Kaelen had prepared himself to give her an earful the next day.

But the next morning, she was gone.

The King of the North didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second. He let out a concussive, deafening Alpha howl that violently shook the very foundations of the Iron-Wood Manor.

The shockwave of his panic instantly woke the fortress.

Torian, who had been sleeping in the adjacent wing, burst through the mahogany doors of the master suite three seconds later, his claws fully extended, his massive chest heaving. "Kaelen! What is it?!"

Before Kaelen could answer, Zarek vaulted up the grand staircase, his fangs bared. Syris and Caspian materialised right behind the Dragon King, their eyes completely wild with defensive instincts.

"Where is the threat?!"

Kaelen turned to face them, his face paler than the winter snow. He didn’t speak. He violently shoved the crumpled, terrestrial blue diary directly into Syris’s chest.

"Read the dog-eared page," Kaelen choked out, his voice completely cold. "Read what she has been hiding from us."

Syris’s green eyes darted down to the frantic, blue ink scrawled across the paper. The Snake King’s mind processed the complex equations, the warnings about the gods, and finally, the horrific, undeniable details of the Vessel Protocol. The absolute, irreversible hollowing of the soul.

The colour completely drained from Syris’s elegant features. The diary slipped from his fingers, hitting the floorboards with a devastating thud.

"By the gods," Syris breathed, absolute horror bleeding into his voice. "The manic laughter. The lavish dinners. The way she kissed us goodbye..."

Every single bizarre, aggressively cheerful action Roxy had taken over the past week instantly made sense. She hadn’t been fractured by trauma. She hadn’t been hiding in a delusion.

She had been meticulously, silently planning her own cosmic execution right under their fiercely protective noses, orchestrating one final, perfect week of happiness to spare them the pain of a true goodbye.

"Did she think this was the best solution?" Zarek roared in anger.

"She is going to sacrifice her soul," Kaelen spat out in reply, tearing across the bedroom to the massive warded windows. "She is going to let the heavens erase her! Fuck!"

Torian whimpered, stumbling backwards as if he had been stabbed in the chest.

"Find her!" Zarek bellowed, his voice cracking. "Lock the Manor down!"

Again and again! Roxann, you keep driving me crazy!

But as Kaelen slammed his hands against the heavy windowpanes, looking out over the frozen courtyards, his blood ran completely cold.

They were too late.

High above the jagged peaks of the Iron-Wood mountains, the bruised violet sky was rapidly bleeding into pitch-black. The cosmic alignment had reached its terrifying zenith.

The eclipse had officially started. And far below, sprinting through the deep snow toward the treacherous, winding path that led up to the highest mountain peak, was a tiny, solitary figure wrapped in a white silk nightgown and a heavy crimson cloak.

Roxy had already slipped out of the Manor.

"She’s on the mountain!" Kaelen shouted, completely shattering the window glass with his bare fists. "Move!"

Roxy’s mate tore out of the master suite, in their various forms, completely determined to rip the heavens apart before they let the gods take their wife.

If she was going to die, she should die with them.

But at the exact same moment, miles below at the base of the mountain, another entity was watching the eclipse.

Abaddon stood at the perimeter of the Iron-Wood territory, his hands casually shoved at his back. His red eyes stared up at the massive, glowing dome of Warlord magic that protected the Vanguard fortress.

Surrounding the Demon King in the forest was a terrifying army of corrupted beasts oozing dark blood from their mouth.

Abaddon smirked, fully expecting his broken, bitter Earthling ally to fulfil her end of the bargain.

Deep within the cellars of the Manor, the parasitic terrestrial runes Roxy had bled onto the warding stones the night before violently activated. The massive crystal obelisks hissed, the raw magic short-circuiting under the foreign code.

With a deafening, catastrophic CRACK that echoed across the entire continent, the impenetrable dome of Vanguard magic flickered, turned a sickly shade of terrestrial blue, and completely shattered like fragile glass.

The Iron-Wood wards had dropped.

