Celeste
The sheath slid down, and the world changed.
The blade that emerged was not steel. It was not metal. It was night given an edge. Shadow smoke poured off it in curling ribbons that drank the light out of the air. The sky dimmed. The torches on the wall below us guttered. Every flame within fifty yards flinched.
A dark pulse shot up from the blade and wrapped around me.
I felt the taint. The second princess’s rage, still alive inside the steel after all these centuries, clawing at me, trying to find purchase. It was angry. It was hungry. It wanted in.
My hands tightened on the hilt.
And then — inside me — the seal shattered.
Not cracked. Not thinned. Shattered, like a pane of glass hit by a hammer, and what came pouring through was not shadow and not power and not magic. It wa
