The winds of Norvhar cut like invisible daggers through skin and bone.
To Eirik Skallheim, the cold was not merely a sensation — it was an enemy, a constant, suffocating force that clung to his breath and burrowed into his bones. At sixteen, he was one among countless orphans left behind by families too poor to feed another mouth.
The village where he grew up was little more than a scatter of soot-darkened huts huddled along a frozen bay where the ice never melted. His parents, hardened fishermen, had vanished during a sea storm when he was just twelve. Since then, Eirik survived as he could — hunting small game, stealing fish from neighbors’ hooks, and sleeping in a shelter he built from driftwood and stolen cloth.
“The cold isn’t your enemy, boy,” an old man from the village had once told him. “It’s what keeps us alive. Respect it, or it’ll bury you.”
But Eirik had never seen the cold as a friend. To him, it was a prison — a wall that kept Norvhar isolated from the world, dooming its people to rot in silence.
The winds of Norvhar whispered like old spirits, slipping through the cracked bones of the land. Each step was a conversation with the cold — and the cold spoke of death.
At sixteen, Eirik Skallheim was no longer a child, but not yet a man. His frame was lean from hunger, his spirit shaped by grief. He had grown up counting losses like others counted winters. When he was ten, his elder brother succumbed to fever in a storm-wracked hut, his body buried under stone and silence. Two years later, their parents vanished into the sea during a violent squall — swallowed by waves while fishing beyond the cliffs. He never saw their bodies. Just the empty boat, carried back by the tide.
But it was at fourteen that the last ember of his childhood was extinguished. His younger brother died during a frostbite outbreak that swept through the village. The healers said it was quick. Eirik knew better. The boy had cried for hours before sleep took him.
And then there was his sister.
She had been the only one who still laughed. A gentle soul in a place where softness froze. Two winters before the sea took their parents, she was sold to a distant trader family — a deal struck quietly in the night for dried cod, grain, and a promise that was never kept. His mother didn’t cry. His father simply stared at the fire.
That night, Eirik punched the wall until his knuckles split. After that, he stopped speaking unless necessary.
The village of his birth was no cradle of kinship. It was survival carved into black wood and colder stone — a clutch of wind-battered huts trapped between glacier and sea. The elders left offerings to the storm gods and whispered that Norvhar made strong men. But Eirik had seen it made only graves.
No one stopped him when he left. Not even the elders. Not even the drunk old fisherman who once taught him to gut a seal. Eirik took only what he could carry: a stitched sack of pelts, a hunting knife, and a shortbow bought with stolen coins.
He didn’t say goodbye.
The journey south was a passage through desolation. Tundra stretched endlessly, broken only by the skeletons of trees and frozen rivers that glistened like glass veins. At night, he dreamed of wolves gnawing at his bones. During the day, he saw nothing but white and shadow. Loneliness pressed on him like a second skin.
On the fourth night, a sudden blizzard descended — a white wall of shrieking wind and ice. He took shelter beneath a jagged outcrop, limbs curling into himself as the snow swallowed the world. His teeth chattered, his breath shallow and sharp.
“Is this what’s left of me?” he thought. “A whisper in the snow? Like them?”
He remembered the shape of the boat drifting back without his parents. The silence after his brother’s last breath. The sound of the door closing when his sister was led away.
But he did not die.
At dawn, he crawled from the stone’s embrace, crusted with frost but breathing. He walked without thought, fueled by instinct and spite. The village elder’s words echoed faintly: “The cold keeps us alive, boy. Or it buries us.”
He wasn’t sure anymore which one he deserved.
When the walls of Frosthavn appeared days later, they shimmered through the haze like a mirage — towers of black stone wrapped in steel and smoke. Eirik stumbled through the gates like a half-dead fox. No one looked at him. No one cared.
The city smelled of fish oil, soot, and salt. The alleys hissed with secrets. The poor slept in barrels, their breath clouding the night air. Above them, noble estates glowed with firelight and excess.
But for a boy with frost in his lungs and a scream sealed in his chest, it was still a beginning.
Arriving at Frosthavn was a harsh awakening. He had expected a place of promise. Instead, he found a brutal city, where the wealth of nobles towered above the misery of the ice-crusted slums. The markets reeked of rot and fish oil, and every alley held the stench of desperation.
The city was a jagged mouth — stone teeth, smoke-veined breath, and alleys that bit with frost. No one asked his name. No one offered a hand. In the slums of the outer ring, children died of cold with snow still dusting their eyelashes.
Eirik watched. And learned.
He slept in the cracks between buildings, under carts, and once inside a butcher’s refuse barrel. He stole bread and dried roots, chewed leather and scavenged meat left for dogs. His hands grew calloused. His stomach forgot what warmth felt like. But he did not beg. He never would.
Each time he passed a shivering beggar, whispering for coin beneath a frozen shrine, his lips twisted into quiet contempt.
“Weakness is a choice,” he told himself. “And choice is survival.”
In the temple squares, he saw people crying before statues — desperate sobs echoing off the stone faces of forgotten gods. He felt nothing for them. They prayed, and still starved. They wept, and still froze. The gods were as useless as the elders of his village.
He remembered his sister’s pleading eyes the night she was sold. His father’s silence. His mother’s numb acceptance. They gave up, he realized. They let life take them.
And so, a thought took root — one that never left:
“The weak die. The strong endure. The rest is just noise.”
As weeks passed, he began to see people differently — not as people, but as measures of strength. The drunkards sprawled in gutters. The orphans too soft to steal. The women wailing outside brothels. The priests with soft hands and softer spines.
All of them were fading things, waiting to vanish.
Eirik hardened.
He trained his body in secret — climbing rooftops at night, leaping over gutters, scaling the cold iron ribs of the city’s abandoned bell towers. He hunted rats with bare hands in the market refusing to sell their pelts. He carried stones up frost-bitten stairways just to feel pain in his arms. Not for pride. For proof.
Proof that he was still becoming. That he hadn’t decayed like them.
He stopped speaking unless necessary. His eyes, already grey, took on the sheen of steel left too long in snow.
One night, while raiding a storage shed behind a tannery, he caught sight of his reflection in a sheet of frozen glass. He stared.
Not at a boy.
At something colder.
A shadow with hunger in its eyes.
The streets began to whisper about a feral youth with a wolf’s gaze and a hunter’s silence. Shopkeepers watched their stalls when he passed. The city guards began to take note.
But it was not fear he desired — not yet. It was distance.
A wall between himself and everything that reeked of pity.
Sometimes, he’d see a child crying in the snow and feel a flicker of something — a memory, maybe. But he’d crush it quickly. If they’re too weak to fight, let the frost take them, he’d think. The snow is honest.
One winter morning, as he passed through a narrow alley, he saw a man collapse, coughing blood onto the stone. People stepped around him. One woman crossed herself. Eirik paused, watched.
Then walked away.
“Mercy makes corpses.”
That was the day he stopped flinching at suffering.
That was the day the cold inside him stopped being a shield — and became a weapon.
One gray morning, Eirik tried to snatch a merchant’s coin pouch and was caught. The guard who seized him was massive, with a beard like a tangled flame.
“You think you can steal from us, vermin?” the man growled, slamming Eirik against a wall.
The blow knocked the air from his lungs, but Eirik didn’t cry out. When the guard lifted him by the collar and punched him hard in the face, he spat blood on the snow and met the man’s eyes, blazing with silent defiance.
“Hit me all you like,” he hissed, teeth red with blood. “I won’t kneel.”
His defiance only fueled the guard’s fury. He threw Eirik to the ground and began to kick him, each strike a wave of agony. Still, Eirik never screamed. With every blow, something hardened in him — a will he didn’t know he had.
Then a voice cut through the chaos, firm and cold as the air.
“That’s enough.”
The guard froze. The speaker was a man of presence — a weathered veteran in a dark fur cloak. It was Commander Rorik Thaldran, a legend among Norvhar’s legions.
He looked down at Eirik, bleeding in the snow, with quiet interest.
“Get up,” he said.
Eirik obeyed, barely standing.
“You have fire in your eyes,” Rorik said. “That’s rare around here. Maybe you’re more than just a street rat. Tell me, boy — ever thought about serving the kingdom?”
Eirik hesitated, his lip split and still bleeding, one eye swelling shut. The snow beneath him was stained red, and yet… he stood.
The word “kingdom” tasted foreign in his mouth. A concept wrapped in banners and thrones — things that had never fed him, clothed him, or saved his family. But the weight in Rorik’s voice was different. It wasn’t a sermon. It was a challenge.
“I’ve thought about surviving,” Eirik muttered, teeth gritted. “If that’s what serving means… then maybe.”
Rorik’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s a start.”
He was taken not to a barracks, but to a stone courtyard behind the local garrison — little more than a patch of ice and gravel surrounded by weather-worn training dummies and racks of splintered weapons. There were no welcoming speeches. No congratulations. Just a command:
“Train until your body remembers what your mind refuses to learn.”
Rorik oversaw everything.
Mornings began before dawn, with Eirik forced to plunge into a half-frozen trough and scrub himself raw. Then came sprints through thigh-deep snow. Lifting stones heavier than his own body. Swinging a wooden blade until his palms split and bled. Again. And again. And again.
“Discipline is colder than Norvhar,” Rorik said one morning. “But it cuts deeper when you lack it.”
Eirik never complained. He’d already mastered pain. What tested him was structure — the repetition, the rules, the brutal honesty of the drills. Here, he couldn’t lie. Not to others, not to himself.
But what began as contempt shifted into obsession. With each passing day, his strikes grew sharper. His breathing steadier. His wounds slower to appear — and faster to heal.
Rorik watched.
“You’re learning,” he said once. “But strength without purpose rots into cruelty.”
Eirik didn’t answer. Deep down, he still believed most people weren’t worth saving.
He trained with other recruits only when forced to. Most avoided him, wary of the boy with the scarred face and silent stare. A few tried to provoke him — all of them regretted it. Eirik fought like a starving wolf, not for victory, but domination.
In private, he still repeated the mantra he’d forged alone in Frosthavn’s streets:
“Weakness is a disease. I won’t catch it.”
Yet Rorik saw the cracks.
One evening, after a day of blade drills, the commander handed him a dull dagger and gestured to a frozen stump nearby. “Cut that knot.”
Eirik struck it — once, twice, a dozen times — until the wood split.
“Now tell me what you saw.”
“A flaw,” Eirik answered. “The crack beneath the surface.”
“And what would’ve happened if you struck blindly?”
“The dagger would break.”
Rorik nodded. “That’s strength, boy. Knowing where to strike. When to hold. What not to destroy.”
That night, Eirik sat alone in the snow, eyes closed, the dagger still in his lap. The cold didn’t bother him anymore. What bothered him… was that he hadn’t thought of that on his own.
They began watching him in silence.
At first, the other recruits mocked him — the pale-eyed boy who never spoke unless necessary, who trained alone long after the drills had ended. But soon, curiosity replaced mockery. Then wariness. Then something closer to awe.
Eirik didn’t try to lead. He didn’t speak to them. Didn’t offer advice. He ran alone. Ate alone. Fought alone. And yet… every morning, when he rose before the sun, they began rising too. When he filled buckets with ice to soak his bruises, they did the same. When he spent hours striking the training post until the wood split or his hands bled — they followed, copying his rhythm from a distance.
They called him Skallheim the Silent. The Wolf Pup. Never to his face.
One recruit, a broad-shouldered boy named Vorn, once approached during sparring drills. “Teach me that last feint,” he muttered, hopeful.
Eirik didn’t answer. He turned, struck Vorn in the ribs hard enough to drop him, then waited as the boy staggered up — only to knock him down again. And again.
There were days when the snow blurred his vision and his fingers trembled too violently to hold a blade. Days when his body collapsed during drills, convulsing in the cold, and he’d vomit from sheer exhaustion. One night, his legs gave out mid-sprint, and he struck his head on the stone barracks wall — blood froze instantly on his temple.
Rorik found him hours later, unconscious in the snow.
The commander didn’t scold him. Only ordered the healers to tend to the worst wounds.
When Eirik woke, he asked only one thing:
“Did I finish the run?”
Rorik didn’t answer.
By the next dusk, Eirik was back on his feet — limping, coughing, but moving.
And the recruits… they watched that too.
They began following him from a distance on the running tracks. Matching his weight drills. Even mimicking the rhythm of his breathing exercises — sharp inhale, longer exhale, just as Rorik had taught.
But when one of them tried to run beside him, Eirik elbowed him off the path. Another tried to spar; Eirik broke the boy’s stance with a vicious sweep and left him gasping in the mud.
It wasn’t cruelty. Eirik didn’t sneer, didn’t boast, didn’t taunt. He simply didn’t tolerate weakness in his space — not even shadows of it.
That was what made him dangerous.
And Rorik observed all of it.
From the ramparts. From the mess hall. From the frost-covered benches near the training yard.
He watched the bruises that never healed. The nights Eirik didn’t sleep, pacing alone. The eyes that never softened — even when the boy’s body was breaking.
“You’re not forging him,” the healer whispered once. “You’re letting the ice shape him.”
Rorik said nothing.
But at night, when the wind howled across the compound like a mourning wolf, he sometimes lingered outside Eirik’s quarters — just to be sure the boy still breathed.
On the shadowed slopes of the Tenebris Mountains, shrouded in eternal mist and thick, ancient forests, lay Shaer’Zanir—a village hidden from the curious eyes of the world. There, the dark elves kept to their ancestral traditions, guarding their secrets and their bloodline with rigid discipline and silent vigilance.
To Sylrith Naerthil, the mountains were both a home and a prison.
Tall and slender, with skin like polished obsidian and silver eyes that gleamed like stars in a moonless night, she was the youngest daughter of Loryen Naerthil, one of the clan elders. Since childhood, Sylrith had felt the weight of her family’s expectations pressing down on her true self like chains woven in silence.
Shaer’Zanir was a place of merciless order, where every gesture and word was governed by laws as old as the mountains themselves. The elders ruled with iron restraint, and Loryen’s word within their household was law.
“You carry the blood of the Naerthil,” he would often say. “That means honor, duty, and obedience.”
But to Sylrith, it meant only suffocation.
She had grown up on stories of sacrifice and ancestral duty—but never found them inspiring. To her, they were tales of blind obedience and wasted lives, repeating like a cursed litany through generations.
Her arranged marriage to Zaleth Moirn symbolized everything she despised. Zaleth was the perfect embodiment of a noble dark elf—disciplined, respectable, unwaveringly loyal to tradition.
“Our union will strengthen the clan,” he said with a polished smile that never reached his eyes. “You should be proud.”
But Sylrith saw only a life of forced submission and silence.
The Naerthil household in Shaer’Zanir was carved into the mountainside like a wound hidden beneath snow and ivy. There, affection was a myth, and childhood was a rehearsal for servitude. From the age she could walk, Sylrith was measured, trained, and shaped—not into a person, but a reflection of her lineage.
“A Naerthil does not ask why,” said her tutors. “She endures. She perfects. She obeys.”
Each day was divided into lessons and drills. Morning rituals on the old laws of clan governance. Midday combat training with blunt-edged spears and choreographed footwork. Afternoon sessions with scholars on history, genealogy, and the unending politics of elven nobility. She hated them all.
The books she longed to read—treatises on wild magic, scrolls on forgotten places, maps of the ruined roads of Astravara—were forbidden. The bow she carved in secret at age ten was found and broken in front of her, her father’s voice cold as marble.
“You are not a ranger,” Loryen said. “You are Naerthil. Do not lower yourself with peasant tools.”
There was no space to fail. A wrong answer meant isolation. A misstep during training meant public reprimand. And when once, as a child, she dared to speak her dreams aloud—to explore the world beyond the mountains—her father’s response was silence. Not anger. Not disappointment. Just silence. It was worse than punishment.
The house was full of people, yet she had never felt more alone. Her sisters whispered of suitors. Her brothers competed in tournaments for favor. Sylrith… watched the horizon.
It was Old-Shadow who saw her, not as a disappointment, but as a flame.
In the stillness of his cottage, where moss grew like velvet on the stone and runes glowed faintly with old power, he spoke not as a teacher, but as one who had already been broken—and rebuilt.
“Do you think this is the life your soul was meant for?” he asked one evening. “There is a storm coming, girl. The mountains are whispering again. And you… you are listening.”
When she asked what he meant, he only smiled.
“The blood in your veins may be Naerthil. But the wind that stirs it comes from older places.” “You feel it too, don’t you? Something is waking. Something buried. And it will want a voice.”
Sylrith never forgot those words.
One night, while escaping yet another of the family’s endless formal gatherings, she found refuge in the presence of Old-Shadow, an elder who lived alone at the edge of the village. Unlike the others, he did not judge her unrest.
“You remind me of a flame trying to survive the wind,” he told her, his voice gravelly and thick with old secrets. “But beware, girl. Flames draw both light—and shadow.”
Old-Shadow spoke to her of the Shadows of Tenebris, a secretive order of spies and assassins who lived beyond the laws of the clan. Free from ancestral expectations—but at a high cost: isolation, suspicion, and the burden of doing what nobles would never admit must be done, at least for a hundred years before they could be free.
To Sylrith, it sounded not like a warning—but a promise.
When she finally refused to marry Zaleth, Loryen erupted in fury.
“You have no choice!” he roared, his voice echoing through the halls of the Naerthil estate. “Do you think the clan exists to cater to your whims? Our blood is our legacy. You have a duty to preserve it!”
“And what about my duty to myself?” she retorted, her eyes burning with resolve. “I won’t be a piece in the clan’s game. I want something more.”
“Something more?” Loryen laughed bitterly. “You are nothing without the clan, Sylrith. Remember that.”
The confrontation ended with Sylrith locked in her chambers under guard.
But that night, she made her choice.
Under the pale gaze of the moon, Sylrith gathered what she could: a dark cloak, a dagger that had belonged to her mother, and a pouch of supplies. With Old-Shadow’s help and a half-formed plan, she slipped through the hidden paths that wove through the roots of the mountains.
“If you truly wish to live beyond your father’s shadow,” Old-Shadow whispered as she left, “go to Kaer’Thalor. It is where the Shadows of Tenebris train those who seek freedom. But know this—they accept no weakness.”
Sylrith’s journey through the mountains was a trial in itself. Icy winds cut like knives. The dark forests moved with unseen things. The cliffs seemed to whisper curses in the old tongue. But she pressed on, driven by something far deeper than rebellion.
The fortress appeared only at twilight.
Hidden in the crags of the inner Tenebris range, Kaer’Thalor did not reveal itself to the uninvited. To find it, one had to be shown, or be chosen. Sylrith was both—barely.
