Chapter 8 - The Siege of Dragontooth
Three days later, the Royal Army laid siege to Castle Dragontooth—a dark, jagged fortress built directly into the side of a volcanic mountain peak.
Surrounded on all sides by three thousand Royal soldiers, Duke Vane stood on the high parapets, his face twisted in desperate rage. Beside him, Lady Celeste was weeping, wearing a dirt-stained gown, her royal ambitions crushed to dust.
"Vane!" Captain Sterling shouted through a brass trumpet from the siege lines below. "Your army in the pass has surrendered! Dragontooth is surrounded! Open the gates and yield to Princess Aurelia!"
"Never!" Vane shouted back, pulling a small black glass vial from his tunic. "I would rather see this entire mountain burn than yield to a kitchen rat!"
Vane uncorked the vial and drank its contents in a single gulp.
Instantly, his skin turned a sickening, unnatural purple-black. Veins bulged along his neck like black cables, and his eyes turned entirely crimson. Duke Vane had consumed Shadow-Core—a banned, forbidden alchemical compound that granted unnatural physical strength and dark magic at the cost of the user's sanity and soul.
"Father! What have you done?!" Celeste screamed, backing away in terror as Vane’s body expanded, his fingernails lengthening into razor-sharp black talons.
With a monstrous roar that shattered the glass in the castle windows, Vane leaped from the fifty-foot castle wall, landing on the rocky ground below with a force that cracked the bedrock.
He stood up, towering eight feet tall, surrounded by a swirling aura of black, corruptive smoke that withered the grass beneath his feet.
"Aurelia!" the monster that was once Duke Vane shrieked, his voice sounding like grinding stone. "I will tear your heart out!"
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Julian pulled his horse in front of Mara, drawing his sword. "Princess, stay back! That thing isn't human anymore!"
"No, Julian," Mara said softly, dismounting her horse and stepping past the line of terrified knights. "This is my family's sin. I must be the one to end it."
