Take Me Away, Dark Lord!

Lucas, Boris, and Gallahan fell to their knees as they bowed their heads, exposing their necks, fully prepared for Kaelus to draw Requiem and sever their heads from their shoulders right there in the frozen mud.

They welcomed the execution. They deserved it.

Kaelus did not draw his sword.

He looked down at them, his chest heaving, his jaw clenched so tightly the bones threatened to shatter.

When he spoke, the voice that emerged from his throat was not human. It was a thirsty, demonic, blood-chilling rasp that echoed directly from the deepest, most lightless depths of the Glacial Abyss.

It was the aura of the warfields, the unchecked, horrific killing intent that had earned him the title of Reaper.

”You guys can die eating dog shit for all I care,” Kaelus snarled, the words dripping with such toxic venom that the knights physically recoiled. ”But first, find my daughter! Bring my daughter back to me!”

The command was absolute.

It was a chain bound directly to their souls.

They were not permitted the mercy of death, not permitted to run; rather, they were ordered to hunt.

Kaelus did not look at them for a second longer.

He turned his burning, demonic eyes toward the jungle, his aura expanding in a massive, shockwave-inducing pulse as he began to track the impossible, tearing the very fabric of the city’s mana apart to find a single thread of her existence.

The Leviathan had been unleashed, and the world was about to bleed.

***

The sensation of high-tier spatial displacement magic is not something the human body is designed to endure.

For Seraphina, the transition from the blistering, emerald-lit heat of the burning circus tent to her current location was not instantaneous.

It felt as though she had been violently shoved into a narrow, freezing, lightless tube, her physical body stretched and compressed like a piece of taffy.

The air had been violently sucked from her lungs, and her inner ear equilibrium had completely shattered, leaving her spinning in a gravity-less void.

When physical reality finally reasserted itself, it did so with brutal, unforgiving force.

CLANG!!

Seraphina hit a solid, freezing surface.

The impact knocked the remaining breath from her small chest, sending a jarring, painful shockwave up her spine.

She scrambled instinctively, her hands reaching out to brace herself.

Her fingers scraped against rough, freezing, unpolished metal.

Iron bars.

She was sitting on a cold, grated metal floor.

She couldn’t see anything.

The darkness was absolute, a thick, suffocating pitch-black that refused to yield even a single photon of light to her adjusting eyes.

The air here was freezing, but it lacked the crisp, clean bite of Kaelus’s ice magic.

This cold was damp, stagnant, and reeked of profound decay.

The smell hit the back of her throat like a physical blow, a sickening cocktail of mildew, old rust, the coppery tang of dried blood, and the unmistakable, sweet-and-sour stench of rotting meat.

For a terrifying, disorienting moment, the child hormones in her six-year-old body threatened to seize complete control as her lower lip trembled.

Her eyes welled with hot, panicked tears; the urge to curl into a ball, cover her ears, and scream for her father was overwhelming, a primal, biological imperative to summon her protector.

’Papa...’ her mind whimpered, the memory of Kaelus’s warm, dark cape and his steady, rumbling heartbeat flashing before her eyes.

But the soul of Mira, the survivor who had endured the crushing isolation of a past life and the brutal neglect of an orphanage, slammed the emergency brakes on her rising panic.

’Stop. Stop it right now,’ she ordered herself, biting her trembling lip so hard she tasted a faint hint of iron. ’Screaming will not bring him here faster. Instead, this might turn you into a target sooner. You are Seraphina von Nacht, a Supreme Dark Archmage! You are not a helpless toddler. Analyze the situation calmly!’

She forced her eyes to close, relying on her other senses.

She wasn’t alone.

The pitch-black space around her was filled with sound.

It wasn’t the roaring of green fire or the chaotic shouting of a market square, it was the sound of pure childhood terror.

All around her, pressing close in the dark, were the sounds of children.

There were more than just a dozen of them.

Soft, muffled sobs, frantic, hyperventilating gasps, and terrified, quiet whimpering of toddlers who had cried until their vocal cords had given out.

”Mommy...” a small voice hiccuped to her left. ”I want my mommy...”

Seraphina slowly reached her hand out into the dark.

Her fingers brushed against soft, trembling fabric as she felt a small shoulder shaking violently.

”Shhh,” Seraphina whispered, her voice surprisingly steady, adopting the same quiet, authoritative tone she had used to comfort the younger orphans at Saint Mary’s. She slid closer on the freezing iron grate, wrapping her small arm around the unseen child. ”It’s okay. Don’t cry loudly. The monsters hear you when you’re loud.”

The child flinched, but then desperately leaned into Seraphina’s touch, burying a wet, tear-stained face into the shoulder of her crimson pinafore.

Seraphina kept her arm around the kid, her dark eyes snapping open, staring blindly into the void.

Her Spirit Sight, which had been scrambled by the chaotic static of the circus tent, was slowly coming back.

The ambient mana here was heavy, oppressive, and incredibly dark, but it was a familiar darkness.

It was the resonance of high-tier dark magic.

Her Supreme Dark Core, safely hidden deep within her, gave a slow, predatory pulse.

It didn’t shrink in terror like it had in the presence of Julian’s Holy Light.

It recognized the ambient energy of this place, soaking it in and feeding on the shadows, slowly expanding her metaphysical perception.

She could ’see’ the room now, not with light, but with mana.

They were inside a iron cage.

The bars were thick as a grown man’s wrists, inscribed with complex, jagged runes that pulsed with a faint, suppressive energy, anti-magic arrays designed to keep spells from being cast from within.