Its walls were carved directly from obsidian rock, veined with silver ore and ancient wards that shimmered faintly under starlight. No banners flew above its gates. No torches lit its passageways. It was a place where silence was not absence—it was command.
Inside, the fortress spiraled downward like a blade plunged into the heart of the mountain. Cold corridors twisted through chambers echoing with the footfalls of those too burdened to speak. Every surface was cold stone. Every scent was blood, dust, and iron.
It was here the Shadows of Tenebris trained the broken, the outcast, and the dangerous. Not to redeem them—but to weaponize them.
The recruits of the Shadows were a broken mosaic—hardened warriors and lost souls, each tested by the world and shaped by failure. In their eyes, Sylrith was nothing but a pampered noble, far from her depth.
“You think you belong here?” mocked one recruit, Tyran Velk, his voice sharp with disdain. “Your high blood won’t help you when we’re knee-deep in rot.”
The entry ritual was simple: survive the first night.
Seventy recruits were left in the lower chambers without light, food, or guidance. Some went mad. Others attacked each other. Sylrith waited in silence, listening, unmoving, until the others had screamed themselves into sleep or death.
When the iron doors opened at dawn, only sixty-one remained. She was one of them.
“You are not welcome here,” said a voice—Voridan Thalrak, the master of Kaer’Thalor, whose very presence seemed to bend the air with pressure. “But you are necessary.”
He did not speak again. The training began immediately.
Kaer’Thalor did not break her on the first day. It broke her slowly. Deliberately. Without even trying.
Gone were the silken robes and measured routines of Shaer’Zanir. Here, dawn meant cold water thrown onto her face and the rough voice of a handler dragging her out of a stone cell too narrow to stretch in. The corridors stank of sweat, blood, and burnt oil. Food was served in wooden bowls that reeked of rot—if you met your quotas. Fail a drill, and your rations were halved. Fail again, and they were gone entirely.
“You’re not in your father’s house now,” one of the recruits whispered to her on the second day, just before slamming a boot into her ribs during sparring. “Here, no one bows to your name. Only to your bruises.”
The instructors—if they could be called that—watched from above, cloaked in shadows and silence. They rarely spoke. When they did, it was only to name the fallen. “Another weak one.” “Clean the floor.” “Next.”
There were no rewards. Only punishments. When Sylrith faltered during a climbing drill and failed to scale a jagged wall, she was stripped of food for two days. When she hesitated in combat against a larger recruit, she was whipped across the back with a wet rope laced with glass chips.
And yet, none of it stung like the absence of Old-Shadow.
In Shaer’Zanir, even in the coldness of her father’s rule, she had known one voice that spoke with warmth. One elder who treated her not as a vessel of expectation, but as someone worth seeing. Here, there was no warmth. No kindness. No softness. And gods—how she missed her younger brothers.
She remembered how little Thael used to sneak into her room after evening drills, bringing small stones he’d carved into animals.
“So you don’t forget the wild places,” he’d whisper. And now, in this place of cold blades and colder hearts, there were no carved stones. Only bruises.
Her fellow recruits mocked her. Some out of jealousy. Others out of instinct. She was taller, better-spoken, and bore the old markings of nobility in how she carried herself. So they beat it out of her.
“Hey, princess,” said Tyran Velk, the brute with a broken nose and a smile like a cracked blade. “Still waiting for your butler to bring your bow?”
The others laughed. She did not.
When they hit her, she hit back. When they stole her blankets, she trained longer in the cold. When her rations were taken, she scavenged roots from the moss gardens that grew wild on the outer paths. She endured. Because to give in meant returning. And returning meant never seeing the world beyond Tenebris.
Sometimes, late at night, when sleep came like a thief and her muscles throbbed with exhaustion, she would lie awake on the stone floor and remember stories.
Stories the servants told when they thought the children were asleep. Tales of Valthenor, the city of a hundred bridges. Of the floating lights of Olyndros. Of ancient ruins deep in the jungles where ghosts still sang in forgotten tongues. Or the voice of Old-Shadow, murmuring half-dreamed truths about the edge of the map—
“There’s more than this. More than duty, more than clan, more than shadows. But to find it, girl… you have to survive long enough to get there.”
That was it. That was her reason.
Not pride. Not legacy. Not even revenge. Curiosity. Hunger for a world she had never touched. And a terror more profound than death itself: that she might never live to see it.
Time ceased to have meaning in Kaer’Thalor. There were no calendars, no celebrations, no seasons. Only progression through pain.
After the first winter cycle, Sylrith survived the physical trials that culled nearly half of the recruits. The bruises faded. The broken bones healed. What followed did not.
This new phase was quieter. Deadlier.
“You have bones now,” Voridan Thalrak declared, during the first gathering of the survivors. “Let us see if you have marrow.”
The psychological phase began with disorientation.
Recruits were scattered across the northern ridges—blindfolded, half-starved, and hunted by instructors wearing the faces of monsters. Some were dragged from their sleep by nets. Others were buried alive and forced to claw through earth to breathe. Every test was a simulation. But the terror was real.
Sylrith spent five days hiding in the roots of a frozen pine, her body wrapped in snow-drenched cloths to avoid detection by trained ice-hounds. She learned not to breathe. Not to twitch. Not to blink.
“If the beast sees you,” her handler had whispered, “you are already dead.”
The second layer of torment was silence.
They were trained to move, kill, and endure without a single sound. Combat drills took place in chambers lined with obsidian—any noise above a whisper echoed violently, alerting the instructors stationed behind false walls.
Failure meant lashes across the soles of their feet. Enough to make walking agony. But limp, and you were dragged back to start. Repeat enough times, and you were dismissed. Dismissal meant exile into the mountains, naked and unarmed.
One recruit screamed during a nerve-twisting joint dislocation exercise. He was never seen again.
Then came The Cipher Trials.
Each recruit received a secret code—a word carved into memory through pain and repetition. If spoken aloud under torture, they were marked unfit and expelled. Yet, each recruit also knew: acquiring another’s code earned rations, warmth, and even praise.
They watched each other constantly.
Who was cracking? Who might betray their secret in a moment of weakness?
Sylrith endured seven days in the dark, suspended by iron hooks from her shoulders. Every hour, she was asked for her code. She refused. Once, a girl named Senra tried to befriend her. Shared stolen fruit. Then, whispered:
“Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
Sylrith only smiled. Senra disappeared the next morning.
Not all torment was cruelty.
They were trained in how to disappear in a city. How to forge a face from nothing. How to enter a fortress and leave no trace. How to seduce, mislead, poison, vanish. They were taught how to erase a life so cleanly that not even memory would mourn it.
During this phase, instructors were no longer distant shadows. They were present. Brutal. Omnipresent.
Voridan broke a recruit’s leg for flinching during a mock interrogation. Mistress Yrlissa made another drown a mouse in bare hands for failing to extract information cleanly.
Sylrith’s reputation changed. She was still a target—still too proud, too composed—but some now respected her. Others feared her.
Tyran Velk, the brute from her first days, kept his distance now. Krill Dravos, always watchful, offered no comfort, but sometimes nodded when she succeeded. And Irilsa Venor… …she simply watched, like a viper judging when to strike.
The Cipher Trials blurred the line between torment and revelation. Every glance became a threat, every silence a strategy. But even in the depths of suspicion, the recruits—creatures of necessity—formed instinctive bonds. Unspoken, fragile, but real.
They sat in small circles during mealtime, backs to stone, bowls in laps, eyes always on the corridors. No one spoke of trust. But some began to share rations when the punishments became unbearable. A bruised shoulder might be wrapped. A warning hissed before an ambush. And if one screamed in sleep, someone—anyone—would nudge them awake.
It was not kindness. It was tribalism. A quiet acknowledgment: we are all broken here, but not yet ash.
Sylrith rarely spoke. But the others noticed her stillness. Her precision. And they began to leave a small space open beside them at the fireless meals. That space was not friendship—but it was not exile.
And then there was Irilsa.
Where Sylrith moved like falling snow, Irilsa burned like coals under iron. She did not seek alliances, but they came to her. Her presence commanded attention, a strange magnetism born of cold confidence and eyes that never stopped measuring.
They sparred often—Kaer’Thalor ensured that. Blades, poisons, and words.
In one exercise, they were paired for a night reconnaissance simulation, tasked with retrieving a token from an instructor’s chamber without being seen. They moved like twin ghosts through the obsidian halls, communicating only through breath and glance.
When Irilsa scaled a crumbling wall and her grip slipped, Sylrith caught her wrist.
For a moment, their eyes met—silver against storm-grey—and the world went still.
“You could let me fall,” Irilsa whispered, voice raw from the cold.
“I don’t waste tools,” Sylrith murmured.
And she pulled her up.
Later, when they completed the mission and returned the token, Voridan merely nodded. But Irilsa lingered as the others dispersed, wiping blood from a scratch across her cheek.
“You don’t hate me,” she said flatly. “Not yet.”
Sylrith didn’t look at her. “I don’t have time for hatred.”
Irilsa smiled then—not mockery, but something colder. Recognition.
“You’re not like the others,” she said. “You’re not here for revenge, or redemption. You’re here because you can’t stop yourself. And that’s what makes you dangerous.”
From that night forward, their rivalry shifted. Still sharp. Still brutal. But under it, a strange gravity. When Irilsa caught a fever after a hunt, Sylrith left a sprig of shadowroot in her satchel. When Sylrith returned late from an exercise, bruised and bleeding, Irilsa was the one who left a stolen salve beside her cot.
Neither spoke of it.
They didn’t need to.
Because in Kaer’Thalor, weakness was death.
But knowing who would bleed beside you—who would not look away when the cold came—was survival.
And sometimes, in the moments between trials, in the long silences when breath fogged against stone, Sylrith wondered if this was what passed for friendship among shadows.
Not warmth.
But the absence of betrayal.
Upon surviving the second phase, each recruit received their first tattoo—a jagged spiral marked into the inside of the left wrist with obsidian ink.
“The mark of the Shadow-Born,” said the tattooist, her hands steady. “You are no longer children.”
The pain was sharp. But Sylrith barely flinched. When it was done, she stared at the ink. She had not chosen this path for glory. But it was hers now. And she would see it to the end.
The air had changed.
It was no longer merely cold—it shimmered with tension, as though the very stone walls of Kaer’Thalor held their breath. This was not fear. It was anticipation.
The Ritual Watcher had arrived.
No one spoke his name. He was not an instructor. Nor a commander. He wore no insignia, carried no blades. Yet when he walked the corridors, even Voridan Thalrak stepped aside.
“He observes the soul,” whispered Mistress Yrlissa. “He sees what the flesh hides.”
Sylrith first saw him during a night trial. She was blindfolded, hands bound, navigating a maze of sound and pressure. When she reached the center—alone, bruised and panting—he was there. Standing in silence. His eyes glowed faintly, like coals in snow.
He said nothing. Only raised one hand, and shadows surged around her like breath.
The third phase of training was the Wroughting — the forging of shadow within the soul.
“You will not learn spells,” said Voridan. “You will become the spell.”
The students were taken beneath Kaer’Thalor, into the Vault of Hollow Flame — a subterranean sanctum carved from black basalt, lit only by mirrored obsidian. There, under the silent gaze of the Watcher, they learned to manipulate shadow — not as light’s absence, but as a living force.
Sylrith felt it immediately.
The darkness whispered to her. Not in words, but in feelings. Curiosity. Hunger. Power.
She learned to draw it around her like a cloak, blurring her presence from the sight of others. To make her voice echo from the wrong direction. To step into a room unnoticed and leave as a phantom.
But shadow demanded a price.
Each time she touched it, a sliver of her warmth slipped away. Memories blurred. Joys faded. Laughter from her childhood felt like echoes from a stranger’s dream.
They were encouraged to compete. To hunt each other, in structured trials and unsanctioned ambushes. Instructors no longer punished backstabbing. They rewarded it.
“Trust is weakness,” said Yrlissa. “To survive, you must be your own blade.”
Some recruits formed pacts. Others tested poison resistance on each other. One girl, Deyra Valas, slit a comrade’s throat in his sleep just to avoid pairing with him in the next exercise.
Sylrith adapted.
She became silent as frost, swift as a falling feather. She no longer slept in the same place twice. She stopped speaking unless necessary.
But it was not hatred. It was preservation.
By the time the third phase began, whatever threadbare bonds remained among the recruits had frayed to nothing. Trust, once a necessary illusion, became a liability. Kaer’Thalor had taught them to kill in silence. Now it taught them to hunt each other in silence.
The rules shifted. Assignments became covert competitions. The reward for completing a task—be it assassination, sabotage, or infiltration—wasn’t survival. It was power.
More rations. More warmth. More time without pain.
The instructors offered nothing directly. But the implication was clear: climb, or be climbed over.
Irilsa understood this before the others.
She became a shadow within shadows—not just executing orders, but doing so with flair, cruelty, and calculation. Recruits who crossed her found blades near their sleeping cots or traps laid in training exercises. She never got caught. Never left proof. But all of them knew.
She made them afraid.
And that fear was currency.
Sylrith watched this unfold from a distance. Not with shock—Kaer’Thalor had long ago crushed her illusions—but with a quiet, growing detachment. She did not play Irilsa’s games. She did not join the alliances formed in hushed corners or trade favors in blood. She stayed apart.
Where Irilsa ruled through tension, Sylrith dissolved into silence.
They no longer spoke.
In drills, they avoided eye contact.
In exercises, they were placed on opposite teams and never needed to be told to fight as if it were real.
They had become mirrors, cracked and turned against each other.
And yet, beneath the cold indifference and sharpened distance, something deeper pulsed—resentment, unspoken accusation, the ache of something that might have been respect. Or friendship. Or warning.
One evening, after an infiltration run through the mountain’s lower veins, Sylrith returned to find her rations missing and her cot soaked in oil. No proof. No name.
But she knew.
Irilsa passed her in the corridor, brushing shoulders just enough to whisper: “Next time, don’t come back late.”
Sylrith didn’t respond.
She wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
Later that week, Irilsa returned from a mission with a broken wrist and blood caked beneath her nails. No one helped her. Sylrith walked past her in the infirmary and said nothing.
But she remembered.
Everyone remembered.
Because this phase was not about perfection—it was about being the last one standing.
And though no blade had yet been drawn between them in truth, the wound was already open.
Kaer’Thalor had cut it well.
At the end of the shadow phase, those who survived the Wroughting received their second tattoo:
A flowing pattern like a serpentine spiral across the ribcage, etched in violet-black ink that shimmered under moonlight. It marked them as Veilborn — touched by shadow, shaped by silence.
“From now on,” the tattooist whispered as ink and pain met skin, “you belong to what cannot be seen.”
Sylrith accepted the pain in silence. When it was done, she looked at her reflection in a still water basin. The face that stared back was colder. Sharper. Unfamiliar.
Now came the Hunts.
Every week, the recruits were dispatched into the wild — sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs — to hunt beasts of Tenebris. Not merely to kill, but to return with something untouched by claw or rot: a fang, a hide, a trophy.
Sylrith once tracked a nightstalker, a creature of skeletal wings and hollow eyes, through an icebound ravine for five days. She used shadow to confuse its senses. Poison to weaken it. Silence to slit its throat.
When she returned, the jawbone she carried earned her five days of rest. Others returned with nothing. Or not at all.
They called it The Hunt, though none of them truly understood what they were hunting.
In truth, it was they who were being hunted—by the cold, the silence, the eyes of the mountains, and the ever-present scrutiny of the Watcher.
No announcements were made. One morning, the bells ceased to ring. Rations were halved. Fires were left unlit. And they were sent into the frost-veined wilds, alone.
Each recruit was assigned a beast to track, a location to infiltrate, a trail to follow into the mouths of forgotten things. They were given nothing but a name—cryptic, symbolic, often misleading—and a time to return.
Most did not.
Those who came back arrived changed. Thin. Hollow-eyed. Stained in the blood of things not entirely mortal.
The Watcher never spoke. But his gaze lingered.
He was seen often during this phase—unlike in the earlier cycles. Perched atop ruined towers or seated within the blackened amphitheater, always veiled, always watching. Recruits would find small marks carved into trees along their paths—glyphs only Sylrith seemed to recognize.
They were his.
They were meant for her.
He is watching you more than the others, Old-Shadow had once told her. Not because he doubts you. Because he fears you may one day doubt yourself.
She did not understand then.
Now, as she buried a blade into the spine of a frostlurker and carved out its heart for evidence, she wondered if she ever would.
There was no time for rivalry anymore. The Hunt consumed everything.
Recruits passed each other only in silence—ghosts sharing fleeting glances in the tunnels before vanishing into their own missions. No shared meals. No whispered warnings. Just weeks of isolation and survival.
Sylrith hadn’t seen Irilsa in months.
And when she did—one passing moment in the armory corridor—they said nothing. Irilsa’s gaze flicked toward her, unreadable, then away.
No smirk. No comment. Just indifference.
A quiet acknowledgment: I see you. But I no longer care.
That stung more than open threat.
Sylrith, too, had changed. Her face had sharpened. Her voice was rarely heard. When others spoke to her, they found only a nod, a passing thought, or nothing. The cold had entered her bones and rooted there.
But her precision had grown.
She had scaled cliffs of black ice to retrieve blood-vines from the nests of stormcrows. Crawled naked through sulfur-choked vents to observe volcanic beasts without being sensed. She had stood for three days in a shallow grave to study the patrol of an orcish scout group without flinching once.
She no longer dreamt.
She didn’t have time for dreams.
And somewhere along those months, the word duty stopped being a burden.
It became a shape.
A blade honed in silence.
By the end of The Hunt, only thirteen recruits remained from the original sixty-one.
They returned to Kaer’Thalor without ceremony.
No applause.
No welcome.
Only silence, and the waiting glyphs etched into their beds—new instructions, final tests.
And one message carved in old runes upon the central pillar of the chamber:
“To become shadow, one must bleed for silence. The last flame begins where the last bond ends.”
Sylrith read it once.
Then turned away.
The last phase was near.
And there would be no one left to share the fire.
No more horns. No morning bells. No warnings.
The final phase had begun—not with ceremony, but with silence.
One dawn, the recruits were gathered in the Hall of Vanished Names, where the walls bore no banners and the air was always cold. Voridan addressed them only once.
“From now on, there are no instructors. No lessons. Only judgment. You are no longer students. You are Shadows being tested by the mountain itself.”
And then he left.
Their first task came without announcement.
They were led into a stone chamber where three prisoners knelt, bound and gagged. A black-robed overseer stood behind them, silent.
Each recruit was given a blade, a list of names, and a single command:
“Extract the truth. You are not to know their crimes. Only if they are lying.”
Some hesitated. Others obeyed too quickly.
Sylrith looked into the eyes of her assigned prisoner—a gaunt human man with swollen wrists and a shattered nose. He did not beg. He simply wept.
