine waiting in the tunnels below. "We're leaving Orestes. This city is a tomb now. We're heading for the Frozen Wastes. No one follows the Argen name into the ice."
Leona looked back at the burning city. The Royal Archive was a pillar of fire in the distance. Her books, her quiet life, her disguise—all gone.
"I'm not a librarian anymore, am I?" she asked.
Bram set her down on the deck of the Crawler. He handed her a new book—a leather-bound journal with a lock made of mithril.
"No," Bram said. "You're the one who writes the history now. And the first chapter of the new world has your name on it."
As the Iron-Crawler hissed and began its descent into the deep, dark tunnels away from the dying city, Leona Argen opened the book. She didn't write about the Duke, or the King, or the fire.
She wrote: Chapter 1: The Weaver Awakes.