"You spoke true in there," he rumbled after a weighty moment had stretched between them. "This conflict has escalated beyond anything our kind has faced before."

Seraphina felt her jaw tighten, incisors scoring her lower lip as the direness of their situation reasserted itself. "Lucian wields forces we were never meant to trifle with. Baleful magicks twisted from the darker spheres of creation."

She came to a halt amid the rubble, sweeping her piercing azure stare out over the blasted clearing where the epicenter of Lucian's barrage still smoldered with acrid, quasi-sentient malice.

"He's thrown the first bargaining chips of this conflict onto the table." Her lips peeled back in...