She did what was asked. She told herself it was duty. But that night, she could not sleep.
Next, they were sent into the valleys below the mountains, cloaked in illusion and silence. There, they watched.
Bandits torching a village. Slavers dragging children from caravans. Men with torches setting fire to homes as screams echoed into the night.
Their orders were clear: observe only. Do not intervene.
It was a lesson in control. In detachment.
Sylrith clenched her fists until her palms bled. She obeyed.
Then came real missions.
First, they were sent against invaders — beastkin raiders that threatened Tenebris’ borders. Then, low-level criminals. Informants. Traitors.
The kill orders were final. No room for questions. No time for mercy.
Some targets begged. Others offered gold. One simply said, “Thank you,” before the blade fell.
With each mission, recruits disappeared. Not just the weak.
Failure was not punished anymore. It was erased.
Those who returned said nothing. No questions were asked.
Sylrith noticed that her own voice had become quieter. Not out of strategy—but instinct.
She stopped speaking when unnecessary. Stopped writing her thoughts in journals. Even her dreams grew silent.
They did not call it graduation. Kaer’Thalor had no room for such luxuries. There were no titles bestowed, no ceremonies, no bonds of kinship sealed in triumph. The last phase was simply known as The Purpose—where shadow was tested by fire, and belief by blood.
The assignments were real now. No longer drills. No longer illusions.
Real targets. Real consequences.
Sylrith was sent to observe a slave ring operating within the southern trade routes. She uncovered everything within days—the route masters, the branded children, the smuggled charms used to subdue magical captives. Her mission was simple: eliminate the ring leader.
But she didn’t kill him in his sleep, as would have been expected.
Instead, she orchestrated a diversion—lighting fire to the outer encampments while freeing the captives under cover of chaos. She then cornered the slaver in a collapsing tunnel, blade pressed to his throat.
She killed him. Swift. Clean.
But it had taken three nights longer than planned. She returned exhausted, wounded, but successful.
Irilsa, on the other hand, completed her assignment in a single night. Poisoned a diplomat and their entire household. Burned the correspondence. Left no survivors. No questions.
She returned bloodstained and smirking.
“They sent you after smugglers,” she said to Sylrith, “and you returned with sentiment. That’s not a blade. That’s a leash.”
Sylrith said nothing.
But she remembered.
Irilsa’s methods were efficient. Clinical. She never hesitated. But she had begun to take pleasure in cruelty. Not the reckless kind—no, hers was curated. Measured. She learned how to break her targets with silence, sow terror before ever drawing a weapon.
And she turned that gift inward.
“Do you think he watches you because he believes in you?” Irilsa asked one night, sitting beside the edge of the mountain overlook after a mission. “No. He watches you because he wants to see if you’ll break.”
Sylrith did not answer.
She didn’t need to.
That night, she found a mark carved into her doorframe. A single rune, old and barely visible. One of the Watcher’s.
“You chose the longer path. That is not weakness.”
Sometimes she found his signs in unexpected places: etched into a dying tree, carved on the side of a hunter’s trap, whispered in the breath of an executed heretic.
He never appeared.
But she knew.
He was following.
He never reprimanded her. Never questioned her hesitations. But his presence—distant and inscrutable—was a constant pressure that sharpened her resolve more than any threat.
Because he never told her what to be.
He simply reminded her of what she had chosen.
And that was enough.
After completing her third true assassination, Sylrith was called to the Tomb The final tattoo came at the end of winter.
The ink was mixed with ash, blood, and shadowroot. It was carved into the back of her shoulder, spiraling downward in a serpent’s coil—an old Tenebris sigil that meant both Oath and Burden.
The instructor who gave it did not speak.
But when the blade lifted from her skin, Sylrith felt it like a weight pulling her toward something far older than herself.
Her brothers were gone.
Her childhood was a pale memory.
Even Irilsa, now a specter of calculated violence, had become something else.
Only Sylrith remained.
Sharpened. Tempered. And yet, still… not broken.
Then, one morning, a sealed scroll awaited her atop her bedding.
It bore the sigil of Kaer’Thalor and a wax mark in deep crimson—the Watcher’s own seal.
Inside, only a few words:
“You are summoned. You have been chosen. This will be your Severing.”
Below, coordinates. A name. A map.
No explanations. No return instructions.
Sylrith folded the scroll carefully, placed it inside her cloak, and prepared her gear: blades, poisons, binding ropes, a small vial of shadow-ink.
She stood in the mirrorless room, the firelight casting no comfort.
“Whatever this mission is,” she thought, “I will finish it. Not because they command it. But because I must see what lies beyond this darkness.”
The Watcher met her only once before she departed.
It was at the cliff’s edge above Kaer’Thalor, where the wind howled like forgotten gods.
He did not speak his name.
He only looked at her.
“I have no praise for you,” he said. “Only this: when the time comes, you will remember what others forget.”
She bowed.
Not in submission.
In acknowledgment.
And when she turned away, he was already gone.
And with that, Sylrith left the only home she had ever known since fleeing Shaer’Zanir. Not as a daughter. Not as a rebel. But as a Shadow of Tenebris.
The Kingdom of Eldoria was a land of stark contrasts. Beneath the golden light of dawn, its cities gleamed with marble spires and gilded domes, but to those who lived in the shadows, that brilliance was nothing more than a veil — one that concealed rot, inequality, and ancient secrets.
Magic, though grand in appearance, was as much a burden to its wielders as it was a curse to those who lived near it.
Altharion walked alone along the cobbled road that led to the capital, Eldorath, his tattered cloak drawn tightly around his shoulders, concealing his pointed ears from the curious stares of passing travelers. In his hand, he clutched a sealed letter — his acceptance into the Arcanum Academy of Eldoria. A place both revered and feared in equal measure.
The young half-elf was tall and lean, with tousled brown hair that hung over his vigilant green eyes. He felt the weight of suspicion in every passing glance from the royal guards stationed at the city gates — especially from the Paladins of Elyonel, protectors of the realm and vigilant wardens of magic.
“You’re late,” one of them said coldly, examining his letter. The disdain in the man’s eyes was unmistakable once he noticed Altharion’s heritage.
Altharion bit his tongue, swallowing his pride.
“Yes, sir. It won’t happen again.”
As he crossed the threshold into the city, he was struck by the chasm between the idealized vision of Eldorath and its lived reality. The marble towers pierced the sky like spears, immaculate in their elegance, but at street level, beggars huddled in the shadows of opulent mansions, and squalid homes were wedged between palatial estates.
“Welcome to the heart of the world,” he muttered to himself, half in awe, half in bitterness.
As Altharion stepped beyond the city gates, the full weight of Eldorath unfolded before him.
The capital of Eldoria, radiant in every propaganda mural and scripture, towered over the common folk like a living contradiction. White marble bridges spanned emerald canals, linking noble districts adorned with temples and statuary devoted to Elyonel, the Primordial God of Light. But the streets below those bridges were choked with filth, where barefoot children begged beside sanctified fountains and zealots screamed sermons about purity and divine justice.
He passed under a great archway carved with runes of protection — and etched graffiti beneath it, hastily scratched and quickly smeared with blood, read:
“Magic is a sin unless you’re rich.”
The city reeked of incense and rot. And memory.
His pace slowed, his breath catching in his throat as a familiar scent — wet stone, burnt bread, and smoke — stirred an old ache. A memory, sharp and sudden.
He had been eight years old. The rain was relentless that night, turning dirt roads into rivers and rooftops into drums.
He remembered the inn — The Blue Ember — where his mother, cloaked and trembling, had begged for shelter. Her voice had been soft, careful not to speak the ancient elven syllables that so easily betrayed her.
“Just one night,” she had said. “My son is ill.”
Altharion, thin as bone and burning with fever, remembered the stares. The innkeeper had stepped forward — a man with eyes like flint and a hand that never left the hilt of the short sword at his side.
“We don’t take in bastards of the forest.”
He remembered being dragged out into the mud, coughing, the torchlight of paladin patrols reflected in puddles around them. His mother had held him close beneath a bridge, whispering an elven lullaby while shivering.
“One day,” she had said, brushing back his hair, “they’ll see you as more than your blood. You’ll be something greater.”
That bridge was gone now — paved over by a new marble road leading to a shrine of Saint Elidryn, martyr of the Mage Purge. The state was rewriting history, and the capital wore its illusion well.
Paladins in white-gold armor marched in formation, their tabards embroidered with the sunburst of Elyonel. Their expressions were cold, their authority absolute. Each carried both a blade and a scroll — one to judge, the other to punish.
“How many like me were dragged through these streets?” Altharion wondered. “How many disappeared behind those walls and never came back?”
A sense of dread clung to him like a wet cloak. The Academy Arcana, once a distant dream, now stood as a monolith of stone and order on the horizon. Even from afar, its black spires pierced the sky like the teeth of a trap.
His fingers tightened around the letter in his hand.
“This is the only way forward,” he told himself. “I’ll survive. I always have.”
But deep inside, as he walked through the vein-like alleys of Eldorath, he wasn’t sure whether he was arriving at a place of knowledge — or stepping into a gilded cage where dreams went to die.
The main gate of the Arcane Academy of Eldoria rose before him like the mouth of an ancient cathedral, encrusted with runes that pulsed with a faint glow — now blue, now silver — as if they breathed magic. The black stone walls seemed to absorb the daylight, and the purple and gold banners of the Arcane Crown fluttered on the battlements, stamped with the symbol of Elyonel: an eye engulfed in ascending flames.
Altharion stood still. For a moment, he remained frozen, trying to convince himself that this was the very place spoken of in hushed tones — whispered in forbidden grimoires and feared in the nightmares of superstitious peasants.
But now… he was inside.
As he stepped through the gates, a subtle magical field wrapped around him like a cold breeze — not hostile, but inquisitive, as though the academy itself wished to know who had crossed its threshold. The noise of the outside world faded, replaced by a soft murmur: the turning of pages, the hum of floating crystals, and the whisper of spells being recited.
And then he saw it.
The inner courtyard of the academy was vast, encircled by spiraling towers and columns of living obsidian, each etched with the names of ancient archmages. Suspended walkways connected the buildings, where apprentices of all ages crossed in colored robes and eyes full of ambition. In the center stood a levitating crystal obelisk, fed by raw energy that flowed in glowing arcs to nearby fountains.
Floating lights hovered like enchanted fireflies, illuminating pathways in the corridors. Stone sculptures whispered to each other in old arcane tongues. Above it all, dragons made of light and energy danced around the main tower — a perpetual illusion maintained by the academy’s master conjurers.
Altharion stopped in his tracks, his eyes wide with wonder like a child’s. His heart raced. For the first time in his life, he felt something new: the freedom to practice magic openly — without hiding, without fear of torches or pitchforks.
“It’s real…” he whispered to himself, pressing his hand to the warm stone wall, alive with arcane energy. “They do this… in broad daylight.”
He forgot the time.
He turned left into a hallway lit by ethereal globes, only to lose himself between two laboratories. He heard the sound of a class in the distance — throats chanting runic hymns, laughter between spellwork. In a smaller courtyard, he saw a group of youths levitating books as robed masters watched from afar. He almost approached — almost — but hesitated. It still felt like a world that did not belong to him.
Then a voice echoed behind him:
“By Elyonel, boy, you’re two hours late.” The tone was irritated, but not cruel.
Altharion turned to see a paladin — an older man with a short beard and tired eyes, though not unkind. His armor bore the traditional sigil of Elyonel’s knights — a sun emblazoned across the chest — yet something about him was different: the way he didn’t reach for his sword upon seeing Altharion, as so many others would.
“Altharion, right? Half-elf. Council letter. I searched for you three times at the gate before I gave up.” He sighed, motioning down a corridor. “You’re supposed to be at the admission ceremony. Come with me.”
Altharion nodded, murmuring a quiet “Sorry.” But the paladin simply shook his head.
“I’d get lost too, if it were my first time here. Green eyes, huh? I’d wager you’re headed for Transmutation or Conjuration. You’ve got the curious look of the insubordinate.” He said it with a half-smile as they walked.
For the first time since arriving, Altharion smiled back. Just a little.
The walk to the Ceremonial Hall was silent, but not uncomfortable. Altharion soaked in every detail — the floating tapestries, the living paintings that narrated battles of legendary mages, and even a statue of a blind wizard who whispered secrets to those bold enough to listen.
And then, the doors opened.
The hall was a dome of dark stone and enchanted glass, where the night sky shimmered overhead despite it being morning. Students stood in lines before a raised dais. One by one, masters evaluated the novices with precise gazes, murmuring blessings or casting diagnostic enchantments.
Altharion took a deep breath. The paladin glanced at him, then placed a firm hand on his shoulder.
“You’ll find that inside these walls, magic is the least of your challenges. Good luck, Altharion.”
And then, he left him standing there.
The Ceremonial Hall seemed to breathe magic. A colossal dome covered in floating runes and illusory constellations created the illusion of an eternal night. Though it was morning, the stars above still shimmered like vigilant eyes. Rows of semicircular benches were filled with new students, arranged so that all had a clear view of the central altar where ecclesiastic masters, senior arcanists, and paladins sat watching.
Each student held a small identification stone — a “pietra of oath” — which vibrated faintly with its bearer’s aura. When called by name, the student would walk to the center of the circle, where a revelation spell was cast to confirm their arcane identity and measure their raw magical potential. Then, they received a sash embroidered with their primary magical affinity in ethereal thread.
Altharion held his as if it were made of glass. His name had not yet been called, but the stares already marked him — a stranger even among initiates.
“You look a bit out of place.”
The voice came from beside him, sharp and melodic, like a poorly tuned lute.
Altharion turned and saw Torrin Valdrath. The young man was immaculate: blond hair slicked neatly back, eyes cold as glass, and a tailored uniform that differed from the standard robes. His personal crest — two crossed swords beneath a silver sun — shimmered subtly on the gold brooch at his chest.
“Name?” Torrin asked, offering his hand as if granting an audience.
“Altharion.”
“Altharion… just that?”
“Just that,” he replied firmly, gripping the offered hand harder than expected.
Torrin smirked.
“Straight to the point. I like that. Half-elf, I suppose? Must be hard to find clothes that fit… and company that doesn’t stone you in the streets.”
Altharion didn’t respond. He’d heard variations of that comment all his life. But before the tension could rise, a short laugh cut in.
“Ignore the peacock.”
A young woman with dark brown hair and amber eyes approached. Her robe was slightly disheveled, sleeves rolled up, and she wore a necklace with a small crystal fragment bound in copper wire. She carried an aura of easy confidence — and literal static, as sparks occasionally danced from her fingertips.
“Kaela Dervan,” she said, leaning slightly toward Altharion. “Officially the only sane person in this hall. Don’t tell the paladins — they let me in by mistake.”
Altharion felt a faint smile escape before he could stop it.
“Altharion.”
“Yeah, I heard. The one who arrived late and had to be escorted like a lost child by a paladin. You caused a stir.”
“Great.” He sighed.
“Relax. Everything’s gossip here. It’ll pass. Or get worse. It’s unpredictable.” She shrugged.
Torrin was still watching, the same smug smile plastered on his face.
“You have a peculiar talent for attracting lost causes, Kaela.”
“And you, for being one.” she shot back without hesitation.
Before Torrin could respond, Altharion’s name was called.
A strange hush fell over the hall as he walked to the center circle. The murmuring stopped. Some recognized the name from rumors — the half-elf on scholarship, the student with no noble patron, the boy brought in by a mysterious letter from Meridan Thalnos.
As he entered the circle, a white light enveloped him, followed by an ethereal pulse.
The pietra in his hand flared brightly. The masters exchanged glances, and a sharp murmur rippled through the room when a second light — a deep purple — ignited behind the white: the sign of affinity with an unstable school.
“Interesting,” Torrin whispered, a sharp gleam in his eyes. “You really are special.”
Altharion returned to his seat, feeling the weight of dozens of stares pierce his back like spears. Kaela was waiting.
“Did you see that?”
“Everyone did.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Oh, definitely,” she said, grinning. “But now there’s two of us. That makes it more fun.”
As the ceremony concluded, his hands trembled — not from fear, but from the overwhelming tide of thoughts crashing in his mind. He’d been marked as “indeterminate.” A curiosity. A risk. And everyone had seen it.
Kaela nudged him lightly.
“Welcome to the list of those they’ll watch too closely.”
“Is that a long list?” he asked, voice low.
“Long enough that it keeps shrinking.”
Her words were cryptic, but her tone was light. She grinned and gestured for him to follow.
The students were dismissed in waves, each escorted by a senior acolyte through the various wings of the Academy. Kaela stayed close, acting as an impromptu guide.
They passed beneath arches carved with glowing runes that flickered in different hues depending on who crossed beneath them. Enchanted torches lined the stone corridors, though many floated freely, drifting like spectral lanterns. The deeper they went, the thicker the hum of raw magical energy became — as if the building itself was alive and listening.
“That’s the Hall of Elemental Resonance,” Kaela said, pointing toward a wing lined with crystalline windows. “They keep the unstable spell matrices there. You hear something explode in the middle of the night? It’s from there.”
“Sounds… safe.”
“Oh, it’s not.”
They walked past the Chambers of Divination, where veiled magi studied the future through still pools of water and whispering mirrors. The Alchemy Spire loomed to the east — a narrow tower crowned with brass domes and pipes that hissed constantly. And in the courtyard, they passed students dueling in a magically enforced arena, spells crashing like thunder between them while floating glyphs recorded their performance.
Kaela pointed up.
“See those?” she said, indicating several balconies with armored figures watching silently.
Paladins. At least four stood along the overlook, their silver-and-gold armor gleaming beneath magical light, their greatswords sheathed but always visible.
“They say they’re here to protect the Academy,” Kaela said. “But everyone knows they’re here to control it. Watch us. Watch the professors. Make sure no one’s learning anything they shouldn’t.”
“They don’t trust magi,” Altharion said.
“No. And they never will.”
In the Refectorium, where students ate beneath a massive illusion of a constantly shifting sky, Altharion found himself seated between Kaela and another boy who had barely spoken until now — Nurelion.
The elf’s sharp features and silver eyes gave him an austere presence. He hadn’t touched his food.
“Half-elf,” Nurelion said, eyes fixed on Altharion. “You walk like someone who doesn’t expect to be welcome.”
“Maybe because I haven’t been.”
“Wise. Don’t mistake their silence for tolerance.”
Kaela rolled her eyes.
“Don’t mind him. Nurelion thinks being cryptic makes him cooler.”
“It does,” Nurelion said, and resumed eating.
