Chapter 6 | Part 2

His father fought like a cornered animal.

Drusniel reached the main hall entrance in time to see it—his father backed against the far wall, blade in hand, three attackers circling. Blood ran from a wound on his arm, another on his side. He moved like he didn’t feel them.

The dinner table was overturned. Wine pooled across the stone, mixing with blood. The bioluminescent flowers lay scattered and crushed, their soft glow dying. Hours ago, they’d sat around that table. His father had laughed. His mother had poured wine.

Now his mother was dead, and his father was dying.

“Come on, then.” His father’s voice was steady despite everything. “You came for House Thel’varin? Here I am. Let’s see what you’re made of.”

The attackers circled. They were careful—they’d seen what happened to the first wave. Two bodies lay at his father’s feet already. One was missing a hand. The other had taken a blade through the throat.

His father had always been a warrior first.

But there were too many of them. And more were coming through the side passages, drawn by the sounds of combat. Four now. Five. Converging on the last defender of a dying house.

“Father!”

The word tore from Drusniel’s throat before he could stop it. Stupid. Childish. The mistake of someone who hadn’t finished his training, who still believed in things like fairness and rescue.

His father’s head turned. Their eyes met across the chaos.

For a moment—just a moment—something passed between them. Not the cold assessment his father usually showed. Not the disappointment or the distant approval. Something rawer. Love, maybe. The kind neither of them had ever known how to say.

“Run, Drusniel!” His father’s voice cracked with something Drusniel had never heard before. Desperation. Fear. The terrible knowledge that he couldn’t protect his son. “Get out! Now!”

“I can help—”

“RUN!”

The attackers didn’t wait. The diversion had given them their opening. Two of them broke toward Drusniel. The remaining three pressed the advantage against his father.

Drusniel saw the first blade fall. His father parried—barely—but the second attacker was already moving. Steel bit into his shoulder. His father staggered but didn’t fall.

He’s not going to fall. He’s going to make them work for it.

The thought was cold and clear and utterly useless.

His father killed one more. A precise thrust through a gap in the armor, the instincts of a lifetime crystallizing in one final moment. Then the other two were on him.

The second strike caught his father in the side. The third opened his throat.

He fell.

Something broke inside Drusniel. Something deep and load-bearing, the foundation on which everything else was built. He felt it crack. Felt the weight shift. Felt the whole structure of who he’d been begin to collapse.

He screamed.

The sound wasn’t human. It was raw and primal and filled with everything he couldn’t put into words—grief and rage and the howling emptiness of watching the last piece of his world shatter against the stone floor of a room that still smelled of dinner.

His magic responded to the emotion. Air exploded outward from where he stood, chaotic and uncontrolled, grief transmuted into force. Papers scattered. Torches guttered and nearly died. The attackers stumbled—

But not enough. Not nearly enough.

“He’s a mage,” one of them said, recovering quickly. Professional. Unimpressed. “Careful. Take him alive if you can. The client wants confirmation.”

The client.

Drusniel’s grief-fogged mind snagged on the word. Not the house leader. Not the patriarch. The client. Who hired assassins to murder an entire house?

Then he saw it.

One of the attackers stepped into the firelight, adjusting his grip on a blood-wet blade. His armor caught the glow—and there, on the chest piece, an insignia Drusniel had seen in his father’s war room, in political briefings, in Shyntara’s intelligence reports.

Three interlocking circles over a curved blade.

House Vrinn.

Vrinn.

The name burned through him like acid. The house that had been watching his family. The house that had been planning the “Thel’varin solution.” The house whose assassins Shyntara had tracked near their borders for months.

Every sign pointed to House Vrinn. Every piece of evidence screamed their name.

The rage crystallized. Sharp and cold and absolute. A blade forming in the forge of his grief.

“The boy.” The lead attacker gestured toward Drusniel. “Get the boy. No survivors means no survivors.”

Drusniel ran.

End of Chapter 6.2 —> 6.3: Blood in the Dark: The Escape