Elena left the beast where it fell.
It lay half in the stream, half on the bank, a knot of horn and muscle and too many joints, as if the world had tried to invent a new kind of hunger and stopped halfway through. The water slid around it with the patient indifference of nature, washing away the black thread of blood that had seeped from its throat. For a long moment Elena watched that thread unravel and disappear, and only then allowed herself to breathe.
Breathing hurt.
Every inhale pulled at the bruised lattice of her ribs. Every exhale stirred the shallow cut across her shoulder where a claw had grazed bone. Her hands shook—not from fear, not anymore, but from the way magic left her body when she forced it out. She was used to the ache of spellwork, the hollowing fatigue that followed a hard casting. Tonight it felt different. Tonight, it felt like someone had taken a bite out of her soul.
She knelt at the water’s edge, cupped her hands, and drank. The stream was cold enough to make her teeth ache, and it tasted of stone and melted snow. It should have refreshed her. It didn’t. It only reminded her how alone she was out here, a single warmth in an uncaring world.
She reached into her satchel with fingers that didn’t quite obey her. Leather creaked. Glass clinked softly.
The last potion of healing sat in her palm like a tiny sun trapped in a bottle—amber liquid with a golden shimmer, as if someone had dissolved hope into water. She held it for a heartbeat longer than she needed to. Not because she doubted she would drink it, but because she knew what it meant.
No more second chances.
Elena pulled the cork with her teeth and swallowed. The potion burned on the way down, a bright, medicinal fire that bloomed in her chest and spread outward. Her skin prickled. The wounds tightened. The worst of the pain eased into something she could carry.
She capped the empty bottle and tucked it back into her satchel out of habit, as if there were any point in saving it.
Then she stood and began the long trek home.
The forest around her was a familiar tangle of shadow and silver. Pine needles muffled her steps. Branches stitched together overhead, sewing dusk into something deeper. Somewhere an owl called—one lonely note that echoed off the trees like a question.
Elena walked as if she could outpace the exhaustion that clung to her bones. She pushed through thickets, over fallen logs, past moss-slick stones. Every so often she stopped to listen, not for danger this time, but for something else.
For home.
For the soft, human sounds that meant she was not the only heartbeat in the world.
The cabin was still a mile out when she first saw the smoke.
It rose in a thin gray ribbon above the trees, gentle and steady, and Elena’s chest tightened with something that was almost relief. Smoke meant fire. Fire meant warmth. Warmth meant her husband had kept the hearth going, that Maya had eaten, that their small life had continued while she bled under the canopy.
Then the wind shifted.
The smoke carried a sharper scent than pine and cooking broth. It carried an acrid edge, like scorched cloth and burned oil. Like something not meant for the hearth.
Elena stopped. Her breath fogged in the cooling air. The forest around her seemed to still, as if the whole world leaned in to listen.
And then—faint, at first—she heard it.
A scream.
Not the scream of an animal. Not the cry of a bird. A child’s scream, high and raw, torn from the throat by fear.
“Maya.”
The name left Elena’s lips like a spell.
She ran.
Pain flared in her side with each step. The potion had closed her wounds, but it had not restored what she had spent. Her legs felt heavy. Her vision swam. Still she ran, pushing through brush that tore at her cloak, stumbling over roots, cursing the forest for daring to be in her way.
Another scream. Closer now.
Elena burst from the trees into the clearing and froze.
The cabin stood where it always had, squat and stubborn against the wild. Smoke curled from the chimney, thicker now, and from a shattered window on the east side. The door hung open, splintered, one hinge bent as if something had forced its way through with brute indifference.
A shadow moved inside.
Then a larger shadow.
A grunt—deep, guttural. A laugh that was too low and too satisfied to be human.
Elena’s stomach dropped.
Bugbears.
She had heard tales of them long before she ever learned to bind flame to her will. They were not the clever goblins that stole hens and ran at the first shout. Bugbears were heavier, meaner, the kind of creatures that did not steal because they needed. They stole because it pleased them to take.
And because they could.
Elena’s eyes found her husband at the doorway.
He held an axe—his woodcutting axe, not a soldier’s weapon—and his stance was wide, braced, the way he stood when storms tried to peel the roof off the cabin. Blood marked his forearm where a blade had bitten. His face was set with the same stubbornness he wore when he argued with her about leaving the cabin unwarded.
He fought anyway.