"She actually did it," Abaddon laughed, a sound devoid of any real joy. He raised his hand, pointing directly at the exposed, vulnerable fortress. "Tear it down. Leave nothing alive."

The demonic horde unleashed a bloodcurdling shriek and surged forward like a tidal wave of pure nightmare.

The Harem, who intended to stop Roxy, instead, were met with an apocalypse.

Pouring over the shattered stone walls of the courtyard, completely blocking their path to the mountain, was an endless swarm of Abaddon’s corrupted horrors.

The Demon King had arrived, thinking Roxy had lowered the wards for him, entirely unaware that she had orchestrated this exact clash to keep the Demon King occupied while she ascended to the gods.

"ROXY!" Torian roared into the dark, his voice a jagged, desperate plea that tore through the freezing wind.

But the Warlords could not run after her. Inside the Manor, crying in the nursery and huddled in the halls, were their children. If the Alphas abandoned the courtyard to chase their Matriarch, the void-beasts would massacre the pups in seconds.

Roxy had forced them into the most agonizing, impossible choice in the universe. And she knew exactly what they would choose.

"Hold the line!" Kaelen commanded, the sadness in his soul turning into a lethal, blinding rage. The Wolf King turned into a full-grown wolf, the size of a mountain. "Nothing gets into the Manor! Nothing!"

Zarek in his colossal, black draconic form, unleashes a roaring, continuous torrent of hellfire that incinerates the first wave of horrors into ash.

Syris summoned a massive, toxic-green swamp mire, melting the beasts where they stood, while Caspian conjured razor-sharp tidal waves that cleaved the corrupted flesh from bone.

They fought with a terrifying fury, screaming her name into the pitch-black sky, their eyes locked agonisingly on the tiny, distant figure of the crimson cloak climbing higher and higher up the jagged summit.

Suddenly, the sky above the courtyard violently shifted.

With a concussive boom, Drax plummeted from the clouds, landing directly in front of the Manor’s heavy wooden doors.

The massive teenage drake had flown at breakneck speed from the training grounds the absolute second he sensed the wards drop. Drax let out a deafening roar, unleashing his own torrent of volcanic ash and flame to shield the nursery wing.

And he wasn’t alone.

Bursting out of the Manor doors right behind the teenage dragon were Axel and Onyx. The twin wolf pups had partially shifted, their eyes glowing with lethal blue, their sharp fangs bared.

They didn’t cower.

They dove directly into the fray, fighting back-to-back with terrifying, synchronized precision alongside their fathers.

"We’ve got the doors, Papa!" Axel shouted over the din of battle, slicing the jagged limb off a void-beast. "Go get Mum!"

But there were simply too many. The demonic sea was endless, pinning the Warlords to the courtyard in a desperate, bloody stalemate to protect their bloodline.

High above the carnage, far removed from the screams and the hellfire, Roxy reached the absolute summit of the highest Iron-Wood peak.

The air was impossibly thin and biting cold. The eclipse was total, plunging the world into a suffocating, terrifying darkness. Roxy stood on the flat stone of the peak, the heavy crimson cloak whipping violently around her legs in the wind.

She looked down at the courtyard, seeing the massive explosions of hellfire, Kaelen in his massive wolf form and swamp magic. She saw her husbands fighting like gods to protect the children she had given them.

A single, hot tear spilt over her cheek.

She was so worried at the same time, she trusted her husbands.

"I love you," Roxy whispered into the howling wind, her voice completely swallowed by the dark. "All of you."

She turned her back on her family, facing the completely black, eclipsed sky.

Roxy fell to her knees on the jagged stone. She folded her hands in her lap, tilted her chin up, and closed her eyes.

"I am ready," Roxy said.

The heavens split wide open.

It was not a warm, holy light. It was an absolute, terrifying, and violently alien pillar of blinding, sterile white energy. It shot down from the eclipsed sky with the force of a hammer, striking Roxy directly in the chest.

The impact made no sound, but the shockwave of pure divine power rippled across the entire continent.

Roxy’s head whipped back, her spine arching as the agonising pain of getting your soul ripped out began.

The cleansing had begun.