Chapter 36. When the Sky Turned Red

It began not with a howl, nor with a whisper, but with a color. The sky ruptured in a burning red—neither the fierce flare of a dancing flame nor the fresh, violent stain of newly spilled blood, but a deeper, ancient rust: the bruise of iron that has lain buried beneath the earth for untold centuries, only to be torn open and poured across the black vault of night. Veins of this iron-red webbed outward, as if the firmament itself were wounded, and each star flickered and dimmed under the weight of that impossible glare. Even the moon—Rootwild’s silent sentinel—waned in its radiance, its pale, cratered face all but swallowed by the bleeding wound in the heavens.

They called it the Fang of Return. No living soul had ever beheld it, yet in the oldest scrolls—ink-dark parchments hidden beneath the Council’s vaulted crypts and sealed with wax steeped in dread—its coming had been foretold. Not as an omen of slaughter, not as the prelude to war, but of something more terrible: undoin