POV: Gretchen Stinkford
The air in the heart of the Iron-Mist Valley did not just smell of sulfur; it smelled of ancient rot, fermented grudges, and the cloying, suffocating sweetness of dark nightshade. I sat perched upon a throne of calcified bone within the Cavern of Sighs, my skeletal fingers dancing over a loom of shimmering, pitch-black silk. This was the Void-Weave, a tapestry of fate I had been sewing since the day I helped Beowulf Conrad drive a cursed, jagged blade into the throat of High King John Robert Walker.
For ninety years, I have fed this loom with the shadows of the fallen and the bitterness of the exiled. Every thread was a promise of ruin for the Reynolds line and the Walker survivors.
Suddenly, a thread snapped.
It didn't just break; it scorched. A ripple of golde
