Overthrow- The Demon Queen 1 -

She spread her arms wide. “Congratulations. You’ve earned my full attention.”

Marble colonnades, soaring stained-glass windows depicting the old gods, fountains that sang with enchanted water. Now the marble was cracked and weeping a black residue. The windows had been shattered and replaced with iron grates. The fountains were dry, their basins filled with ash.

“I always do.”

Sera pressed her ear to the door. “Two guards. Standard patrol. They’ll pass in three… two… one…” Overthrow- The Demon Queen 1

The Heartstone’s fragments swirled in the air around her, reforming, knitting back together. The God-Killer lay in two pieces on the floor. The hooded figure staggered back, clutching their chest, their hood falling away to reveal a face that was still human but barely—scars upon scars, eyes that had seen too much, a mouth that had forgotten how to smile.

Kaelen and Sera followed, their footsteps echoing off the bone dome. The distance to the pedestal seemed to stretch impossibly, the room growing longer with each step. A trap. A spatial distortion. The queen’s defenses were waking up.

But the Heartstone was not.

Kaelen held the figure’s gaze for a long moment, then nodded. “Good. Because the moment that stone breaks, the queen will know. And she will come for us. We will have perhaps thirty seconds to flee before her attention turns fully to our location. We split up at the second courtyard—Sera takes the east gate, I take the west, and you…” He hesitated. “You vanish. You have your own way out.”

They had paid for it in blood. Literally. The merchant who had sold it to them had demanded a year off each of their lives. Kaelen had felt the weight settle into his lungs the moment he agreed—a heaviness, a promise of earlier twilight.

“And if we fail?” The question came from Sera, younger than the others by a decade, with cropped hair and eyes that still held a dangerous amount of fire. She had been a baker’s apprentice before the queen’s shadow fell. Now she was a thief, a scout, and the only person Kaelen trusted to pick a lock made of solidified nightmare. She spread her arms wide

“The last seal is in the queen’s own throne room,” said Kaelen, tracing a finger through the dust on a cracked wooden table. His voice was low, gravelly—the voice of a man who had forgotten how to laugh. He was the strategist, the one who had once been a general before Malachar had turned his bones to glass and then back again, leaving him with a limp and a permanent ache. “The Heartstone. If we break it, her hold on this world shatters.”

Kaelen pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the fire in his ribs. He had no weapon. He had no plan. He had nothing but the memory of a sky that had once been blue and a woman he had loved who had died in the first wave of the queen’s conquest.

But in the cellar of a burned-out tannery on the edge of the capital city of Thornhaven, three people still whispered. Now the marble was cracked and weeping a black residue