Though cold at first, Nurelion’s insights quickly revealed a calculating mind. He had been at the Academy for a year longer and seemed to know its unspoken rules well. While Kaela laughed and threw sparks with her fingers over their plates, Nurelion spoke of the “Spellvault,” where dangerous grimoires were kept, and the “Thirteen Stairs,” a forbidden passage descending below the academy that few dared speak of.
Later, as they returned to their dormitory wing, they passed a patrol of paladins in the corridor. The air turned heavy. One of them stopped and narrowed his eyes at Altharion.
“Name?”
“Altharion.”
The paladin gave no further comment. He stared, then turned without another word.
Kaela waited until they were gone before whispering:
“He’s Andrik Vael. One of the zealots. Walks the halls like he’s the judge of everyone’s soul. Stay away from him.”
“They act like we’re prisoners,” Altharion muttered.
“We are,” said Nurelion from behind. “We just have better curtains.”
That night, Altharion stood alone at the window of his shared dorm, looking out at the spires of Eldorath in the distance. The Academy’s towers rose like jagged thorns beneath the starless illusion that hung eternally over the school. Lights floated silently through the air. Somewhere far below, a voice chanted in an unknown tongue.
His pietra still glowed faintly in his palm. A token of belonging. But it felt more like a leash.
From the hallway, Kaela’s voice drifted in, laughing at something Torrin had said — or insulted. Altharion wasn’t sure which.
For the first time in years, he felt the flicker of something unfamiliar. Not comfort. Not safety.
The port city of Caltheron was a tapestry of contradictions—luxuries draped in velvet and horrors clothed in silence. Towering marble facades cast long shadows over alleys soaked in spilled wine and forgotten blood. Spices from distant lands perfumed the air even as rats scurried beneath the carriages of gold-gilded nobles. Beneath the banners of commerce and conquest, the city pulsed with ambition, hunger, and whispered prayers to nameless powers.
For Selena, a young courtesan raised in the gutters of the Lower Quarters, Caltheron was both a glittering dream and a golden cage. Her life was a cycle of rehearsed laughter, measured glances, and silken steps across ballrooms where power masqueraded as romance. Each day she wore a different mask, each night she offered a different version of herself—always in search of a patron who might lift her from the mire of poverty.
But the attentions she earned, however sweet, faded like perfume at dawn. She was desired, but never remembered. She was envied, but never loved.
One evening, after a particularly bitter celebration where she had been paraded like a jewel and discarded like an empty goblet, Selena wandered alone through the opulent Golden District. Her dress, once white and perfumed, was torn and stained; her sandals were dust-covered relics of the night. Tears traced silent paths down her cheeks, their salt burning in the summer wind.
She passed under balconies of gold filigree and through archways carved with ancient hymns to prosperity. The laughter of nobles echoed above, indifferent to the girl unraveling below.
It was in this liminal hour—neither night nor dawn—that she saw the figure that would change everything.
Beneath the shadow of an arched bridge carved with scenes of mythical triumphs, a woman stood. Her beauty was otherworldly, untouched by the grime of the city. Her eyes shimmered with a vibrant green, like emeralds aflame. Raven-black hair flowed as if stirred by invisible currents, and her translucent gown danced around her form like mist given shape.
“Are you lost, my sweet child?” the woman asked, her voice no louder than the hush of wind across silk.
Selena halted. The woman’s presence was disarming—not frightening, but eerily familiar, like a lullaby once sung in a forgotten cradle.
“I… I am lost,” Selena whispered, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. “Lost in everything. In this life… always chasing something I can never seem to reach.”
The woman smiled, and that smile was a secret. A secret older than Caltheron’s stones.
“Perhaps you’ve been searching in the wrong places,” she said gently, extending a graceful hand. “Come. I know a sanctuary where you may see yourself clearly.”
Selena hesitated—but only for a heartbeat. Something in her bones knew this path could not be turned from. Moved by desperation and drawn by something deeper, she followed the stranger into the narrow veins of the city.
They walked in silence through a maze of alleys that seemed to fold around them, until they arrived at a hidden courtyard bathed in moonlight. There, nestled between ancient olive trees and a fountain of silver lions, stood a small marble temple. Its walls were lined with mirrors, each reflecting the flickering torchlight into endless, dancing echoes.
“This,” the woman said, her voice hushed with reverence, “is the Temple of Larythis—Lady of Emotion, Weaver of Desire. And I am her servant.”
The temple’s air was thick with incense—sweet and bitter, a scent that clung to memory like perfume on skin. The walls, veined with silver and pearl, bore strange carvings in a flowing script that seemed to shimmer when looked at too long. Mirrors adorned every surface—arched, cracked, twisted. Some showed reflections that lingered even after the observer stepped away. Others whispered, barely audible, the echoes of emotions long departed.
Soft music, wordless and dreamlike, drifted through the chamber as if played by unseen hands. The floor was warm to the touch, a polished stone etched with spirals that pulsed faintly underfoot.
Selena felt as if she had stepped outside of time.
“In this place,” the priestess continued, “your true beauty may be revealed. Not as the world sees you, but as you might become.”
At the heart of the temple stood a grand mirror, taller than any man, its frame carved from obsidian and gilded with veins of gold and violet stones. Selena stepped toward it, drawn as if by gravity.
“Look, Selena,” said the priestess, her voice a silk whisper. “See not what is… but what could be.”
Selena stared into the mirror. At first, she saw only herself as she was—tired, worn, ordinary. But then the reflection shifted. Her skin smoothed. Her eyes became twin sapphires, clear and bright. Her hair curled into cascading waves of midnight. What looked back at her now was no longer a girl, but a goddess.
“Is this what you desire?” asked the priestess.
“Yes,” Selena breathed. “More than anything.”
The priestess turned toward her, her face aglow with torchlight. “My name,” she said, “is Elyra. I was once as you are—hungry for more, aching from never being enough.”
Selena swallowed hard, her voice uncertain. “What… happens if I accept this gift?”
Elyra tilted her head, smile never faltering. “Then Larythis will see you. Truly. She will shape what is already within you. She does not give power—she reveals it.”
Selena’s eyes drifted back to the mirror. That radiant, perfect version of herself stared back with confidence she had never felt but always yearned for.
She thought of her life—the life before tonight.
Noblemen’s laughter echoing in her ears as they passed her on to each other like a shared jewel. The taste of wine gone sour on her lips. The whispered promises of affection that vanished with the morning. The rooms scented with sweat and spice, the masks she wore with each new client—wild, tender, cruel—whatever they wanted.
Her body had been currency. Her charm, a weapon. Yet despite her skill in pleasure, despite her beauty and wit, she was never the one chosen. Never the one kept. Always the illusion, never the dream.
She’d watched other courtesans—less talented, less devoted—rise above her. Watched them draped in silk, escorted in carriages, given rings and deeds and names. She saw their jewels and their gardens and their freedom. And in the solitude of her rented room, between silk sheets bought on borrowed coin, she would weep in silence, wondering why not me?
“I gave everything,” she whispered aloud now, her voice raw. “And still, it was never enough.”
Elyra stepped behind her, placing cool hands on her shoulders. “Then give it to her. Give it to Larythis.”
From the folds of her gown, the priestess produced a silver dagger. Its blade shimmered unnaturally, like light dancing on water.
Selena hesitated.
“I’m not… I don’t worship demons,” she said, though the words rang hollow.
Elyra chuckled softly. “Who said anything about demons? Larythis is no monster. She is truth. The truth of what lies beneath your skin, behind your eyes, beneath every sigh and scream. She is hunger made divine.”
Selena took the dagger. Its hilt molded to her palm like it had been waiting for her.
“Offer your desire,” said Elyra. “Let it be known. Let it shape you.”
With trembling fingers, Selena cut a shallow line across her palm. The pain was sharp but fleeting—almost pleasing. As the blood touched the mirror’s surface, the golden frame pulsed with light, and a wave of warmth rushed through her body.
The world blurred. The mirror shimmered like liquid gold. Her knees gave way, and the chamber spun.
Selena collapsed into Elyra’s arms, gasping. She felt her skin tighten, then soften. Her breath deepened. Her spine arched with unfamiliar grace. It was as if she were being remade from within.
She saw herself reflected, not in one mirror, but in a thousand—each one showing a different version of her: the child scraping coins in the market, the girl weeping in moonlight, the courtesan biting back shame, the goddess rising in ecstasy.
And behind all of them… eyes. Emerald eyes watching. Loving. Claiming.
In a flash of violet flame, Selena saw her. The Lady.
Larythis.
She stood behind the mirrors, beyond the veils of the world, bathed in starlight and shadows. Her skin shimmered violet and opal. Her lips curved in divine amusement. She said nothing, but Selena heard her voice in every corner of her mind.
“You are mine.”
Caltheron did not change overnight.
But it felt as if it had.
Wherever Selena went, silence followed—then whispers, then gasps. She no longer had to fight for attention; it flooded her like sunlight through a shattered windowpane. Nobles paused their conversations to look her way. Servants froze mid-step. The laughter of the city stilled as she passed, like an invisible tide that bent the world around her.
In the first week, she was invited to a dozen salons. In the second, she received gifts from five different merchant princes—perfumes brewed in Altharion, silk imported from the floating markets of Zehrat, and even a necklace said to have belonged to a queen of the Southlands.
They all came with the same note, written in different hands:
“For the jewel that outshines them all.”
Selena wore them briefly, then cast them aside.
She began to glide through the world like a dream in motion. Her skin seemed to catch fire beneath candlelight. Her voice could make a grown man weep or a room fall into silence. Her touch sparked longing, and her absence birthed despair.
But none of it was enough.
Wine, once her escape, now tasted like spoiled fruit. The laughter of guests felt forced. The hands on her skin—greedy, trembling, worshipful—meant nothing.
She drank more. Stronger. Imported spirits said to be laced with rare herbs from beyond the eastern border. She inhaled powders crushed from crimson lotus petals that burned her throat and turned her dreams into screaming stars. She lay with those who ruled fleets and ruined families, just to feel the hunger in their eyes.
And still, it was never enough.
“I need more,” she whispered one night, curled in silk sheets soaked with sweat and perfume. “I was promised more.”
She began to frequent darker places—underground taverns where masked nobles sought secret pleasures, houses with no names and no rules. Her reputation only grew. They said she was the muse of Caltheron’s madness, the spark behind a dozen duels, the reason a governor abandoned his post.
Selena knew what they said. And part of her adored it.
“Let them worship,” she told herself, reclining in a bath filled with crushed violets and heated milk. “Let them burn.”
But a shadow had begun to form. She noticed it in the eyes of her admirers—how their joy turned to need, and their need to desperation. One strangled his wife after glimpsing Selena kiss another man. Another carved her name into his skin with broken glass.
Her presence stirred not only love and lust, but obsession. Violence. Madness.
She felt it growing inside her too.
“Why do I still feel hollow?” she asked Elyra during one of her rare visits to the temple. “I have everything now.”
Elyra only smiled.
“You were not made to be filled,” the priestess said, running a finger across the mirror’s surface. “You were made to reflect. The more they give you, the more they need. And the more you reflect, the more she sees.”
Selena stared at her reflection. It was stunning. But behind the beauty, she began to notice something else—a tremor in the hand, a flicker of something hungry in the eyes. A faint distortion.
The mirror never lied.
The golden glow that had once followed her now cast long, devouring shadows.
There was no corner of Caltheron where Selena’s name had not been whispered. Poets sang her praises, masked nobles begged for her gaze, and commoners wept at the chance of catching her scent in the air.
But her allure had become… unpredictable.
A single glance could now stir uncontrollable longing. Touches left burn marks—metaphoric or real, none could say. Some collapsed into convulsions after nights with her. Others, unable to cope with the hunger she awakened, took their own lives in silence.
And Selena felt it—the hunger inside her growing too.
At first, she blamed the wine. Then the opium. Then the priests of Ralthor who spoke of curses woven through pleasure. But none could offer relief. Each time she indulged, the craving only grew stronger, darker, emptier.
“I should stop,” she murmured to herself one morning, her fingers trembling as she reached for a silver vial of dream-smoke.
“I can’t,” she added, almost laughing—a desperate sound.
Her skin pulsed with heat when others looked at her. Her breath quickened when desire surrounded her in the rooms of velvet and incense. Yet with every peak of pleasure came a hollowing ache, as though something inside her was being carved away—scooped out, replaced by fire.
She began to dread sleep.
Each night, her dreams were mirrors—endless, shifting. Reflections that stared back with too many eyes. Sometimes she saw herself walking through a hall of lovers who fell dead at her feet, their mouths open in silent ecstasy. Other times, she dreamt of Elyra watching from the corner, smiling as Selena writhed in a bed of roses that turned to glass.
And always, from behind the mirror, a voice:
“More…”
Selena stopped attending the grand feasts. Her skin burned in sunlight. Her reflection flickered. At times, it no longer mimicked her movements. Once, she saw her mirror-self blink long after she had.
In one of the noble villas, a young woman fell in love with her. Purely. Selflessly. She brought her flowers, played the harp by moonlight, and whispered stories by candlelight.
Selena tried to love her back.
But one night, overwhelmed by a surge of desire not her own, Selena kissed her—and the girl collapsed, body shaking with fever. She never recovered.
That night, Selena screamed into her pillow until her throat bled.
“Please… someone help me,” she gasped into the silence. “I can’t stop…”
She returned to the temple—but Elyra was gone. Only the great mirror remained, cold and waiting.
“Take it back,” she begged. “Take it all back. I don’t want this anymore.”
There was no answer. Only her reflection, smiling faintly. And behind her own image… Larythis, watching through emerald eyes.
Selena awoke in darkness.
Not the darkness of night—but the kind that lives beneath the skin, behind the eyes. A place where light had no name.
Her breath was shallow, her heart pounding. She hadn’t eaten in days, nor drunk. The wine made her sick. The perfumes stung her nostrils. The touch of others, once her only comfort, now felt like glass beneath her skin.
She stared at her reflection in the silver washbasin. Her eyes were too bright, gleaming like emeralds licked by fire. Her lips too red, as if always freshly kissed—or freshly fed.
“Why am I still empty?” she whispered. “Why am I still… starving?”
The answer came not as a voice, but a sensation.
She was alone in her chamber when it struck. A servant boy brought her letters—gifts from distant nobles begging for her favor. He bowed and turned to leave, but she stopped him. Her hand touched his wrist—barely.
And something shifted.
He gasped. His body trembled. His eyes rolled back, and a shiver coursed through him like cold lightning.
Selena recoiled.
“What… was that?”
The boy collapsed, breathing shallow, eyes wide in rapture.
“I felt… everything,” he whispered.
Selena fled the room, but the tremor followed. Her skin tingled. Her heart raced. Her hunger sharpened. It wasn’t for food. Nor drink. Nor lust.
It was for them. For their heat, their emotions, their life.
And when she fed—even if just a little—she felt whole.
For a moment.
The days blurred.
Selena stopped attending events. People came to her now—drawn like moths to her flame. And she let them. Their desire filled her veins like wine. But it never lasted. She needed more.
She began to take from them slowly: a whisper, a kiss, a touch. Then—more. A hand resting too long on a chest. A breath shared too closely. And when they collapsed, shaking and smiling and ruined, she watched with wide eyes.
“I didn’t mean to,” she told herself.
But she always came back.
She stopped sleeping. Her body began to change—first imperceptibly. Her skin lost its warmth, glowing faintly in candlelight. Her nails sharpened. Her voice could coax even the most stoic men to tears.
One night, a noble came to her chamber bearing a rose forged from rubies. He knelt, shaking with adoration.
“Take my name,” he begged. “Take my lands. My soul, if you wish.”
She smiled. And kissed him.
When the sun rose, only ash remained.
Selena stared at her hands. They pulsed with violet light. Her fingers shook—not from fear, but from hunger.
“I need more.”
She ran.
Back to the temple. Back to the mirror.
It no longer showed her face.
Instead, it revealed a creature of terrible beauty. Eyes of emerald flame. Lips curved in endless hunger. Hair of shadow. Skin like liquid moonlight. Wings, at times. Claws, sometimes. A shape that changed with the desires of those who looked.
Selena fell to her knees.
“Please,” she sobbed. “Let me die. Let me end.”
But the mirror did not grant mercy. It only shimmered with her reflection—now shifting endlessly. Woman. Flame. Smoke. Beast. Desire incarnate.
And behind it, as always… Larythis.
Watching. Smiling.
“You wished to feel alive,” the goddess whispered. “Now you feed to remember what life once felt like.”
“You are no longer mine. You are your own hunger.”
That night, Selena’s body cracked.
Her skin peeled like silk. Her eyes burned. Her mouth opened and did not close for hours—as if screaming without sound. Her form dissolved, piece by piece, into mirrors and shadow.
When the dawn came, there was no trace of her in the temple.
Only a scent of rosewater and ash.
The Legend Remains
Selena vanished, as so many do, consumed by the very hunger they once believed would set them free.
Her name faded from ledgers and letters, but not from memory. In the whispering alleys of Caltheron, they still speak of her. Of eyes that shimmered like emerald fire. Of a touch that blessed—and ruined. Of a beauty too sharp to be mortal.
Some say she still lingers in mirrors, watching through the reflections of those who crave too much. Others claim she visits dreams, veiled in silk and shadow, offering pleasure so deep it leaves only emptiness behind.
But it is not in temples or courts that her legacy truly lives.
It lives in song.
At twilight, in the smoky corners of taverns where hearts run hot and tongues run loose, her story is sung. Bards pass it from mouth to mouth, turning her tragedy into melody. Sometimes as a warning. Sometimes as a seduction. Always as a mirror.
A mirror of desire. Of loss. Of longing too deep to escape.
And when the fire is low and the crowd is drunk on laughter or tears, the bard leans close to the strings and begins:
Ballad of the Mirror Rose
(as sung in the taverns of Caltheron and beyond)
In Caltheron’s golden-blooded halls, Where laughter weeps and pleasure calls, A girl with tears behind her eyes Danced beneath a painted sky.
She wore desire like perfume sweet, And kissed the wine from nobles’ feet. Yet no man stayed, no love would bloom— Her heart a cage, her soul a room.
O mirror rose, O mirror flame, They gave her gold, but not a name. She asked for love, they gave her lust— And turned her joy to bitter dust.
One night a lady dressed in mist Spoke words like silk, with eyes that hissed: “Come find the face behind your veil, And drink from fire what love won’t tell.”
They walked through glass and temple gate, Where shadows bloom and mirrors wait. She bled a drop upon the frame— And rose anew, no more the same.
O mirror rose, O mirror fire, She fed on touch, on need, desire. But every kiss, and every moan— Carved deeper hunger in her bone.
Her name was sung, her skin adored, But hearts around her split and tore. She tasted men like vintage wine, Then left them pale by morning’s shine.