One bugbear lay on the ground near the steps, sprawled awkwardly as if it had been thrown. Another stood just inside the threshold, hunched and thick, its fur matted, its long arms ending in hands that gripped a jagged spear.
It lunged.
Her husband met it with the axe, catching the spear shaft and shoving it aside. The axe blade snapped forward and bit into the bugbear’s shoulder. The creature roared, not in pain—more in anger at being inconvenienced.
Inside the cabin, Maya’s small figure darted behind the table. Her eyes—wide and shining—locked onto Elena, and the relief in that gaze broke Elena’s heart.
“Elena!” her husband shouted. “Run—take her—”
A second bugbear stepped from the shadows behind him.
Elena had not seen it.
It moved with a predator’s patience, lifting a crude knife and driving it forward.
The blade sank into her husband’s abdomen with a wet, final sound.
Time slowed.
Elena saw his eyes widen. Saw his mouth open without sound, breath stolen by shock. Saw the way his knees buckled, not because he had grown weak, but because the body can only take so much before it gives.
Maya screamed again. The bugbear yanked the knife free and snarled, spattered with blood like a butcher proud of his work.
Something inside Elena snapped.
Magic surged up from the hollow places she had left it, scraping her insides raw as it came. It was not elegant. It was not measured. It was pure, desperate fury.
The air around her shimmered.
The leaves at her feet crisped.
The bugbear at the doorway turned its head, sensing her, and bared its teeth.
Elena lifted her hand.
“Enough.”
The word was quiet.
The flame was not.
It erupted from her palm as a narrow spear of white fire that punched through the bugbear’s chest and out its back in an instant. The creature jerked, eyes going wide, then collapsed, smoking.
The second bugbear—knife still dripping—took one step toward Maya.
Elena moved faster than thought.
She crossed the yard in a blink, propelled by anger and the last remnants of the potion’s borrowed strength. Her other hand came up, fingers curling as if she grasped the air itself. The bugbear’s throat tightened. Its feet lifted off the floorboards.
It clawed at nothing, choking, eyes bulging, its hands scrabbling like a child’s.
Elena’s voice shook. “You come into my home.”
Her fingers tightened.
The creature’s neck snapped with a sharp crack.
It dropped.
Silence fell so abruptly it felt like a spell.
Smoke drifted. The hearth popped once inside the cabin. A raven cawed from somewhere in the trees, unimpressed.
Elena stood in the doorway, chest heaving, and the fury that had carried her there drained away as quickly as it had come.
Her husband lay on the floor.
Blood spread beneath him, dark and widening.
“Elena,” he whispered.
She knelt beside him. Her hands hovered, uselessly, over the wound, as if she could push the life back into him by sheer will. The knife had gone deep. Too deep. The healing potion was gone. Her magic—her precious, cursed magic—was a storm. It burned. It broke. It did not mend.
Not like this.
“Hold on,” Elena said, and the words sounded like a lie even as she spoke them. “Hold on, please—”
His hand found hers, slick with blood and shaking with weakness. He squeezed, just once, as if to anchor her.
“Maya,” he breathed.
Elena looked up.
Maya stood a few steps away, trembling, her small hands pressed to her mouth. She stared at her father’s wound with the horrified stillness of a child who cannot understand how the world can change so quickly.
“Elena?” Maya’s voice cracked on the name, as if she didn’t know whether Elena was real or another nightmare.
Elena forced herself to swallow. Forced her voice to steady. “Come here, love.”
Maya didn’t move.
Her husband’s fingers tightened again. His eyes were glassy, already looking past Elena into somewhere she could not follow.
“Promise me,” he whispered.
Elena’s throat closed. “Don’t—don’t ask me—”
“Promise.” He coughed, and blood bubbled at the corner of his lips. “Keep her… safe.”
Elena bowed her head, pressing her forehead to his. “I promise.”
He exhaled. A long breath, easing out, and then… nothing came after.
Elena waited for the next inhale.
It did not arrive.
For a moment she could not move. The cabin, the forest, the smoke, the dead bugbears—everything blurred. The world narrowed to the stillness in his chest and the warmth leaving his skin.
Then Maya made a sound, soft and broken, and Elena’s body remembered she was still alive.
Elena turned and pulled her daughter into her arms.
Maya clung to her with a fierce grip, as if she feared Elena would vanish too. Her face pressed into Elena’s shoulder, wet with tears and snot and terror.
