A week after the fall of the Obsidian Keep, the heart of the Umbral Realm was a place of frantic, chaotic rebirth. The dark fortress, once a symbol of Malakor’s oppressive order, was now the bustling, disorganized capital of the new Alliance of Free Realms. Its cold, opulent halls were filled with a cacophony of languages and cultures—the guttural commands of werewolf guards, the grinding speech of troll engineers assessing the fortress’s damage, the sly, mercantile chatter of Jax’s pirates setting up new trade routes, and the whispered incantations of Hecate’s witches, who were working to cleanse the Keep of the last vestiges of Malakor’s corrupting influence.
Aria found herself at the center of it all, a quiet, still point in a hurricane of her own making. Her recovery was slow. Her imm
