Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)
Chapter 413 - 407: Donin is falling

Chapter 413: Chapter 407: Donin is falling

The night over Donin was ink-dark, the stars veiled by a low ceiling of clouds that moved like restless smoke. The city slept uneasily, its perimeter wards faintly flickering, stretched thin from weeks of tension. Hadeon’s men had grown accustomed to waiting, an endless stalemate where nothing moved but shadows and rumors.

The first strike came with the usual precision of the Agaron Empire.

Damian’s Shadows didn’t waste effort on walls or gates. They slipped through ether gaps too small for normal troops, weaving through unguarded corridors and the quiet skeleton of supply lines. No signals flared. No alarms sounded. By the time the first alarm bell rang, three key relay towers were already burning from within, ether nodes gutted with precise cuts, leaving Hadeon’s outer command lines blind.

In the southern quarter, a single burst of flame illuminated the night as one of the arsenal depots erupted, the fire drawn inward rather than out, swallowing its own sound. Damian’s special units weren’t here to wage war, they were here to dismantle a kingdom of soldiers piece by piece.

They moved like a tide already receding, gone before the mind could catch up, before orders could form. A patrol blinked out near the old garrison square. Another vanished between shifts at the watchtower. The air grew thinner, not from heat or pressure, but from the absence of movement where there should have been noise.

And still, no declaration of war came.

Only silence.

In the central barracks, a lieutenant reached for the comm crystal, only to find it fractured clean through. His second-in-command collapsed before he could speak, a black point lodged under his collarbone that glowed faintly before the ward activated and killed the man in less than a second.

The lieutenant didn’t shout. Didn’t call for backup. He froze.

Because something was wrong with the air. The sort of stillness that didn’t come from nightfall or curfew but from an absence. Like the breath before a cave-in. Like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing the sea below was gone.

He turned very slowly.

A shadow moved behind him.

By the time his lips parted to speak, his body had already hit the ground, a thin, scorched line drawn neatly across his spine. The attacker never stopped. The door didn’t creak. The barracks lights flickered once and then held steady, as if nothing had happened at all.

Outside, the city was already breaking.

Not from fire or shelling, but from the collapse of order. Squad leaders found their weapons jammed with ether interference. Mages attempting to raise wards found their spell cores unresponsive, too choked with dust from ash that hadn’t yet reached them. And still, no banner was raised. No alarm roared in the sky.

There was only silence, thick and humming, stretched taut over streets that had forgotten what peace sounded like.

A captain tried to issue a fallback signal near the eastern bridge, but the moment he reached for the embedded glyph-stone, it crumbled in his hand. Not cracked. Not corroded. Gone. Dismantled from within. The same sigil arrays they’d installed for protection now lay inert, turned to powder.

Above them, the towers still stood, but their hearts had been carved out. The ether pathways were rerouted, pulsing faintly with a rhythm that no longer belonged to Donin. From street to sky, command was bleeding out, and no one knew where the wound had started.

By the time the second wave of Shadows surged past the broken checkpoints near the governor’s court, the guards had already turned on each other. Misdirection, paranoia, sabotage, the city tore itself apart before anyone outside touched it.

—

The command center was too quiet.

Glass monitors lined the walls, most of them still flickering with static overlays, interrupted feed, disrupted signal. The live map in front of Hadeon had begun to lag twenty minutes ago. Then it glitched. Then it crashed entirely, leaving behind a blue screen and the sharp, humming silence that followed failures no one wanted to admit out loud.

He didn’t speak.

Didn’t ask for the sixth status report that hadn’t come.

Instead, he stood with both hands braced on the table edge, eyes fixed on the last snapshot of Donin’s southern quarter. There were no fires visible yet, just a strange blackout zone spreading outward from the relay towers. Too clean to be coincidence. Too fast to be a mistake.

His jaw tightened, just slightly.

"Sir..." someone tried.

"Cut the outer channels," Hadeon said, quiet and flat. "Right now."

"But..."

"Do it."

The technician moved, hands flying over the console. The room stayed cold.

General Rovan stepped in from the side, coat still dusted with ash from the east trench. "We lost signal to the depot six minutes ago," he said. "Barracks hasn’t reported in. We thought the lines were jammed but..."

"They’re not jammed," Hadeon murmured. His voice didn’t rise. "They’re gone."

He didn’t look away from the screen.

The last incoming log from the Pais border flashed briefly in the lower right corner of the mainframe. Unread. Then corrupted.

Hadeon’s gloves were supposed to ground him, to hold the tremor at bay, to make him feel like he still had authority in his own skin but the faint, traitorous twitch beneath the leather didn’t stop, not even when he pressed his thumb against the biometric seal for the third time and watched the console flash an error in dead, silent red.

The override should’ve worked.

He had hardwired the codes himself, signed them with blood and ether and every bit of political weight Donin still had when the first cracks in Agaron’s loyalty began to show, but that had been weeks ago, before the northern nobles grew quiet, before the embargo tightened its noose, before entire houses began peeling off one by one, shedding their allegiance like cloaks no longer fashionable.

Now, the central console was down, the high-frequency comms stuttered static, and the ward feedback loop on the eastern perimeter kept reporting ghost flares where there should have been nothing, no movement, but he knew better.

He pivoted sharply, jaw set, teeth clenched tight enough to ache.

"Where the hell is Rowen?" he snapped, already moving toward the secondary relay desk, his voice ricocheting off the empty chamber walls with the clipped precision of a man who had built this empire’s edge and was now watching it crack beneath his feet.

A junior officer, too young to be standing in this room and too old to pretend she didn’t know the answer, swallowed once and replied without meeting his eyes.

"Gone. Sir. He left two hours ago. Evacuated his household through the south corridor."

"He was supposed to hold the ninth ward node."

"Yes, sir."

"And?"

"He claimed the node was compromised."

Hadeon stared at her, not really at her, but past her, through her, as if he could force the world to rewind if he just stopped blinking long enough.

"He is the compromise."