“I was scared,” Maya sobbed. “I was so scared.”
“I know,” Elena whispered, rocking her. “I know.”
Behind them, the hearth continued to crackle.
The fire did not care.
They buried him the next morning.
Elena did it with hands that moved as if they belonged to someone else. She dug until her palms blistered, until her shoulders screamed, until the earth smelled rich and damp beneath the topsoil. Maya sat wrapped in a blanket on the porch steps, silent, watching.
When the hole was deep enough, Elena laid him in it.
No priest came. No neighbors. The nearest village was a day’s walk, and Elena had kept them distant by design. Magic drew attention. Attention drew fear. Fear drew torches and ropes.
So it was only Elena and Maya and the forest.
Elena placed his axe across his chest, because he had died holding it.
Then she filled the grave and pressed the earth down, packing it firm, as if she could secure him against whatever waited beyond.
When it was done, she stood before the mound and let herself finally cry.
Not quietly. Not gracefully. The grief tore out of her like the magic did when she cast too hard—raw and burning and uncontrollable.
Maya watched, eyes red, and did not ask Elena to stop.
When Elena’s tears ran dry, she wiped her face with the heel of her hand and went back inside.
The cabin was a wreck. The table overturned. The window shattered. Blood stains on the floorboards, darkening where it had soaked into the wood. Elena stared at those stains for a long time, then turned away.
She could scrub. She could repair. She could pretend.
But she could not unmake what had happened here.
Maya had gone to the back room—the small space they called hers—and now she stood in the doorway, clutching a wooden doll Elena had carved for her last winter.
“Mama,” she said quietly.
Elena looked up.
Maya hesitated. “Why did they come?”
Because you were here, Elena almost said.
Because I am here.
Instead, Elena forced herself to speak what she could bear. “Because there are cruel things in the world, and sometimes they find us.”
Maya’s brow furrowed. “But… we were hidden.”
Elena’s chest tightened. “Yes.”
Maya’s voice was small. “So how did they find us?”
Elena didn’t answer right away. She walked to the hearth, added wood, watched the flames leap. The fire cast dancing shadows on the walls—shadows that looked too much like monsters if you stared too long.
“I don’t know,” Elena lied.
Maya stared at her for a beat, and Elena felt the weight of that gaze—too old, too knowing. Then Maya’s eyes dropped to Elena’s satchel, where the empty potion bottle still sat.
“You used it,” Maya whispered.
Elena’s throat tightened. “Yes.”
Maya’s fingers clenched around the doll. “So you can’t… fix him.”
The words were not accusatory. They were simply a child’s brutal understanding of limits.
Elena shook her head. “No.”
Maya’s eyes filled again, but she did not cry. Instead she asked, softly, “Are the monsters coming because of you?”
Elena’s breath hitched.
It was the question Elena had spent her whole life avoiding. The question she had tried to outwalk, out-hide, out-silence.
Her magic had always been a secret she carried like a loaded blade. Useful. Dangerous. Something you did not show unless you had to.
But her daughter was not asking like a villager would, with suspicion and fear. Maya asked like someone who loved her, who depended on her, who deserved truth.
Elena knelt in front of Maya and took her small hands in hers.
“I don’t know if they came because of me,” Elena said, voice rough. “But I know this: when I use magic… the world notices. Some things are drawn to it. And some people…”
She stopped. The memory of torches, of whispered warnings, of her mother’s hard eyes.
Maya swallowed. “So… if you stop using it…”
Elena closed her eyes. “If I stop using it, the monsters won’t stop existing. The world won’t stop breaking. And we won’t be safe.”
Maya’s lower lip trembled. “Then what do we do?”
Elena stared into the hearth until the flames blurred. For a long moment she listened to the cabin—the soft settling of timbers, the distant sigh of wind in the pines, the faint crackle of resin burning. All the ordinary sounds that had once meant home.
Now they only meant exposed.
She could stay.
She could nail boards over the shattered window, scrub blood from the floor until the wood was pale again, carve new wards into the doorframe with shaking hands and pretend she could make safety out of stubbornness.
But the wards had failed once.
Or had never existed at all.
And her husband—her love—had paid the price for her hope.
Elena’s fingers curled against her knees. A familiar ache rose in her chest, not the fatigue of magic but the heavier pain of responsibility.
Options. Choices. The same cruel arithmetic her mother had always forced her to do.