She begged the gods to lift the flame— But found her shape no more the same. Her voice turned sweet, her soul turned black, There was no road that led her back.
O mirror rose, O mirror shade, She lost herself the night she prayed. Now those who seek her feel the sting— Of longing born from shadowed wings.
So heed this song, ye hearts that burn, For love that never will return. Beware the kiss too deep, too warm— It may not come in human form.
Some pleasures bloom and some destroy— Some lovers dance, and some are toys. The mirror waits with rose and flame… But never shows you quite the same.
O mirror rose, beware the fire… She lives within your own desire.
The full moon hung low over the scarred lands of the Profane Region, casting a pallid, bone-colored light across a world forgotten by gods. Winds howled across the withered plains, dragging with them the acrid scent of ash, iron, and decay. Durok Thrazk stood upon a jagged rise, alone, watching the firelight dance below where his tribe — the Thrazk — had settled for the night. The cries of drunk warriors echoed through the night, crude songs and shouts punctuated by the occasional brawl or the snapping of bone.
But for Durok, the night was not a celebration. It was a cage of memory.
He had known isolation all his life. Born of a human slave and an orc warlord, Durok’s blood had always marked him as an aberration — not one of them, never fully. His strength had earned their reluctant respect; his victories, their silence. But not their hearts. Not their trust. “Half-blood,” they whispered, as if the very word were a curse. Even when he led them to victory, even when he bled more than any of them — he remained a stain.
He had learned young what it meant to be lesser.
His earliest memories were not of lullabies or warmth, but of bruises. Of sneers from elders. Of being thrown into a pit with wild dogs to “toughen him up.” Orcs believed hardship built strength, but for half-bloods like him, hardship was cruelty without end. Half-orcs were tools at best, cannon fodder at worst. Most died before adulthood. Those who survived did so by clawing, biting, and bleeding for every scrap of dignity.
Durok’s mother — a kind-eyed woman named Mera — had died when he was still small, a broken neck after defying a guard who mocked her son. No one mourned her. No one dared.
“I survived because she didn’t,” he murmured now, eyes tracing the silhouettes of his tribe. “She gave her life so I could grow strong enough to endure.”
His hand rested on the hilt of his axe, the same weapon he’d gripped since the first time he was allowed to hunt. It was old, notched and worn, but dependable. Like him.
The Profane Region stretched endlessly beyond his feet, a land choked by the legacy of Daemonkind. What was once forest and fertile plain was now a cursed expanse of rot and ruin. Nothing grew without struggle. Every stream risked corruption. Every animal that lived was lean, savage, or tainted. The ground itself seemed to resist those who walked upon it.
Here, survival wasn’t a triumph. It was a sentence.
And yet, within this broken land, tribes still fought each other — over muddy rivers, over rusted weapons, over handfuls of dry roots. Unity was as foreign to the orcs as compassion. They revered strength but confused it with domination. To them, diplomacy was softness, mercy was failure. And someone like Durok, who carried both his parents’ blood — and their worlds — was a living contradiction they would never fully accept.
Still… he endured.
He clenched his jaw as the wind tore at his cloak. Somewhere in the distance, a Vorrak howled — one of the nightmare beasts that stalked the corrupted woods. Tomorrow, others would face it in the Ritual of Blood. But not him.
His trial had already come.
And it had nearly killed him.
The bonfires crackled high into the dusk sky, casting long, flickering shadows across the gathering of warriors that encircled the ritual grounds. Their chants pulsed like a heartbeat through the night, deep and rhythmic, echoing across the blackened cliffs surrounding the Thrazk camp.
Tonight was the Ritual of Blood — the ancient trial that marked the passage from youth to warrior. It was a sacred tradition, older than memory, meant to test the strength, courage, and spirit of those who dared call themselves orc.
Durok stood at the edge of the ring, cloaked in the furs of the Vorrak he had once slain. The air was sharp with anticipation, the heat of fire barely cutting through the chill wind that swept down from the north. He clenched the haft of his axe but said nothing, his eyes fixed on the young half-orc boy now stepping forward into the sacred circle.
The boy’s name was Rugar — lean, anxious, but with a fire in his gaze that Durok knew too well. He had seen it in the mirror, years ago, when the world had dared him to prove his right to exist.
All around, voices rose in debate — quiet enough not to be a direct challenge, but loud enough to sting.
“Another half-blood in the ring.” “He’ll embarrass us all.” “It’s a disgrace to tradition.”
Durok didn’t turn to silence them. He didn’t have to. His presence alone was reminder enough.
He remembered his own Ritual of Blood, years ago — the jeers, the narrowed eyes, the spit at his feet. They’d called him weak before he even entered the forest. They expected his body to be dragged back broken or not at all.
Instead, he’d returned with the head of the Vorrak — not just a claw, as tradition demanded — and dropped it at the feet of the elders. For a breathless moment, the entire tribe had gone still.
But respect, he had learned, did not last. The hatred of the old ways was not so easily undone. And though his leadership had opened the ritual to all, the war of blood still raged in the hearts of many.
Now, as Rugar knelt to receive the ritual markings on his skin — three jagged strokes of ochre across his chest, symbolizing claw, blood, and stone — Durok stepped forward to speak.
His voice cut through the murmurs like steel.
“This trial does not ask who your parents were. It does not care if your blood is pure or mixed. It asks only one thing: Are you strong enough to fight for us?”
A hush fell over the crowd.
Durok looked to the boy, who now held a spear tipped with obsidian and waited by the threshold of the forest.
“Go,” Durok said, just loud enough for Rugar to hear. “Return not for blood, but for honor. And for your future.”
The boy nodded, face tight with fear — and pride — and disappeared into the trees, toward the lair of the Vorrak.
As the fires burned lower, Durok retreated to the council tent as the crowd dispersed into whispered arguments and restless anticipation. Some still hated what he stood for. But none dared to defy him openly.
The fire crackled in the center of the council tent, its low light casting long shadows on the worn faces of the three elders seated around the circular stone table. Ancient banners of the Thrazk tribe hung behind them — torn, faded, and heavy with the weight of a thousand years of blood and battle.
Durok stood before them, not as a supplicant, but as the current chieftain, his back straight, his axe sheathed at his side. Yet even with the mantle of leadership upon him, the room made no secret of where the real power still lingered.
Across from him sat Morrakh One-Eye, the oldest of the three — blind in one eye, cunning with the other. His voice was gravel soaked in venom.
“You’ve already sullied our legacy enough, Durok,” Morrakh spat, his fingers tapping impatiently on the table’s edge. “Letting half-bloods into the circle? Into the Ritual of Blood? What will come next? Sharing meat with humans?”
Beside him, Varsha Iron-Root, matron of the forges, remained silent, her arms crossed and gaze unreadable. She had long walked the line between tradition and pragmatism.
The third, Garrn of the Old Flame, sat with his hands folded, brows furrowed in clear distaste. “Tradition exists for a reason,” he muttered. “We do not break what has preserved us for generations simply because the world grows softer.”
Durok stepped forward, his jaw tight.
“What has preserved us?” he echoed bitterly. “Was it tradition that protected us from the Gorvash? Was it your old songs that burned their supply lines and turned the tide when the tribe stood on the brink of annihilation?”
Morrakh bared yellowed teeth. “Victory does not give you the right to rewrite the stones.”
“No,” Durok replied. “But blood does.”
Silence hung thick in the air.
For a moment, Durok’s thoughts drifted—drawn involuntarily back to a younger version of himself, barely more than a boy, standing at the edge of the ritual forest, the laughter of full-blooded orcs ringing in his ears.
“Let the pigs come clean up his corpse by morning.” “He’ll feed the Vorrak better than he’ll ever feed the tribe.”
They hadn’t even given him armor. Only a rusted blade and a torch.
But he’d walked into the dark anyway—his heart beating louder than the drums—and when he emerged, it wasn’t just with a claw. He had dragged the entire head of the Vorrak across the clearing, face caked in blood, eyes blazing with defiance.
The elders had fallen silent that night, too.
“You let me prove myself when none of you believed I would survive,” he said now, voice low. “And I did more than survive. I saved this tribe more times than I can count. So why do you deny others that same chance?”
Varsha’s eyes narrowed. “Because most will die, Durok. Half-blood orcs are not built for our world. And if they fail… it will be you who sent them to die.”
Durok met her gaze without flinching. “Then let them choose their deaths, as we do. That’s what it means to be orc. To face the blood. To earn your place with blood and steel — not by heritage.”
Garrn leaned back with a sigh. “You want to rewrite what we are. But some stones cannot be reshaped.”
Morrakh grunted. “And if your half-breeds fall? Their blood will stain more than just the dirt. It will stain your name, chieftain.”
Durok looked at the fire between them. His reflection danced in the embers like a ghost of who he used to be.
“Then let it,” he said. “I’d rather be remembered as the one who gave them a chance… than the one who chained them to silence.”
With that, he turned and left the tent, the old murmurs rising behind him like the fading chants of a dying era.
The night of the Ritual had been a storm of fury and fire.
Among the initiates stood Rugar, a wiry half-orc youth with deep eyes and a scar from a childhood beating — a mark of defiance that had never truly healed. Unlike the others, his name had been whispered with skepticism from the moment he stepped into the clearing. A half-blood. A runt. But he carried Durok’s teachings in every breath, every movement: precision, patience, resilience.
His opponent — a hulking Vorrak — came out of the woods snarling, spines rattling in the dark like war drums. The fight was ugly. Rugar was tossed into trees, bleeding from the chest and limping from a mangled ankle. But he endured. He set traps. He baited the creature into a narrow ravine. And when the moment came, he drove his spear between its ribs and brought it down screaming.
When he emerged at dawn, dragging the bloodied claw in one hand and a limp arm cradled against his chest, the clearing fell silent.
Even the purebloods had nothing to say.
He had survived.
He had won.
Durok met him in the center of the camp with a hand on his shoulder and a fire behind his eyes. “You’ve earned your place, Rugar. And I’m proud to call you brother.”
But pride quickly turned to poison.
Over the next days, murmurs twisted into glares. Orcs spat when Rugar passed. The warriors who once ignored him now whispered louder, sharpened weapons slower. “Weak blood… lucky kill… not a true orc…”
Four nights later, a scream tore through the morning mist.
Durok sprinted toward the sound, heart already sinking. He arrived to find Tarn, another half-orc youth, kneeling beside a bloodied body. Rugar. Slumped against the rocks near the eastern ridge, throat torn open, chest riddled with jagged cuts not from any beast — but from blades.
Tarn looked up with tears in his eyes. “He didn’t even have a weapon, chief… They left him to bleed out. Like he was nothing.”
Durok knelt beside the corpse, a silence heavy as steel weighing down on his shoulders. He touched Rugar’s cold brow. A boy who had proven himself. A boy who had earned his place.
And yet, he was still hunted.
Still hated.
Still murdered like prey.
Later that evening, Durok confronted the three elders beneath the Shadowhorn Pillar — the sacred stone where tribal laws were debated.
“They slaughtered a warrior who had passed the Ritual. He was one of us. This cannot be ignored.”
Elder Garrn leaned back, uninterested. “He died alone. Not in battle. That makes him unworthy of the name. The wilderness claimed him. That is all.”
“Lies!” Durok snapped. “He was ambushed. You know it.”
Morrakh shrugged. “Then he wasn’t strong enough to protect his own throat. That’s the lesson.”
Durok’s fists clenched. “So that’s it? We open the Ritual to them and then turn our backs the moment they rise? What message does that send to every warrior training now — that proving yourself means nothing?”
Garrn looked down at him — always down. “It means that some places must remain beyond certain bloodlines. You can play at unity all you want, Durok. But you cannot force beasts and wolves to share the same den.”
Durok’s voice dropped to a cold, dangerous whisper.
“If justice cannot be found in this circle, then it will be carved by my own hand. I will not let this rot go unanswered.”
He turned and walked out into the storm brewing beyond the camp’s fires, leaving behind three unmoved old orcs and the echo of a name that would not be forgotten: Rugar.
The days following the council’s confrontation saw the air in the Thrazk camp grow heavy with unease. The smoke from the cookfires carried more than the scent of charred meat — it carried tension. Conversations dropped when Durok passed. Eyes narrowed. Fists clenched. The drums beat slower now, less celebratory, more ritualistic, echoing the tribal undercurrents of something ancient and unforgiving awakening in the blood of the orcs.
But in the shadow of tradition, something new stirred.
Behind a ridge of shattered stone just beyond the western perimeter of the camp, Durok had gathered a small group of half-orc youths — a band of outcasts once forbidden from even watching the Ritual of Blood, let alone training for it. Now, beneath the steel-gray sky, they swung axes, practiced stances, and bled into the soil like any warrior-in-the-making.
Durok stood among them, shirtless, sweat running down the scars across his back. His voice carried like gravel wrapped in command.
“Again. Form. Step. Swing. A warrior without discipline is just meat with an edge.”
A boy named Tagruk, lanky but quick, collapsed to a knee after a misstep. His grip on the blade faltered.
Durok approached and knelt beside him. “You fall now,” he said, quietly, “so you don’t fall when it matters. No one is born worthy. We forge it.”
The boy looked up, panting. “Do you think… we can survive the ritual?”
Durok met his eyes. “If you fight with heart and mind — yes. If you believe the whispers that you’re just a mistake — no.”
Their secret meetings were whispered of in the camp, but few dared to intervene. Not yet.
At night, the divides grew clearer. Orcs gathered in hushed circles around fires, murmuring discontent. One warrior, Brakha Skull-Taker, sharpened his axe as he growled to his peers.
“Durok wins his duels. Fine. But how long do we wait while he poisons our tribe with outsiders and softbloods?”
“Challenge him, then,” muttered another. “Do it by the old way.”
Brakha snarled. “Already tried. He beat me. But it was luck.”
From the shadows, a more dangerous voice whispered, “Then don’t challenge. Remove.”
That same night, Durok returned to his tent to find a crude effigy on the ground — his face carved into wood, throat slit, and tusks broken.
He burned it in silence.
In the weeks that followed Rugar’s death, the camp of the Thrazk grew quiet — too quiet.
Whispers no longer flowed like smoke around Durok; they coiled and clung to him like poison in the air. Every look from a traditionalist warrior carried weight. Every sharpening blade, every cleaned axe, became a question: Is this the day they strike?
Tarn stayed close to him now — not as a guard, but as a witness. The once-naive half-orc had changed since he found Rugar’s body. His movements had grown colder, precise. He no longer asked Durok if unity was possible — only if it was still worth fighting for.
“We’ll be next,” Tarn muttered one night beside the watchfire. “They’ll come when your back is turned. They always do.”
Durok didn’t answer at first. He was staring into the flames, jaw tight.
“They will,” he finally said. “But this time, we’ll be ready.”
In the forges below the chieftain’s tent, Varsha Iron-Root met quietly with a dozen orcs — purebloods, warriors all, veterans from the Gorvash war and the defense of the eastern ridge. They had seen Durok bleed beside them, shout orders under fire, carry bodies from the mud. They knew his strength.
And though they too were bound by the chains of tradition, some had begun to see beyond the old ways.
Varsha addressed them plainly.
“Durok fights not just to lead. He fights to protect. That is more than most chieftains can say. When the time comes — and it will — I need to know who stands with the future.”
They nodded, one by one. Quietly. Not out of fear, but out of respect. Their blades would answer when words failed.
Durok did not send out patrols to intimidate the traditionalists. He didn’t stomp through their camps or threaten them at council.
Instead, he removed himself.
He gave more space. Allowed them to whisper louder. Allowed them to scheme.
He gave them hope — the most dangerous illusion of all.
Meanwhile, he trained the half-orcs at night, sharpening not only their skill with weapons but their minds.
“We do not fight just to survive,” he told them. “We fight so that no one else has to bury a brother in the dirt because of blood they did not choose.”
But every time he looked at Tarn, who trained with relentless purpose, and every time his mind drifted to Rugar’s lifeless eyes, a cold fist twisted in his chest.
He died because I made him believe they would accept him. Because I gave him hope. I handed him a claw… and they took his head.
The firelight often found him alone after training, muttering to the dark.
“I should have seen it coming. I should’ve known they’d never let it go.”
Tarn found him there one night, gripping the stone carving of Rugar’s trial — a broken shard of the ritual totem they had set after his return. Durok had kept it, hidden, like a splinter in his soul.
“You did what no other chief would do,” Tarn said.
“And I got him killed,” Durok replied, flat.
“You gave him something worth dying for.”
Durok didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Not yet.
Because the truth was: he was laying the bait for more bloodshed. Feeding the unrest. Luring out the traitors, the murderers, the cowards who whispered but never dared.
And when they struck… he would crush them all in one blow.
But every hour that passed — every campfire flicker in the dark — was another chance for a young half-blood like Rugar to suffer the same fate.
That was the price of strategy. That was the weight of leadership.
It began with silence.
The kind of silence that pressed on the skin like smoke before the fire, the kind that tasted of steel and blood yet to be spilled.
Durok knew the moment had arrived.
His scouts had tracked the meetings. Tarn had identified the ringleaders. Varsha had armed the loyalists in secret. The trap had been set — and now, like wolves blinded by arrogance, the traitors walked willingly into its jaws.
As the moons reached their apex, the insurrection began.
Dozens of orcs, faces masked in black ash, rose from within the camp. Fires were set to supply tents. Sentries were murdered in their sleep. The screams of children and elders pierced the night as the attackers cut a path toward the chieftain’s tent.
But this time… Durok was not unprepared.
From the outer ridges, his loyalists struck. Half-orcs and veterans alike surged into the heart of the camp. Varsha led the forge-guard in burning retaliation, hammers cracking skulls and armor alike.
And Durok — in the center of the bloodstorm — met the fury himself.
He fought like a god of old, surrounded by traitors, body soaked in crimson, eyes burning with wrath. He moved like an avalanche, his axe severing limbs and shattering spears. But for every enemy he struck down, another two rose.
Then Brakha Skull-Taker appeared from the smoke, one eye swollen shut, mouth grinning through blood.
“You should have died with your whore mother,” he snarled.
They clashed with thunder. Axe to axe. Blow to blow. Brakha was strong, brutal, relentless. But Durok was unforgiving. With a roar that shook the spine of the camp, Durok split Brakha’s blade — and then his skull — in one stroke.
But not before Brakha’s weapon scored deep across Durok’s left cheek, from brow to jaw — a gash that would never fully heal. A mark carved not by enemies of the tribe, but by its own blood.
When dawn rose, it found the camp drenched in silence once more.
More than forty bodies littered the central grounds. Half-orcs and purebloods, loyalists and traitors — all mixed into a single grotesque tapestry of broken flesh.
Durok stood amid the carnage, one hand over his bandaged face, the other on his axe.
