CHAPTER 55: SHATTERING THE ILLUSION

The thunder of the guns fell silent at last. Smoke rolled across the plain in choking curtains, ash and dust mingling with the cries of the dying.

Where once Ignarion’s banners had stood proud, only tattered remnants flapped in the scorched wind.

Their formations were broken, their captains dead, their men scattered like leaves in a storm.

And in that silence came another sound.

The low rumble of hooves.

Caedrion sat astride his warhorse, the beast clad in steel barding blackened by powder and flame.

He raised his saber high, revolver gleaming in his other hand. His voice rang like steel drawn from a scabbard:

"Cavalry! Ride them down!"

The order was met with a roar of savage approval.

The line of Ferrondel horse surged forward, lances and sabers lowered, revolvers cocked.

Dust and smoke churned beneath their charge as two thousand riders cut across the blackened field like a storm given form.

The Ignarion levies, already broken, already fleeing, looked up in horror as the thunder of hooves bore down on them.

Some dropped weapons and begged. Others tried to rally, raising shields, spears, anything that might slow the tide.

It did not matter.

Caedrion’s revolver barked, the crack splitting the air. A captain fell with half his head missing.

The Lord of Dawnhaven swept his saber low, cleaving a fleeing soldier from shoulder to spine in a single stroke.

The cavalry hit like an avalanche.

Steel hooves trampled men into mud. Sabers flashed, hacking through armor and bone alike.

Revolvers cracked in rhythm, each shot finding a back, a skull, a desperate hand raised in vain.

The rout became a massacre.

From the flanks came Ferrondel infantry, advancing in perfect columns.

Bayonets fixed, rifles gleaming, they fired in disciplined volleys.

Each blast tore into the huddled masses of Ignarion levies trying to regroup.

The Spellswords among them shouted spells of flame and warding, their barriers flaring bright, only for concentrated rifle fire to smash through, the magitech rounds shrieking like darts of the Architect’s own wrath.

One Spellsword raised his staff, calling down fire. Caedrion spurred his horse straight toward him.

The staff barely began to glow before the revolver barked once more. The spell sputtered into nothing, and the man fell with a smoking hole through his chest.

"Keep firing!" Caedrion shouted, wheeling his horse through the chaos. "Break them all!"

The air filled with screams, with thunder, with the crash of rifle bolts and the chopping bite of sabers.

Ignarion’s men were slaughtered as they fled, every attempt at resistance swallowed in the tide of modern war.

At last, there was no resistance left.

Only the scattered remnants of an army that had once believed itself invincible, crushed under hoof and shot alike.

Caedrion slowed his mount, blood dripping from his blade, smoke still curling from the cylinder of his revolver.

He looked across the ruin of Ignarion’s host, his chest rising and falling with the rhythm of battle’s end.

A heavy sigh escaped his lips, as he raised his saber into the sky and proclaimed victory to the men who followed him.

"The battle is won! House Ignarion will be forced to yield now, or we will break them!"

Dawnhaven’s army cheered, lifting rifle and saber into the air alike.

They could not believe what they had just done. And with such ease.

A force that had stood as the dominant power in the human realm for millennia shattered beneath their might.

An army of Nulls had massacred an Army of spellswords, reaping their lives as if they were wheat to the scythe.

It was simply inconceivable, and yet it had occurred.

And now, the soldiers of House Ferrondel cheered on their Lord’s declaration of victory.

Knowing that they now marched on Emberhold to end the war once and for all.

All the while House Ignarion quaked in the halls of the Ember Court.

---

The great hall of Emberhold was awash in red firelight.

Tall braziers roared with Crucible flame, yet their heat brought no comfort. Instead,

shadows leapt across the vaulted ceiling like specters mocking the assembled lords.

Veltharion sat upon the black throne, carved from basalt veins and etched with centuries of his house’s sigils.

His shoulders were square, his armor polished, yet his face was drawn, lines of strain etching deeper with every whispered word that echoed across the chamber.

Messengers had returned from the front. Survivors too few to count, their reports too consistent to deny:

The banners of Ignarion lay in the dust.