Maya watched her, waiting, small shoulders hunched as if bracing for another blow.
Elena took a slow breath. “We do what I should have done before.”
Maya blinked, wary. “Hide?”
Elena’s mouth tightened. “No.”
She looked at her daughter’s face—the swollen eyes, the streaked cheeks, the doll clutched so tightly its painted smile had worn away in spots. Elena saw the child in her, and also something else: a sharpness that grief had already begun to hone.
She reached out and brushed Maya’s hair back from her forehead. “We stop pretending the forest can keep you safe.”
Maya’s gaze flicked toward the broken window. Toward the darkness beyond it.
“Elena?” Maya whispered, using the name the way she used Mama when she was trying to be brave. “Where would we go?”
Elena’s eyes drifted to the mantle above the hearth, where a simple wax seal sat in a shallow dish—scarlet wax stamped with a crown and a circle of runes. The King’s mark. The last proof that Elena had not imagined the life she had lived beyond these trees.
He had hired her.
A sorceress, hidden and half-myth, summoned not because she was welcome but because desperation had finally outweighed fear.
“Do you remember the man in the fine cloak?” Elena asked softly. “The one who came with the King’s seal?”
Maya nodded. “The one who wouldn’t look at your hands.”
Elena almost smiled at that. Almost.
“Yes. That one.”
She stood, legs stiff, and crossed to the mantle. Her fingers closed around the seal dish, then around a folded scrap of parchment beneath it—an old message, creased and re-read until the words had softened at the edges.
By Order of His Majesty…
Elena didn’t need the rest.
She turned back to Maya. “We go to the King.”
Maya’s eyes widened. “To the castle?”
“Yes.”
Maya looked around the cabin as if seeing it for the first time. The table on its side. The floorboards stained dark. The door still bearing gouges where the bugbears had forced their way in.
“I don’t want to leave him,” Maya whispered.
Elena’s throat tightened. She walked to the window, stared out at the fresh mound of earth just beyond the clearing. The grave was simple—too simple for a life that had been anything but.
“We’re not leaving him,” Elena said. “Not in the way you mean. He’s in the ground, Maya. He’s part of this place now. But you… you are still here.”
Maya swallowed hard. “What if the King is… mean?”
Elena huffed a quiet breath. “Kings are rarely kind. But they are very good at keeping what they claim as theirs.”
Maya frowned. “I’m not his.”
Elena crouched again, bringing their faces level. “No. You’re mine. And because you’re mine, he will keep you safe. Not out of love. Out of obligation.”
Maya’s brows knit. “Why would he be obligated?”
Because he asked for my power.
Because he bought my time.
Because the monsters are his problem, and you are now tied to the one woman in his kingdom who can fight them without steel.
Elena didn’t say all that. She didn’t put that weight on Maya’s shoulders.
Instead she said, “Because he owes me. And because he needs me.”
The word needs hung in the air, sharp as frost.
Maya’s eyes dropped to Elena’s satchel. “So you’ll… go fight again.”
Elena closed her eyes briefly, feeling the familiar churn of fear and resolve.
“Yes.”
Maya’s voice was barely audible. “And I’ll stay there.”
Elena opened her eyes. “You’ll stay there.”
Maya shook her head quickly, panic rising. “No—Elena—no—”
Elena caught her hands gently but firmly. “Maya. Listen to me.”
Maya’s breaths came in small, fast pulls. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
“I know.”
Elena held her daughter’s hands tighter, anchoring her. “But if you come with me… if you stay out here… you will never be safe. Not while I’m doing what I have to do.”
Maya’s eyes flashed with sudden anger—bright and desperate. “Then don’t do it!”
The words cracked like a whip, followed by a sob she tried to swallow.
Elena’s chest twisted. She pulled Maya into her arms and held her until the shaking eased.
“I wish I could,” Elena whispered into her hair. “I wish I could put my magic away and become only a mother. I would—gods, I would—if the world would allow it.”
She leaned back enough to look Maya in the eye. “But it won’t. Not anymore.”
Maya’s voice broke. “Because of the monsters.”
“Yes.”
“And because… because of you.”
Elena didn’t flinch.
“Yes,” she said softly. “Because of me.”
Maya stared at her, silent, then said, in a smaller voice, “Are you going to kill them all?”
Elena’s jaw tightened. She looked again toward the grave, toward the trees beyond, toward the wider dark.