Tarn approached slowly. “We won.”
Durok didn’t answer. He was staring at the body of a young half-orc, no older than Rugar had been. His chest pierced. His eyes still open.
This is the cost of mercy… of trust… of believing they’d stop at words.
That evening, Durok summoned what remained of the tribe.
In the center of the camp, twenty prisoners knelt — the insurrectionists who had surrendered. Warriors. Elders. Even former allies. They begged. They pleaded.
Durok showed no mercy.
One by one, they were executed, their heads placed on pikes around the perimeter of the camp. A warning. A declaration.
To those who questioned him.
To those who would ever try again.
When the Council of Elders assembled the next day, they were different men. Humbled. Silent. Garrn would not look him in the eye. Morrakh had lost two sons in the uprising.
Durok stood before them, blood still fresh on his armor, his new scar raw and prominent.
“You have a choice,” he said. “Either you follow me, and we build a tribe that survives what’s coming… or you will be buried with your broken idols and dying songs.”
Varsha stepped forward. Alone.
“I stand with the future.”
One by one, the others followed — out of fear, perhaps. But also because they had seen what Durok would do to protect what he built.
That night, Durok sat alone on the ridge where Rugar once trained. His scar pulsed with the beat of his heart. Below, the camp was quieter than ever — afraid, yes, but united.
He clenched his fist.
“No more soft hands,” he murmured. “No more dreams that cost the lives of boys.”
He had tried to lead through hope.
Now he would lead through fear, through strength — through respect born of iron and fire.
Durok Thrazk was no longer building peace. He was forging order.
Weeks had passed since the Night of Broken Oaths, but the scent of ash still lingered in the bones of the Thrazk camp. Where once stood a warband fracturing under the weight of its contradictions, now rose the foundation of something new — something dangerous and bold.
From the ashes, Durok forged a new creed. Not of blood, but of worth.
“Strength is earned,” he proclaimed to the assembled tribe atop the central ridge. “Not inherited. Not bought. Not bound by what pulsed in your veins at birth. It is shown in your choices. In your scars. In your service.”
The firelight burned against his scarred cheek as he drove a blackened spear into the ground, wrapped with a cloth soaked in the blood of both half-orcs and purebloods — no longer separate. Now Thrazk.
The first reform Durok enacted was the most controversial: all warriors, regardless of heritage, would be trained and ranked by performance alone.
The old caste structure — where purebloods held positions of power by default — was shattered.
Orcs once born to nothing now found themselves officers. Young half-orcs were assigned veteran mentors. Those who refused to train beside them were dismissed from the warbands or reassigned to latrine digging until they accepted the new law.
“You fight together, or you rot together,” Durok declared.
Combat trials were introduced every two weeks — brutal, grueling, and fair. Victory brought status. Cowardice brought demotion. No exceptions. The rituals remained, but no longer as gatekeeping tools. They were now proving grounds for all.
In the northernmost reaches of Astravara, nestled between cold forests and fog-covered hills, lay a small village named Arvenstead.
It was a place of quiet endurance. The winters were long and the soil hard, but its people were strong — not in sword or spell, but in silence and ritual. The villagers prayed to the gods when the sun rose and when it set. Their homes were built from blackened stone and weathered timber, their windows small to keep the cold out and the shadows in.
Elaria was born in the heart of this forgotten place.
Her mother, Selyne, was a healer — wise in herbs, songs, and the language of dreams. Her father, Tharos Valthorne, had once been a soldier in the southern campaigns, but had returned home with one leg and a haunted gaze. He never spoke of the war, only sharpened his axe each morning and taught Elaria to listen more than she spoke.
She grew up under gray skies and quiet days. She learned to trap snowfoxes, read the runes on old stones, and recognize the cry of crows that meant death was near. She did not know the world beyond the mountains — only its stories, told by firelight, in low voices.
And the stories always ended the same:
“Beware the dark,” her mother would whisper. “It has many faces.”
Arvenstead had few luxuries, but one tradition never faded: the Night of Flame, celebrated each winter solstice.
On that night, bonfires lit every path, and villagers danced with lanterns to drive back the longest night of the year. It was said that on this night, the veil between worlds grew thin, and spirits — both holy and foul — walked among mortals. It was the only time Tharos smiled. Elaria remembered him lifting her into the air as the flames rose, shouting:
“Let the gods see us burn, and know we are not afraid!”
But fear was always there. The North held more than frost and wolves. Travelers spoke of orc tribes growing restless beyond the ridgelands. Of daemon whispers near ruined temples. Of people disappearing without sound or sign.
And still, the villagers stayed.
Because Arvenstead was home. Because the North belonged to those willing to die with it.
Life in Arvenstead was simple, almost cyclical.
Each morning, Elaria rose before the sun, wrapping herself in wool and furs before stepping into the biting air. Her hands knew the cold by touch, not by thought. She helped her mother grind dried roots into powder, gathered frostberries near the treeline, and fed the goats huddled under stone shelters.
She loved the silence. The kind of silence that made footsteps sacred and breath a whisper of life. While her friends carved runes into bone or practiced with slings, Elaria often wandered deeper into the forest trails, speaking softly to the wind, learning the patterns of birds and the warnings of broken branches.
Her father taught her how to survive — how to track without being seen, how to hold a knife without trembling, how to strike with the will to kill if ever needed.
But he also taught her restraint, and respect for life.
“Strength is not in killing, girl,” he would say. “It’s in choosing not to.”
Elaria never imagined a time when that choice would be taken from her.
The day it happened, the air was too still.
Birds had not sung that morning. Dogs barked restlessly. The snow had fallen overnight in perfect silence, blanketing the hills in white purity — a canvas waiting to be stained.
Elaria was returning from the woods with a basket of herbs when she saw the first signs: a column of black smoke rising from the south, beyond the ridge where the old stone watchtower stood.
It was no chimney fire. No hunting accident.
And then the sound came — a deep, guttural horn blast, foreign and foul, echoing across the mountain like a challenge hurled at the gods themselves.
She dropped the basket.
The village erupted in confusion. Farmers ran with their children. The old priest tried to ring the cracked bronze bell. Tharos, with his old leg wrapped in iron, was already at the center of the village, gripping a rusted axe and shouting commands.
But it was too late.
The orcs came like a wave, painted in blood and ash, snarling in a language made to be shouted. Their blades were crude but brutal. They cut through fences, homes, and flesh without pause.
Elaria saw her neighbor Hara fall with her baby still in her arms. She saw the old hunter Larn impaled on his own spear. She saw her father…
“Run!” he shouted to her, blood pouring from his side. “Get to your mother!”
She did.
But when she reached her home, it was already burning.
The scent of lavender and charred wood filled her lungs. She kicked down the door, coughing and calling, until she found her mother — crushed beneath the collapsed beam of the ceiling, her face burned but her hands still clutching the satchel of herbs.
Selyne was dead.
And everything that Elaria had known — everything that had once felt sacred — was ash.
She ran until she couldn’t breathe. Until her legs gave out and the cold kissed her bones like an old friend come to take her away.
But the orcs found her.
They dragged her, screaming, through the snow, chaining her hands. She was thrown in a cage with two other children. One cried. The other didn’t even blink.
From the bars, she looked back one last time toward the smoldering ruins of Arvenstead, where the white snow had turned red.
And something inside her — something silent and gentle — cracked.
The white had turned red.
Where once the snow carried the prints of foxes and deer, now it bore the scars of dragging chains, torn flesh, and burnt ash. Arvenstead was no more — only a smear of smoke curling up from a crater of ruin.
Elaria saw it only once more, from a slope overlooking the village while bound in iron. Her eyes could barely stay open from the smoke and tears, but she memorized what remained: the charred skeletons of houses, a goat with its throat cut, and a shattered lantern still glowing weakly beneath the snow.
The orcs had no need for trophies. Their victory was total.
The warband that took her wore symbols carved in bone and ash — swirling brands over their chests and backs. They chanted “Groth’Kar! Groth’Kar!”, invoking the name of their warlord like a prayer of hate.
Each warrior bore a circular brand scorched into the forehead — a spiral of fire encircling a jagged eye. Their tongues were often forked. Some carried slaves lashed to poles. Others wore necklaces of teeth, both human and beast. They did not kill all — some were kept for sport, some for sacrifice.
And some, like Elaria, were simply marched until they broke.
It was not a journey. It was a sentence.
For four days, the captives were driven across rocky passes and snow-laden valleys. They were given no food, only melting snow to drink when the orcs allowed. The strong carried the weak. The weak collapsed. When they fell behind, the orcs struck them down. Children cried until they had no voices left. Mothers whispered lullabies as they bled.
Elaria walked barefoot. Her lips cracked, her wrists raw from the chains. Her vision blurred more each hour. Her thoughts were fogged with starvation and bruises.
She saw a girl torn apart by two hounds when she tried to run.
She saw an old man stabbed through the stomach for asking for water.
And every night, the orcs laughed around their fires while the prisoners were left to freeze in a pile, sharing what little warmth they could through silent trembling.
The seventh day was colder.
Not colder in weather — colder in meaning. Elaria had stopped registering the pain in her legs. She no longer cried when struck. The world had narrowed to three sensations: the tightness of the chains, the cold of the snow, and the rhythmic pull of breath as if her body had forgotten it could stop.
She was no longer walking. She was enduring.
Each step forward was a decision not made by thought, but by instinct. She could no longer remember what her father’s voice sounded like. Her mother’s face came in flashes, blurred at the edges. The song Selyne used to hum while grinding herbs — Elaria repeated it in her head like a broken wheel:
“Let the wind be quiet, let the roots hold strong…”
But the wind was cruel now. And the roots were gone.
At some point, in the mud beside a ravaged streambed, she found it: a small, curled fragment of birch bark, pale as snow and etched with a faint spiral.
It was nothing. Just rot. Just bark.
But something about it… it felt seen.
She tucked it into the wrappings of her sleeve and held it in her hand when the others couldn’t see. She would run her thumb across its grooves, like feeling the edge of a memory she couldn’t quite reach.
At night, when the cold tried to slip into her lungs, she whispered to it like a charm:
“I’m still here. I’m still here.”
The moon was hidden behind thick storm clouds. Snow fell in slow, wide flakes, muffling the world in stillness.
Elaria sat against a frozen log, her knees to her chest, chained to the corpse of a boy who hadn’t woken up that morning. Her body was feverish. Her breath shallow. She hadn’t eaten in over three days.
She whispered, hoarsely:
“Tianara… Elyonel… anyone. Please.”
“I don’t want to die here.”
“I don’t want to become like them.”
She stared into the woods, expecting nothing. Her faith had become a fading echo — more habit than hope.
But still, she prayed.
That night, she dreamed.
She was standing alone in the middle of Arvenstead — but not as it was, not in ruin. The fires were burning in lanterns, not rooftops. The snow was soft again. Her mother’s voice called her name. Her father was sharpening his axe by the hearth.
But the sky above was wrong.
There was no moon. Only a single star, burning too bright, flickering like it wept.
She looked down, and her hands were not her own. They were older. Calloused. Holding a torch.
The wind whispered a single word — not in any language she knew, and yet it echoed inside her:
“Endure.”
She awoke to frost biting her lip and the press of a foot to her ribs.
And when she reached into her sleeve to feel the birch bark, it was still there.
Still warm.
One of the orcs — a massive brute with a burnt eye socket and a club of spiked iron — grabbed Elaria by the hair and dragged her toward the fire. She did not scream. She did not fight.
She had no strength left.
He showed her to the others like a new toy, laughing in that wet, gurgling way their kind did. One of the orcs spit on her. Another tested her cheek with a dagger’s edge. They argued. She heard only fragments. One of them wanted to keep her for later. Another wanted to kill her for fun.
She closed her eyes.
“Let it end.”
But just as the orc raised his hand again—
A horn echoed through the trees.
Not an orc horn. No guttural cry. This was sharp. Holy. Piercing.
The laughter stopped.
And then came the sound of hooves and steel upon snow.
This was clear. High. Piercing.
Like a blade of sunlight tearing the sky.
The orcs froze.
Then— steel upon snow, hooves cracking branches, war cries in a language older than conquest.
The world exploded.
Fire bloomed in the treeline as a holy sigil burst into the air — a ring of sunfire, radiant and spinning, blazing above the forest like a second dawn.
The orcs barely had time to draw their crude weapons before the first knight tore through the camp — his blade wreathed in golden flame, splitting a warlord clean in half. Others followed: shields like tower walls, their cloaks white and gold, etched with runes of light and judgment.
The Inquisition of the Divine Flame had come.
Elaria didn’t understand.
She saw the battlefield in disjointed flashes:
A spear impaling an orc mid-charge.
A warhound leaping over the fire, mauling a goblin.
Arrows streaking like comets, searing runes etched into their shafts.
A woman in radiant armor cleaving through a circle of brutes as if dancing.
It was beautiful. Terrible.
A holy storm.
And she was at its heart.
The orc that had grabbed her turned to run — but a lance burst through his chest before he took a step. His blood steamed as it hit the snow.
Elaria collapsed, too weak to stand, too numb to care if she died there.
But then, heavy boots stopped beside her. Someone knelt.
She expected cold iron. Shackles.
Instead — warm gauntlets, gentle.
She was lifted, slowly, reverently, like something fragile and sacred. Her head dropped against a chestplate warm from battle, the sun emblem of Elyonel glowing faintly with residual power.
She smelled steel, oil, and myrrh.
“You’re safe now,” a voice said.
It was deep. Worn. Kind.
“You’re safe, child. The Flame heard you.”
Her lips parted to speak, but no words came.
Only tears.
As she was carried away from the ashes and screams, the light of the fires reflected in her half-open eyes. It didn’t feel real.
And yet, in her palm — still clutched in cracked fingers — was the curled piece of birch bark. Somehow untouched.
Her thumb pressed against it.
It was warm.
It was real.
And as her mind began to drift into unconsciousness, she whispered not with voice, but with thought:
“I endured.”
The ruins of the orc camp burned for a day and a night.
What remained of the captives — broken, half-starved, many too wounded to walk — were loaded onto wagons or carried in arms. Elaria was one of the quiet ones. She said nothing for the first two days. Her eyes followed the smoke curling over the treetops. Her body moved only when guided.
The knights of the Inquisition did not speak much either. Their discipline was monastic. But their eyes were kind, and they worked without rest — tending to wounds, preparing food, shielding the refugees from snow and wind.
Elaria watched everything.
She did not sleep easily. When she did, she clutched the birch bark tightly against her chest.
On the third night, as they camped under a canopy of frozen pine, one of the knights knelt beside her, wrapped her in a second cloak, and whispered:
“You’re strong, little one. The Flame heard you.”
And for the first time since Arvenstead, Elaria nodded.
She did not speak, but she followed.
She walked beside the wagons, her steps light but constant. When a soldier dropped a pouch, she picked it up. When a fire needed more wood, she found branches. When a child cried for their mother, she offered her hand, even though her own had no one left to hold.
The knights noticed.
Especially Captain Kaelthorne.
He was a tall, broad man with weathered eyes and a deep scar along his jaw. He did not speak unnecessarily, but his voice carried calm wherever it went. He was the one who had lifted her from the snow. He never said her name — for he did not know it — but he nodded whenever their eyes met, as if confirming she still lived.
And every time, she repeated in her mind:
The Flame heard me.
As they drew closer to the city of Tarsellan, Elaria’s steps grew firmer.
She began to mimic the knights as they trained. When they practiced sword forms at dusk, she watched from a distance, then traced the motions with a stick. When scouts returned from patrol, she followed them silently and memorized the layout of their maps.
One morning, two riders found her outside the camp perimeter, following bootprints in the snow with surprising accuracy.
Instead of reprimanding her, they invited her along.
By the time they reached Tarsellan’s gates, Elaria walked not with the survivors, but with the vanguard.
Her tattered cloak still hung from her shoulders. Her boots were still torn. But she walked tall. And her eyes, once glassy and lost, now glimmered with quiet fire.
Captain Kaelthorne watched her from the battlements of Tarsellan as she sparred with one of the young squires using wooden sticks. She took the hit, fell, then stood again.
No complaints. No hesitation.
He approached the officer in charge of refugee processing and spoke plainly.
“The girl in the frostcloak. She has no family. No name on our scrolls. But I saw something in her that will not break.”
“You want to enlist her?”
“I want her tested,” he replied. “Send her to Lysara. If she fails, she returns. If she survives—” He paused, then added: “She won’t fail.”
That night, Elaria was summoned.
Kaelthorne stood waiting with a parchment in hand. His expression, as always, was stern — but not cold.
“The road ahead is not merciful,” he told her. “But I believe you were meant to walk it.”
He handed her a token: a sunburst carved into iron, marked with the sigil of the Inquisition.
“This will take you to Lysara. There, you will learn to wield what the world gave you.”
Elaria did not cry. She simply bowed her head, clutched the token, and whispered a single word beneath her breath:
“Endure.”
Perched atop the windswept cliffs of the Lysarian Mountains, the Monastery of Lysara resembled more a fortress than a sanctuary. Its stone towers clawed toward the clouds, weathered by centuries of blizzard and battle. Here, the faith of Elyonel was not merely prayed — it was forged in sweat, steel, and discipline.
Elaria arrived under snowfall, her boots soaked, her hair matted beneath a torn hood, her body lean but wiry from months with the Inquisition. In her cloak, tied by a simple leather cord, hung a small curled piece of birch bark — now hardened, weather-worn, and sacred. She wore it like a charm. Her silent vow.
Endure.
Training at Lysara was nothing short of brutal.
Presiding over the regime was Master Inquisitor Harland Vorath, a man carved from stone and ice. Broad-shouldered, bearded, and with eyes like frost-chipped granite, he ruled the courtyard with bellowed commands and thunderous footsteps.
“The enemy forgives no weakness,” he barked during sparring. “If you fall, you die. If you hesitate, someone else dies because of you.”
Elaria stood out — not because of size or strength, but for her refusal to quit. Smaller than most recruits, she relied on agility and unrelenting will.
During one exercise, she was paired with a larger trainee named Kieran Dorne — affable, easygoing, and clearly amused by the mismatch.
“Don’t want to hurt you, little firefly,” he grinned. “You won’t,” she replied flatly — and dropped him with a quick feint and disarming pivot.
Harland, watching from the shade of the watchtower, gave the faintest nod.
While Harland shaped their bodies, Sister Calindra Lys shaped their spirits.
Calindra, with silvering hair and a voice like warm wind through stained glass, taught the theology of fire: the role of the Inquisition, the nature of divine justice, the weight of the burden they would carry.
“Elyonel’s light is not passive,” she said one frostbitten morning. “We are not candles in the dark. We are the swords of sunrise — swift and merciless.”
