Far beyond the northern forests and the trade roads Aiden still walked, at the black-stone heart of the demon continent, the news arrived without warning.
It began as a single encrypted report from a border scouting cadre. Three full-blooded trackers had been found unconscious on a ridge outside a mixed-race crossroads town. Their minds were fogged. The residual signature clinging to them was faint, half-erased by distance and time, yet no living demon had tasted anything like it in a thousand years. The imprint was incubus. Not a diluted remnant. Not a failed hybrid. True blood.