“I’m going to stop them,” she said. “Or I’m going to die trying.”
Maya’s eyes brimmed again. “Don’t say that.”
Elena forced her voice gentler. “It’s the truth. And you deserve the truth.”
She stood, keeping one hand on Maya’s shoulder as if she could hold her steady by touch alone. Her gaze drifted to the scarred doorframe.
The bugbears hadn’t just stumbled onto their home. Elena knew that now. Too many things had come too close, too quickly. Too many monsters acting with purpose.
Like a tide being pushed.
Like something behind them herding them forward.
Elena’s fingers moved unconsciously, tracing the air as if drawing lines only she could see.
There was an old thought her mother had spoken once, late at night, when wine had loosened the iron in her voice.
Monsters don’t come from nowhere, Elena. They come from somewhere someone opened.
Elena had dismissed it then as a story meant to scare children into obedience.
Now her husband lay in the earth, and the land beyond the cabin felt wrong, as if the forest itself had grown teeth.
Elena turned back to Maya. “Pack what you can carry. Warm clothes. Food. Your doll, if you want it. Nothing else.”
Maya’s mouth trembled. “We’re leaving now?”
“Yes.”
Maya glanced toward the grave again, then nodded once, sharp and determined through the tears.
Elena watched her go, then moved through the cabin like a woman preparing for war.
She gathered her satchel, checked the few remaining vials—mostly tinctures and bitter herbs, nothing that would stop a blade. She slid a small knife into her boot. She took the King’s seal from the mantle and tucked it into the inside pocket of her cloak, close to her heart.
And then she paused.
Her gaze landed on a loose floorboard in the corner—one she hadn’t touched in years, one that had always felt… wrong, like a memory she kept stepping around.
She knelt.
Her nails found the faint notch and pried.
The board lifted with a soft creak of old wood, as if reluctant to give up its secret.
Beneath it lay a narrow hollow lined with oilskin, carefully wrapped and tied with twine that had long since lost its scent of fresh hemp.
Elena’s breath caught.
She hadn’t known it was here. But some part of her—some inherited part—had always suspected.
She untied it with trembling fingers and unfolded the oilskin.
Inside was a single torn page of parchment, edges ragged as if ripped from a larger whole. The ink had faded in places, but the symbols remained sharp—interlocking circles etched with sigils that made her skin prickle as if the page remembered being whole and resented being torn.
At the top, in a careful hand she recognized too well, was written:
THE CIRCLE
Maya returned then, small pack on her back, eyes wide when she saw Elena kneeling on the floor.
“What is that?” she whispered.
Elena stared at the page until the words blurred.
It felt like a hand reaching out of the past and closing around her wrist.
Her mother had hidden this. Not burned it. Not destroyed it. Hidden it—like a seed.
Elena swallowed. “It’s… a piece of something old.”
Maya stepped closer, clutching her doll. “Old like… before?”
Elena nodded slowly. “Before the monsters were this bold. Before magic began to… misbehave.”
Maya frowned, gaze dropping to the strange sigils. “It looks like… like a map.”
Elena’s eyes flicked to the lower margin, where the ink darkened as if written later than the rest. A note, squeezed in tight:
If Elena finds this, the wards have failed. Go to the King. Place Maya behind stone walls. Then seek the lost sigil where the leylines twist. Bring nothing but restraint.
Elena’s blood chilled.
Her mother had known.
Not the bugbears. Not her husband’s death—no prophecy could be that cruelly precise—but the shape of what would happen when Elena tried to live small with a power that refused to be small.
Elena folded the page carefully, as if it might crumble if handled without reverence, and slid it into her satchel.
Maya watched her. “Are you okay?”
Elena exhaled through her nose, steadying herself. “No,” she said honestly. “But we’re going anyway.”
“Going where?” Maya asked, voice shaking again.
Elena tightened the strap of her satchel and stood.
“To the King,” she said. “First.”
Maya swallowed. “And then?”
Elena looked out the broken window at the forest, at the dark line of trees like a wall of spears.
“And then,” Elena said, voice low, “I find where the monsters are coming from.”
Maya hugged the doll to her chest. “And you close it?”
Elena’s jaw set.
“Yes,” she said. “If it can be closed.”
She stepped to the door and looked back at the cabin one last time. The hearth still burned. The floor still held stains. The air still carried the ghost of violence.
She could stay and turn this place into a tomb.