Elaria absorbed every lesson, every story. But one day, during a lecture, she asked:
“If we are the light… why does the world fear us so deeply?”
Calindra paused. A shadow passed over her face.
“Because light exposes what people want to keep hidden. And sometimes… because even those who carry it forget what it is for.”
Despite the rigor, Elaria found moments of solace — in the snow, in the silence, and especially in the letters from Kaelthorne.
He wrote plainly, never poetically. Yet there was warmth in his words, and clarity in his praise.
“You are growing stronger. I see it from afar.” “Keep the bark. Keep your name.” “Do not let them burn the part of you that still loves.”
Elaria kept his letters hidden under her mattress. Re-read them on cold nights. Folded and unfolded them so often the edges frayed.
He became her anchor — a distant sun she could still navigate by.
The Monastery of Lysara did not tolerate weakness — but it welcomed the broken.
Every recruit bore scars: some visible, others whispered in nightmares. Elaria quickly learned that pain was a language spoken by all who trained there. No one asked what you had lost. They assumed the answer was everything.
They did not become friends quickly.
But they became family.
Of all the recruits, Kieran was the one who challenged Elaria most.
Bigger, louder, and always grinning like the gods owed him something, Kieran had the ease of someone who had never had to prove himself — and yet, never stopped trying anyway. He teased Elaria, called her mouse when she was silent, and iron fox when she fought back.
“One day I’ll beat you,” he said after his third sparring defeat. “You’ll be old and slow by then,” she replied, wiping sweat from her brow.
They bickered during drills, competed in rites, and pushed each other past their limits.
But Kieran was also the first to help her up when she fell. The first to sit beside her when nightmares made her hands shake.
Elaria’s belief, once fragile, became furnace-hot.
Each prayer, each hymn, was another stone atop the walls she built around her grief.
Every day began before dawn, when the Bell of Rekindling rang through the halls. Recruits lined the courtyard in silence, standing barefoot in the snow, palms raised as they faced east. They chanted:
“Let the flame cleanse our weakness.” “Let it illuminate what must be done.” “Let it burn what should not remain.”
Then came the Rite of Ash, where each was marked with a rune across the brow — a symbol of sacrifice, a reminder that the self was no longer sacred.
Elaria embraced it all.
But behind her calm eyes, something darker smoldered.
She remembered the laughter of the orcs as they torched her village. The way the goblins smiled as they struck the chained. She remembered her voice breaking from hunger.
She whispered her mantras with clenched fists.
“They are filth. They are disease. They are what the Flame was made to destroy.”
Though he barked like a storm, Harland Vorath saw more than technique.
He noticed how Elaria studied tactics obsessively. How she overcompensated for her size with creativity. How her eyes didn’t blink at violence — only at mercy.
At night, after the drills, he’d sit by the brazier and roast salted almonds, tossing them into his mouth like stones. Sometimes he’d call Elaria over without warning.
“Still here?” “Yes, Master.” “Good. You’re not completely useless.” (A pause.) “That was sarcasm, by the way.”
His humor was dry, brittle like the mountain wind — but behind his words was a rare warmth.
He called her “soldierlet.” Never “girl.” Never “child.”
“If you live long enough, I’ll make a killer out of you.”
Meanwhile, Sister Calindra became her spiritual tether.
She smelled of parchment and elderflower. Her fingers were ink-stained, and her laugh was soft and bright. She read the scrolls of the Prophets by candlelight and taught the recruits to question, not just obey.
“Faith without love is fanaticism,” she said. “Faith without fire is cowardice. We must be both torch and shelter.”
She always made time for Elaria — to answer questions, to listen in silence, to place a hand on her shoulder when she couldn’t speak.
“The Flame heard you, child. But it doesn’t only burn monsters. It can consume you too, if you let it.”
Life in Lysara was more than training. It was a way of being.
The Rite of Silence, practiced every seventh day, required a full cycle without speaking — to teach recruits to listen to the inner voice and silence fear.
The Rite of Binding Flame, held monthly, involved walking a short path of heated stones barefoot, as scripture was read aloud. “Pain cleanses. Pain teaches.”
The Feast of Names, a winter vigil, honored fallen inquisitors by reciting their stories around the Flame-Hearth. Each name spoken became a promise to remember.
These rituals were sacred.
Not superstition. Not performance.
They were what kept the broken together.
Time in Lysara was not marked by seasons.
It was marked by scars, achievements, and absences.
Elaria grew in body and mind — her sword was now an extension of herself, her faith no longer a question, but an oath carved into marrow. But within her, a storm brewed.
She still remembered Arvenstead. The chains. The fire. The snow.
And in the silence between prayers, her memories whispered:
They are not people. They are not kin. They are shadow given form.
Sister Calindra Lys, now well into her twilight years, saw the signs.
She would sit with Elaria in the scriptoria, watching her copy verses with rigid precision. One day, she placed a frail hand over Elaria’s wrist and said:
“Vengeance is easy, child. But love is divine. If you lose your compassion, you may still wear the Flame — but you will no longer carry the Light.”
Elaria did not answer. Her eyes stared at the ink. But her fingers trembled.
Later that same week, Harland Vorath found her practicing alone, slashing at straw dummies until her arms bled.
“Clemency is for saints,” he said, sitting on the stone ledge nearby. “And saints die young. Hate keeps us standing when the world wants us buried. Use it. Shape it. Just don’t drown in it.”
His voice was low. Not cruel — just honest.
Elaria didn’t speak. But she nodded.
And continued.
The final year felt like a cage.
She had mastered all forms of combat. She led mock missions with near-perfect success. She read every doctrine. Debated every passage. Sparred every night.
But her spirit was hungry.
She watched others leave, already appointed to distant provinces — some to the Great Library, others to desert patrols, coastal embassies, cursed borderlands.
She wanted purpose. Action. Redemption. She wanted to make the monsters afraid.
Kieran noticed.
“You keep pacing like the floor will vanish if you stand still,” he joked, nudging her shoulder. “Maybe I’m hoping it does,” she replied.
Their rivalry had softened over the years — no less intense, but now tinged with something else. A glance held too long. A breath stolen after a duel. A silence they didn’t dare explore.
“Don’t fall in love with me, fox,” he teased once. “I’m not the one watching when you train shirtless,” she retorted.
But behind the quips was something unspoken.
A pull neither of them could name — not yet.
Two months before graduation, Calindra died in her sleep, beneath the stars she loved.
The monastery fell into quiet mourning. Recruits offered prayers in the Flame-Hall. The monks embroidered her shroud with golden thread.
Elaria didn’t cry in public.
But that night, she climbed to the highest tower of Lysara and sat alone until dawn, holding the old woman’s pendant in her hands.
“I will not be gentle,” she whispered. “But I will not forget.”
And when she descended, her eyes were steel.
Graduation came with snow on the wind.
Recruits stood in perfect formation in the Grand Courtyard. The Flame burned high above them, roaring with divine intensity as the High Inquisitor blessed each trainee.
When the rites ended, Harland Vorath stood before them one last time — arms crossed, gaze stern.
“My job here is done,” he said. “I’m too old to keep yelling at greenbloods. They’re sending me to the Northern Wall — cold, dull, and quiet. Sounds perfect.”
The recruits chuckled.
“I trained you to survive. To obey. To think. I don’t care if you remember my name. But I expect you to remember what I taught you.”
He turned to Elaria and Kieran at the front of the line.
“And you two— try not to kill each other. Or fall in love. Or both.”
Kieran smirked. Elaria’s ears flushed, but her eyes didn’t break from Harland’s.
“Thank you,” she said, voice low but resolute.
“Don’t thank me,” Harland replied. “Make me proud. Or I’ll come back and slap you.”
They both smiled.
But when he walked away, something tightened in her chest.
The world was changing again.
And this time, it wasn’t waiting.
Elaria stood alone before Calindra’s shrine.
In the dim sanctuary of the Monastery of Lysara, her mentor’s banner hung gently above a tapestry embroidered with the sacred flame of Elyonel. A brass bowl of incense smoldered before her, sending up ribbons of cedar and lavender. In her hand, she held the weathered piece of birch bark — the one she had carried since the ashes of Arvenstead.
She said nothing at first.
Then she knelt, placing the bark beside the ceremonial veil draped over Calindra’s relics.
Her eyes closed.
“You said love would save me. I don’t know if that’s true. But I’ll carry your light as far as I can. For both of us.”
She rose.
And walked away from the place that had forged her.
That final night, Lysara roared with celebration.
Laughter echoed through the stone halls, tankards clashed against wooden tables, and boots stomped to the beat of old soldier’s songs. The beer was bitter and strong, brewed in the shadow of the mountains, and it flowed without restraint.
Elaria felt lighter than she had in years. No orders. No sermons. No drills. Just the warmth of comradeship, earned through fire.
Kieran found her near the hearth with two mugs, smiling ear to ear.
“Told you we’d make it,” he said, offering one. “You said we’d die before year two,” she replied. “Details.”
Later, under the stars on the north tower, they sat shoulder to shoulder.
Neither spoke for a while. The air was cold, their breath soft mist. When he finally turned to look at her, his expression had none of the mischief — only clarity.
“Out there… you’re the only thing that makes sense.”
“Then don’t get lost,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
Their kiss was slow. No urgency. No fear.
What followed beneath rough wool and soft linen wasn’t passion or desperation — it was a quiet surrender. Two souls on the edge of something vast, anchoring each other for one final night.
And when sleep took them, curled together on the stone floor of the tower, their hands rested against her chest like a heartbeat.
The assignment came with little ceremony.
A sealed scroll. The red wax of the Inquisition. A list of names. Among them, two stood together:
Valthorne, Elaria. Dorne, Kieran.
Their destination: Merathia, the Jewel of the South — or so it was still called, even as its foundation rotted.
They were to travel with a supply convoy, protect emissaries en route, and report to the Southern Command upon arrival. It was, on parchment, a straightforward order.
But Elaria felt the weight of it immediately.
“It’s not Lysara anymore,” she whispered to Kieran as they packed. “Good,” he said, buckling his harness. “We already burned there. Time to see if we shine anywhere else.”
The journey south stretched for weeks.
They passed through farmland withered by drought and villages clinging to survival. Children watched them with hollow eyes, and mothers with cracked hands offered what little food they had in exchange for blessings.
Elaria would dismount without hesitation. Offer water. Mend small wounds. Whisper prayers.
Kieran followed suit — though with more grumbling.
“You’re going to turn into a walking saint,” he said as she bandaged a child’s foot. “Then you’d better not sin too loud beside me,” she answered.
But their acts drew sharp warnings from their commanding officer, a severe woman named Inquisitor Malden.
“You are not here to heal peasants. You are not missionaries. Your duty is forward. Every minute wasted puts the mission at risk. We are not saviors. We are fire.”
Elaria bowed her head in silence.
But that night, as the others slept, she and Kieran left scraps of food by the trees, where barefoot families had waited just beyond the road.
“They’ll find it,” she whispered. “You still think small kindness matters in a world like this?” Kieran asked. “No,” she said. “I think it matters because the world is like this.”
Merathia appeared over the horizon like a rising beast — towers gleaming in the distance, spires stabbing the clouds, banners fluttering like silk wounds in the wind.
From afar, it looked like civilization incarnate.
Up close, it reeked of rot and perfume.
The convoy passed through the northern gate at dusk. Narrow alleys sprawled like veins from the central road. Beggars clustered near the stone arches, ignored by armored patrols and silken carriages. A merchant whipped a man for stealing a crust of bread. No one intervened.
Elaria’s jaw tightened.
“They don’t even look at him,” she muttered. “They’d have to acknowledge he exists first,” said Kieran.
Inside the city, life teetered between opulence and suffering. The market squares glowed with amber lanterns and silver flutes, while ten paces away, barefoot children slept in refuse beneath crumbling murals of dead saints.
Their official reception was cold, mechanical.
They were led through the outer barracks, handed scrolls of protocols, and told to stay within assigned sectors. The local commander, a rotund man with sweat-stained robes, offered no welcome — only warnings about “stepping out of place.”
But Elaria barely heard him.
Her eyes were on the people.
The broken, the silent, the unseen.
“We’re going to help them,” she whispered to Kieran that night. “We’ll try,” he replied. “But we’re not in Lysara anymore.”
She didn’t care. Her conviction burned too bright.
“Then we’ll bring Lysara with us.”
The first month in Merathia shattered her illusions slowly.
At first, it was the small things — requests denied, investigations delayed, petitions ignored. Then it became systemic. A child robbed in front of the chapel? Not their jurisdiction. A widow assaulted by guards? She lacked a witness. A starving camp of refugees outside the gates? “That’s a civic issue,” they said.
Elaria filed reports. She sent letters. She requested audiences.
Nothing changed.
She was summoned instead — not to thank her, but to warn her.
“You are a guest in this city,” said Commander Arven Malden, a bloated man with rings on every finger and no calluses on his hands. “The Inquisition exists to maintain order — not charity.”
“But what is order without justice?” she replied.
He leaned forward.
“If you keep questioning protocol, you will be stripped of your seal. With dishonor. Do I make myself clear, Initiate?”
She said nothing.
Her silence was a wound.
Kieran stood by her side at first.
He confronted officers with her. He argued in meetings. He even skipped protocol once to help her feed a family in the lower districts. But the weeks wore on him — and unlike her, he began to bend.
“They don’t want us to fix the city, El,” he said after a particularly frustrating day. “They want us to keep it from falling apart entirely.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’s not supposed to be.”
She stared at him. He avoided her eyes.
“We do what we can. Within the lines. Maybe it’s not perfect — but it’s what we signed up for.”
“No. It’s not.”
The silence between them stretched longer each day.
The laughs faded. The shared meals grew cold. Where once there was fire, now only cinders.
Her days became a march of silence.
Each morning she stood in polished armor, listening to directives from officers who had never walked a muddy street. She nodded when told to ignore the starving girl at the temple steps. She bowed when instructed to turn away from the bleeding thief in the gutters. She wrote her reports. Filed them in triplicate. Signed her name beneath blank lines.
And every time she passed the beggars, they still reached out — with hands like broken roots, with voices hoarse from hunger.
She looked away.
Each time, it was easier.
She did her duty. She followed the flame. And it no longer meant anything.
You’re still her, Kieran had said.
She wasn’t sure anymore.
Kieran changed.
He no longer protested when bribes passed hands beneath the chapel. He stopped speaking up when Inquisitors struck beggars in the name of “discipline.” He laughed at their jokes, shared drinks with their commanders, and began using the phrase:
“That’s just how things work here.”
At first, Elaria tried to argue.
She reminded him of Lysara, of Harland’s warnings, of Calindra’s gentleness. But Kieran just sighed.
“You think those lessons matter here?” “Yes,” she insisted. “They have to.” “No, El. What matters is keeping your place. Keeping your sword clean and your boots shinier than the man above you.”
He spoke with calm certainty — like someone who had decided long ago to survive instead of believe.
And slowly, he stopped calling her by her name. She became “Sister Valthorne.” And she stopped correcting him.
The rot sank into her bones.
Guilt gnawed at her. She began skipping training, missing prayers, drinking too much during night patrols. When civilians shouted for help, she barked at them to shut up. One boy spilled her wine in a tavern — she struck him. Not hard. Not enough to draw blood. But the sound of his body hitting the floor haunted her.
She apologized. He ran.
The next day, she vomited in her room and didn’t leave for hours.
The nightmares returned.
She saw Arvenstead burning again, but this time, she stood beside the orcs, clad in Inquisitor’s red, holding the torch. The birch bark crumbled in her fingers, turning to ash.
The Flame Heard You, it whispered. And left you to burn.
The turning point came during a sanitation mission in the lower district.
The order was simple: quarantine a plague-stricken sector. Seal it. Prevent spread. She followed the protocol. Barricaded the gates. Kept the people inside. Just like she was told.
Three days later, the screams began.
Not from sickness. From fire.
One of the senior Inquisitors, under the guise of purification, had torched the entire block. Women, children, elders — all dead. The rot didn’t matter. The order had been given. And Elaria had helped execute it.
She saw the flames rise. She saw a girl, just like she had once been, pounding against the locked gates.
And she saw herself — on the other side.
She vomited behind the chapel.
That night, she found Kieran in the barracks courtyard, sharpening his blade.
“You knew,” she said.
He didn’t look at her. Just kept grinding the whetstone.
“I suspected. So what?” “So we murdered them.” “We followed orders. If we hadn’t, the disease would’ve reached the merchant ward. Hundreds more—”
“You’re repeating them,” she snapped. “Like a damn parchment. You used to care.”
He stood, finally meeting her gaze.
“I still care. About the uniform. The order. The Empire. You want to play savior in a city like this, fine — but don’t drag me into your guilt.”
“You think they’re lucky to have us?” she asked, voice trembling. “They are,” he said. “Ungrateful wretches. Half of them would be dead without us.”
Those words struck deeper than any blade.
They echoed too closely to what she once heard from her captors, from the orcs who dragged her across the snow laughing as she begged for mercy.
And for a moment, she didn’t see Kieran.
She saw another monster in a red cloak.
“We’re done,” she whispered.
He didn’t protest.
He didn’t call her back.
He just turned away.
And Elaria stood there, broken — but free.
She spent three nights wandering the slums after the fire.
No words. No prayers. Just smoke and silence.
When she finally returned to her assigned quarters, her armor lay untouched. Her blade, still coated in soot. She sat for hours in the chapel alone, staring at the flame, seeing only flickers of the faces she had sealed behind the gates.
That night, she dreamed not of Elyonel — but of Kaelthorne.
Her old commander, the one who had pulled her from the snow with arms of iron and a voice that felt like home. He was not speaking in the dream, only watching her, as if waiting.
When she woke, her choice was already made.
The next morning, she presented herself at the Merathian Citadel.
She requested transfer to The Northern Wall — a frozen post on the edge of civilization, where aging veterans and political inconveniences went to disappear.
The clerk blinked at her, confused. He called for a superior. Then another. Until at last, she stood before Inquisitor-General Aeran Rauk, a man with a thin moustache, silk gloves, and the cruelty of a man who never had to raise a sword himself.
“You must be joking,” he said, barely glancing at her form. “I am not.” “Sister Valthorne, the Wall is a tomb. No advancement. No salary for months. No contact. No influence. You might as well be asking for exile.”
“So be it.”
He leaned forward, intrigued now.
“Why? You wish to be forgotten?”
She stared at him — a long, empty gaze. The kind a storm gives before it strikes.
“Because if I stay here,” she said quietly, “I’ll start killing the wrong people.”
That made him pause.
He chuckled, but the sound was nervous. There was something in her eyes — something cracked and deep and lethal.
