Malachar.
He materialized at the center of the shadow army. Not projected — Physically, bodily, in the space between the dark host and the alliance's defensive line. And he was nothing like what the legends described.
Arvella had imagined a monster. A being twisted by a millennium of void into something visually inhuman — shadows for skin, darkness for eyes, the physical embodiment of the horror that his name evoked.
Malachar was beautiful.
The beauty of a blade. The beauty of things that are perfect because they are empty — polished surfaces with nothing behind them, shapes without substance. He was tall — taller than any being Arvella had seen — and his body was the body he had been born with a millennium ago. Fae. The birch-bark skin. The white hair. The geometric markings. All of i