Or she could leave and turn it into a beginning.
Elena reached down, took Maya’s hand, and together they crossed the threshold.
The forest swallowed them almost immediately, pines closing behind like a door.
They traveled hard, following game trails and old footpaths Elena had once used to reach the villages unseen. They avoided the road until the last stretch, when the land opened into fields and stone markers appeared, carved with the King’s crest.
By then Maya was quiet with exhaustion, her small fingers numb in Elena’s grip.
When the castle finally rose on the horizon—gray stone walls catching the last light of day—Maya stopped walking.
It wasn’t fear, exactly. It was awe.
“It’s… big,” she whispered.
Elena didn’t look away from it. “Big things are harder to break,” she said.
At the gates, soldiers called out, suspicious at first, then startled when Elena produced the red wax seal and spoke her name.
Recognition flashed across their faces.
A murmur ran along the wall.
Sorceress.
The King’s witch.
Elena ignored it. She’d heard worse.
They were ushered through, past the outer yard, into stone corridors where torches burned without flickering. Maya pressed closer to Elena, overwhelmed by echoes and the smell of iron and horses and too many people.
A steward in fine cloth approached, pale and sweating, bowing too quickly.
“Lady Elena,” he said, voice thin. “We were not told—”
“No,” Elena interrupted, sharp as a blade. “You weren’t. Because I was busy burying my husband.”
The steward froze.
Elena leaned in slightly, letting him see the dried blood still under her nails, the exhaustion carved into her face.
“Tell the King,” she said, “that the monsters found me. Tell him they killed the man who kept my home standing. Tell him I have brought him what he wanted: my compliance.”
Her voice dropped lower. “And tell him this: he will keep my daughter safe behind his walls, or I will bring the monsters to his very doorstep and let them eat through his gates.”
The steward swallowed hard. “Yes, my lady.”
Maya’s fingers tightened around Elena’s hand. “Elena…”
Elena looked down, softened her voice. “I’m here,” she said. “Just for a moment.”
A maid approached then—older, kind-eyed, hands gentle. She knelt in front of Maya.
“What is your name, sweet one?” the maid asked.
Maya hesitated, then whispered, “Maya.”
The maid smiled. “Maya. Would you like warm bread and a bath? And a room with blankets so thick you could disappear into them?”
Maya’s eyes flicked up to Elena, pleading.
Elena knelt beside her. Her throat felt like it was full of ash.
“This is the safe part,” Elena whispered. “This is the stone wall between you and the dark.”
Maya’s eyes filled. “And you?”
Elena forced a smile that hurt. “I’m the wall too,” she said. “Just… a different kind.”
Maya shook her head quickly. “Don’t go.”
Elena took Maya’s face gently in her hands. “Listen to me. The King can guard you with steel. He can feed you. He can put a hundred men between you and any monster that crawls.”
Her voice broke a little. She steadied it. “But he can’t stop what’s coming. Not without me.”
Maya’s tears spilled over. “I don’t want to be brave.”
Elena pressed her forehead to Maya’s. “You don’t have to be brave here,” she whispered. “Just be safe.”
Maya sobbed once, then nodded, small and defeated.
Elena stood and let the maid lead Maya away.
Maya looked back only once, over her shoulder, eyes shining.
Elena raised a hand in farewell, fingers trembling.
When Maya disappeared around the corner, Elena’s body finally remembered how to shake.
She stood there in the corridor, alone beneath stone arches, and the grief rose up again—hot, choking, immediate.
She wiped her face once, hard, as if she could scrub emotion away like blood.
Then she turned toward the throne room.
The King awaited.
And beyond him—beyond stone and steel—somewhere in the wild heart of Archwynd, a portal yawned like an open mouth, spilling monsters into the world.
Elena felt the torn page in her satchel like a heartbeat.
Seek the lost sigil where the leylines twist.
She exhaled, slow and deliberate, and stepped forward.
This was not the life she had wanted.
But it was the life the world had demanded.
And Elena—Sorceress of Archwynd—would answer.
Not with mercy.
With balance.
And with fire.
Finis
Can you save the Land of Archwynd? It will take more than a willing spirit and a fight to survive the dangers that lay siege to the realm… success requires strategic decision making and decisive action. Monsters. Traps. All forms of fell evil you will face. If you are up to the challenge, head over to the Armory and pick up your copy of Archwynd. And then put yourself to the ultimate test of good versus evil.