Their levies had been butchered, their Spellswords shattered, their formations annihilated under a storm of thunder and iron.

The murmurs of the Ember Court were sharp as knives.

"It cannot be true," hissed Lady Maltrisse of House Ignarion, her jeweled fingers trembling.

"Nulls cannot slay Spellswords. It is against the order of the world itself."

"And yet," countered an elder with hollow eyes,

"our sons do not return from the field. Their staves lie broken, their bodies burnt. Dawnhaven marches with an army of twenty thousand, armed with weapons no Magus can withstand."

"Lies!" shouted a younger lord, his voice cracking with desperation. "A fluke, a trick of relics! Ferrondel must have uncovered some fragment of the Eidolons’ art. This is not strength, it is thievery, sorcery!"

Veltharion raised a hand and the voices faltered, though the tension still writhed like a serpent beneath the silence.

His voice was low, but it carried, heavy with the finality of iron.

"It is no trick."

The words fell like stones into the firelit chamber.

"Our legions are broken. The levy host we mocked as rabble swept the flower of our armies from the field. Lord Caedrion Ferrondel has not merely stumbled upon a relic, he forges them. Again and again, with his own hand."

Gasps rippled through the Court.

One of his nephews rose, his youthful arrogance still clinging like armor against fear.

"Then we must raise more! Muster every last man, every last Spellsword. Burn Dawnhaven to the ground before this... this false lord grows stronger!"

A chorus of agreement followed, old voices fueled more by desperation than conviction.

Veltharion let them speak. Let them bluster, until their fire burned down to coals. Then he stood.

His presence silenced them more effectively than any shout. His wings of magma flared for a heartbeat, a reminder of the Crucible’s blessing, before dimming again.

"You think to raise another army?" His tone was scornful, cold. "And with what? Our coffers lie bled from the last campaign. Our Spellswords, half of them lie dead on the plains before Dawnhaven, the rest still children, untrained, decades from mastery. Do you propose we hurl farmers and slaves into the furnace and call it strength?"

The nephew faltered, his mouth working soundlessly.

Another elder, his voice quieter, broke the silence. "Then... perhaps diplomacy. A truce. If we offer gold, land,if we acknowledge Ferrondel’s seat as legitimate, perhaps we may—"

"Bend the knee?" Lady Maltrisse spat, her outrage breaking her composure at last. "Never. Better ash and ruin than that humiliation."

"Better ash and ruin," Veltharion echoed softly, his eyes glinting like embers. He let the words hang, heavy as a gallows rope.

"And yet ash is all you will have if you cling to pride."

The hall erupted into fresh argument, some screaming for desperate war, others whispering for peace, still more simply trembling at the collapse of everything they had believed eternal.

Veltharion raised his hand again. The firelight caught his armor, casting his face in molten shadow.

"You do not understand," he said.

"Our time is ending. For millennia we ruled by fire and fear. We believed the Crucible made us eternal. But Ferrondel has torn the veil from our age. He has shown the world a weapon that does not heed bloodlines, nor spells, nor the arrogance of Magi."

He leaned forward, his voice rumbling like thunder.

"The age of sorcery is dying. An age of iron and flame rises in its place. And in that age, we are prey."

The words struck harder than any battle report. To hear them spoken aloud, here, in the sanctum of their power, was to hear prophecy made flesh.

A noblewoman wept openly. Another lord slammed his staff to the floor, muttering denial under his breath.

One elder clutched his chest as though his heart itself had betrayed him.

Veltharion watched them all with contempt and pity entwined.

"Mark my words," he said, his voice carrying to every corner of the hall.

"We may scheme, we may whisper of diplomacy or war, but the truth is this: Caedrion Ferrondel will not stop. His forges burn day and night. His army swells by the week. He will come for us, and when he does, no wall, no barrier, no banner will save you."

He turned from the throne, his cloak of flame trailing embers behind him.

"Prepare yourselves. You stand not at the dawn of victory, but at the twilight of our House."

And with that, the great Veltharion Ignarion left his court in stunned silence, his kin frozen like statues, each one choking on the bitter truth:

The age of their dominance was over.