“You’ve become quite dramatic, Sister. I should strip your seal entirely.” “Then do it. Or sign the transfer. But do not waste my time.”
He studied her a moment longer. Then, with a sigh, signed the parchment.
“You’ll report to the Northern Wall. Effective immediately. You’ll retain your armor, but you’re demoted to Field Initiate. You’ll sleep in the frost with the rest of the ghosts.”
“Good,” she replied. “They’re harder to disappoint.”
She left Merathia at dawn.
No ceremony. No farewells. No escorts. Her horse was old. Her gear, worn. Her rank, erased.
But for the first time in years, her hands didn’t tremble when she strapped on her sword.
The wind felt cleaner the farther she rode.
And somewhere deep inside — beneath the ash and bile — the birch bark still rested, inside her heart.
A relic. A promise.
She did not look back.
Never again, she swore. Never again will I be consumed by their filth.
The city of rot faded behind her.
And the North, wide and cold, welcomed her like a blade welcomes the whetstone.
It was on the fourth morning of her journey that she found fresh tracks in the snow.
Elk, maybe. Or wolf. Or both. Her senses, honed by grief and training, pulled her off the path and deep into the woods. She was tired, silent, wrapped in her own storm.
That’s when she heard laughter.
Not cruel. Not mocking. Just… careless. Human.
She crept forward through the pines, hand on her sword, until she spotted a man sitting on a rock beside a campfire — poking at something on a stick. He wore a travel-worn cloak and a crest she barely recognized: a variant of the Inquisition sun, altered with a crescent and star. Around him lounged five more figures, armored and alert but visibly at ease.
The man turned and saw her. Instead of reaching for a weapon, he grinned.
“If you’re here to rob us, you’re several meals too late,” he said. “But we’ve got coffee. Poisonous coffee, mind you. I make it myself.”
Elaria stepped into view, cautious. “Who are you?”
He stood, not too fast, not too slow. “Commander Aldric Vael. Expeditionary Force — North. And you, by that look, are very lost or very determined.”
“Sister Elaria Valthorne,” she replied. “Newly reassigned. And not lost.”
Aldric studied her for a beat, then chuckled. “Of course not. You just happened to wander into our camp like a wolf sniffing out a lie.”
She declined the coffee.
They shared fire and silence until Aldric invited her to ride with them toward the Wall. At first, she kept her distance. His easy tone and frequent jokes made her suspicious. Merathia had taught her to fear charm — it usually meant rot.
But the longer they traveled together, the more she noticed the respect in the eyes of his men. They called him names behind his back — Old Owl, Ghost Beard, Map-Bastard — but every insult dripped with affection.
And when night came, and the scouts returned bloody from an ambush, Aldric was the first to stitch wounds and the last to sleep.
“You’re not what I expected,” she told him one evening. “And you expected what?” “Another liar. Another coward.”
He just smiled and sipped his foul coffee.
“You’ll find those too. But not in this company.”
By the time they reached the lower ridge that overlooked the Northern Wall — The Last Vigil — she was already riding at the center of the column, not the edges. Her sword had drawn blood twice in those weeks. She’d saved one scout from a freezing river and another from a shadowbeast with glassy skin and a smile stitched shut.
They had stopped calling her “the quiet one.”
Instead, they began calling her “Ashbrand.” A name she did not yet understand. But accepted.
The snow broke open before them as they crested the ridge, and there it stood:
The Great Northern Wall. The Last Vigil.
A monolith of ancient stone, jagged and frost-slicked, rising like the spine of a dead god across the mountains. It coiled and twisted with the peaks, its towers lost in the mist, black banners whipping against the wind. Cold iron. Burned granite. Silent torches that had not been lit in years.
It was older than empires. Older than calendars.
And it commanded silence.
Elaria, though hardened by fire and failure, felt her knees weaken.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she whispered.
Aldric only smirked. “Good. That means it still works.”
As they descended toward the gates, figures emerged from the mist. Sentinels in dark blue cloaks. Eyes like ice. Weathered armor, marked by centuries of rust and rune.
At their head stood a broad-shouldered man with a thick grey beard and eyes sharp as obsidian.
“By the flames, is that you, Vael?” he bellowed, voice echoing off the stones.
“Unless I’ve been replaced by a more charming version,” Aldric replied.
The two clasped arms like brothers. Elaria watched, startled — then recognized the voice, the posture, the gravel-lined laugh.
“You’re still alive,” she said, stunned.
“And you’re still too lean for this weather,” Harland grunted, eyeing her from head to toe. “But I’ll take what I get.”
They shared a nod. Not warmth, not comfort — but respect. The bond of forged iron, not silk.
“She’s yours again,” Aldric said. “And I’ll fix what Merathia tried to break,” Harland replied.
The Wall wasn’t just stone. It was a crucible.
Elaria’s days began with wind-burned marches across the top battlements. Her lungs froze before dawn. Her legs stiffened in armor not made for comfort, but for survival.
Training was brutal. No rituals. No sermons. Just blade, grit, and the ghost of death watching from beyond the frost.
“This is the last light,” Harland said one morning as she staggered through a sparring match. “No cities beyond. No laws. Just them. If we fall here, they don’t stop at the gates. They take the world.”
It was here that her pain turned back into purpose.
Each breath in the frozen air was a step away from Merathia.
Each night she stood watch was a prayer whispered in silence.
Life on the Wall followed a rhythm colder than any bell.
There were no dawn prayers. No processions. No banners fluttering above marble courtyards.
There was ice, and stone, and watchfulness.
Every morning, Elaria woke before the sun, when the stars still clung to the black sky like frozen scars. She donned her armor in silence, shared stiff bread and blackroot tea with the other sentinels, and climbed the eastern stair to her post. The wind at the top sliced like glass across her face. She did not flinch.
She was one of the youngest on the Wall — and it showed.
Many of the others bore white in their beards, or else burns where helmets had once failed them. They moved slower but struck harder. Men and women of the Wall were not beautiful. They were not clean. But they stood tall, like statues carved from the very stone beneath their feet.
And Elaria began to find herself among them.
Each shift passed in cold silence, broken only by the whumph of falling snow or the distant cry of something not quite bird, not quite beast. And every night, she trained — with Harland when he was sober, or with herself when he wasn’t. She ran until her legs burned, sparred until her muscles screamed, and prayed no longer to Elyonel, but to discipline itself.
Slowly, her posture straightened. Her eyes hardened.
And respect returned — not from others first, but from within.
Most days passed without incident.
But when the wind changed, the Wall awakened.
Small bands of orcs tested the defenses. Not full assaults, but scouting packs — wiry and hungry, dressed in hides stitched from human skin and bone. Sometimes, corrupted beasts clawed at the base of the Wall, bleeding shadow. Once, a flying daemon shrieked overhead and dropped a soldier from a hundred feet above the snow.
And each time, Elaria was ready.
She became known for her speed with a blade, her refusal to retreat, and her calm precision. She didn’t roar in battle — she moved like frost on steel, silent and sure.
But what caught her attention most were the men of the outer force.
The Expeditionary Force — Aldric’s mad bastards — were not like the sentinels.
They didn’t guard. They hunted.
Whenever a report came of movement beyond the ice fields, or whispers of daemon activity, Aldric and his handpicked unit rode out through the Iron Gate and disappeared for days. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes… forever.
“They’re ghosts,” one of the veterans muttered. “Half-cursed, half-mad.”
And yet, morale never faltered.
When they returned — covered in filth and frostbite, dragging heads or corpses behind them — there was always laughter. A grim joy. They toasted the dead with black liquor and threw knives at the wall in their name.
“What drives them?” Elaria asked Harland once.
The old man chewed a strip of jerky, stared across the courtyard, and said:
“Some do it for glory. Most for guilt. But all of us—”
“All of us stay,” he added, “because it’s the only place left where our sins are outweighed by our usefulness.”
But even in the discipline, cracks began to show.
One night, returning early from patrol, Elaria passed Aldric and Harland speaking low in the armory. Their voices were hushed, their eyes tense.
“Movement’s increasing. Five groups in ten days. Organized. Patterns.”
“Scouts say they’re marking the ice. Banners. Rituals. It’s not just orcs anymore.”
“And still no reinforcements?”
“No. The Inquisition says we’re exaggerating. That it’s the wind playing tricks.”
“Or maybe they don’t want to believe what we’re seeing.”
Elaria froze in the shadows, her breath tight.
She had heard these tones before — the sound of men trying to reason with dread.
Later that night, she wrote in her journal:
The Wall is still strong. But something out there is pressing harder. And they are pretending not to notice. Or perhaps they want it to fall.
Despite it all, Elaria did not break.
She grew sharper. Colder. But beneath that, something warm remained.
Not hope. Not faith.
Just resolve.
She did not wear her Inquisitor seal like a badge anymore — she wore it like a chain, a reminder. She was not here to rise in rank. She was not here for glory. She was here to be the final line.
And if the storm came — if the dark beyond the Wall rose in full strength — she would be the blade that answered.
No more speeches.
No more mercy.
Only the work.
The horn blew three times.
That meant an outbound mission. Large scale. High risk.
For weeks, scouts had reported growing clusters of Orc movement—small warbands merging into something larger. Symbols carved into ice. Fire pits that burned black. A chieftain rumored to wear bones not just as armor, but as language, a walking altar.
The Council at the Wall could no longer ignore it.
A full-scale response was assembled: thirty soldiers, two expeditionary clerics, three scouts, and Aldric himself at the helm.
Elaria was called at dawn.
“You’ll ride north-east with the third unit,” Harland said, sliding her orders across the stone desk. “You’ve earned your place. Don’t lose it to doubt.”
She nodded, quiet. She was tense, but she didn’t flinch.
“I’m ready.”
And she was. Ready to step beyond the Wall not as a victim, not as a tool—but as a weapon honed by solitude and fire.
Two days into the march, the snow changed.
It grew thin. Greasy. Grey as ash and bitter to the tongue. The sky darkened, though no clouds covered it. The wind whispered through holes in the world, carrying with it the smell of meat and copper and rot.
“Is this all frozen land?” Elaria asked Aldric one evening, huddled near the only fire allowed.
He leaned on a flat stone beside her, nursing a dented flask of burner’s tea.
“Not all. There’s corrupted soil down south too. Near the Black Coast. Even a second wall.”
She blinked. “There’s a Southern Wall?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Less dramatic, more sun. They even get sand between their toes before the orcs come screaming over the dunes.”
He smirked. “Always wanted to see it. Maybe lie on the beach. Get a tan. Ask the orcs if they drink coconut water.”
She raised a brow. “You’re joking.”
“I joke because if I don’t, I scream.”
They sat in silence a moment longer, the laughter fading. Around them, the snow did not melt, but dissolved. The trees curled backward. Some bled when struck.
Elaria gripped her sword tighter. “It’s worse than I imagined.”
“It’s worse than they let you imagine,” Aldric muttered. “Corruption is not just a stain. It’s a hunger. This land was once forest and river. It remembers what it was. That’s what makes it dangerous.”
“Because it wants to forget?” she asked.
“Because it wants to bring you with it.”
By the fourth night, they found their first ruin.
A village — or what had once been one. Burnt frames of houses buried in black frost. Skeletons still chained inside. The walls were painted with sigils in blood, curling and pulsing faintly under moonlight.
The clerics whispered prayers. One wept openly.
Elaria said nothing. But she felt her stomach twist.
This was not war. This was desecration.
They continued. For every league, more signs. Pikes of human heads. Skinned beasts crucified to frozen trees. A deep pit that steamed in the night, lined with broken weapons and the bones of Inquisitors long dead.
She recognized some of the armor.
Not by name. But by make. From Lysara.
“They were graduates,” she whispered.
No one responded.
Even Aldric, for once, had no joke.
They reached the ridge by mid-afternoon. Snow crackled underfoot like old parchment. The scouts ahead had gone quiet.
Aldric called a halt.
Just as he did, a shriek echoed through the frozen gulch below.
Not beast. Not Orc.
Human. Female. Terrified.
Elaria and two others moved first, cresting the slope to find a sight none were prepared for.
Civilians. Half-naked. Shackled to frost-covered altars carved from stone and bone. Around them, humans in black robes, hands raised to the sky, chanting in a guttural tongue warped by madness and magic.
And among them, Orcs stood guard, calm and coordinated. Waiting.
“They knew we were coming,” Aldric growled. “This is a lure.”
But it was too late. One of the clerics charged ahead, screaming to save the prisoners.
The mages turned.
One raised his hand—and a circle of fire twisted with voidlight erupted at the cliffside, blowing the cleric apart.
Then the ambush began.
It was chaos.
Orcs poured from the tree line, guided by heretical spells. Black fire, chains of ice, necrotic illusions — sorcery meant to break minds as much as flesh. Elaria drew both her blades — a short curved dagger for inside the guard, and a lightweight longsword for cutting precision. Her armor, dyed frost-grey, let her move between lines with speed.
She found her first opponent — a heretic wielding a staff made of carved femurs — and dropped him with a feint and stab beneath the ribs.
Another lunged at her. She rolled, slashed, and moved again.
Every inch of ground was purchased with blood and bone.
Aldric rallied the rear. His voice cut through the panic.
“Circle the altars! We hold this line or die feeding it!”
And they did.
By the end of the battle, ten of them were dead.
Two prisoners were saved.
But five more had been sacrificed during the ambush — their hearts torn free, their blood fed to glyphs that pulsed on the stones like open eyes.
That night, the survivors buried the bodies beneath shallow snow mounds. No fire. No prayers. Only silence.
Elaria cleaned her blades slowly. Her fingers trembled.
Aldric sat beside her, holding his side — bruised from a blast.
“You did well,” he said, half-conscious. “For a girl who once thought I drank coconut water.”
She didn’t laugh. She just nodded.
“They were waiting,” she said. “They knew our route.”
“Aye,” he muttered. “Same as the others. The graduates from Lysara… They weren’t ambushed. They were baited. Like us.”
He looked at the snow, where the glyphs still glowed faintly.
“This was a test.”
“For what?”
“To see what we’d send. What we’d risk to answer.”
In the days that followed, Elaria became a shadow beside Aldric’s shoulder.
She slept beside the scouts, ate little, spoke less. But when it was time to fight, she moved like a silver flame.
Orc hunting parties. Spell wards in old ruins. Abandoned Inquisitor camps warped into shrines. Each encounter drained them. Each cost them lives. But Elaria no longer questioned. She simply fought.
One of Aldric’s veterans, a weathered woman named Broen, clasped her shoulder after a skirmish.
“You fight like you’ve been with us for years,” she said.
“Feels like I’ve been dying with you for years,” Elaria replied.
They laughed. And from that night on, Ashbrand was not a nickname. It was her place in the unit.
The expedition had started with thirty. By the second week, they were seventeen.
Some fell to blades. Others vanished in the night, taken by shadows or lured by phantom voices.
Elaria began to count them in silence. Not names. Just shapes. Faces she saw in the snow.
We were sent to end a threat, she thought. But we are walking into its mouth.
And yet she did not waver.
She had no faith in the gods anymore.
But she had a duty to the dead.
They found the survivor two days after the altar ambush.
A boy, barely older than sixteen, hidden beneath a pile of corpses. His skin was blue from the cold. His mind—fractured. He had the brand of a reconnaissance unit from Durath’Khar, one that had gone missing months ago.
They thawed his limbs by the fire. Gave him broth. He barely swallowed.
“He’s not going to last,” said Aldric, kneeling beside him.
But the boy clutched Elaria’s arm.
His voice cracked like burnt paper.
“He spoke to me. In the dark. With no mouth.”
“Who?” she asked.
“The one who walks behind the blood,” he muttered. “The one the war will carry. A black crown… a tongue of iron… He said the Emissary has been chosen.”
“Daemon,” Aldric muttered under his breath. “Has to be.”
The boy convulsed that night. And died with black veins pulsing across his throat.
On the fourth day of the march back, they spotted them.
Another band of Inquisitors.
Their armor bore the crest of the Order of the Sacred Brand — a unit Elaria had never seen on deployment this far north. Still, they spoke the right codes. Carried the right banners. Looked like them.
And yet…
Something felt wrong.
Their posture was too perfect. Their eyes too flat. Their commander — a bald man with a hawk’s nose and silk-lined gloves — smiled too easily.
Behind them stood civilians in chains. Among them, to Elaria’s shock, were half-orcs. Children and women. Beaten. Broken.
Aldric dismounted and greeted the captain.
“Didn’t know Brand units were posted this far. What brings you to the ice?”
“A special mission,” said the man with a practiced grin. “Cleansing rites.”
Elaria froze.
Cleansing rites were not used in current doctrine. Not since the reformation. Only the oldest, most fanatic Inquisitors still practiced and used that term.
Something’s wrong.
She drifted through the ranks, unnoticed. Circled behind the false Inquisitors.
And there—on the belt of one of the soldiers—she saw it:
A dagger etched in Daemon runes. A small vial filled with sacrificial black blood. A whispering charm used by cultists of Thanarok.
She turned.
“Aldric!” she hissed. “They’re not ours!”
The lie shattered in a breath.
Aldric’s mace came free. Elaria’s blades flicked to her hands. The false Inquisitors screamed words not in any human tongue — and the trees trembled as something unseen surged in the air.
The two groups clashed in the snow-choked glade.
Steel rang. Magic burned.
One of the corrupted unleashed a gust of black flame, incinerating two of Aldric’s scouts. Another pulled a hidden whip tipped with bone hooks, rending open a soldier’s face.
Elaria moved like lightning.
She disabled a false inquisitor with a stab through the calf, spun behind another, and gutted him before he could raise a glyph-bound relic. But it wasn’t enough.
One by one, her companions fell.
Broen — her shoulder pierced with a spear. Garrin — crushed beneath a corrupted knight’s warhammer. Aldric — bleeding from three wounds, still barking orders.
They fought not to win, but to survive.
At last, only the enemy leader remained — wounded, cornered, one arm shattered by Aldric’s mace.
He laughed.
Blood poured from his mouth. His teeth were black. His eyes—pupils vertical like a beast’s.
“You think this is a victory?” he coughed.
“You butchered your own,” Elaria snarled. “You wear the flame and spread rot.”
“Because it is not the flame that matters. It is the strength it once held. And that strength need to return.”
He grinned wider.
“The God of War awakens.”
“The Emissary will burn the heavens.”
“And you—you children of ashes—you will beg to kneel when he raises the black crown.”
Elaria silenced him with a blade to the throat.
His body fell. But the echo of his voice clung to the wind.
Only twelve survived the encounter.
They freed the prisoners — humans, half-orcs, and even a dwarven scout. Their wounds were deep, but their words deeper.
They spoke of rituals, forced conversions, sacrifices made to something they called “the Iron Flame.”
Aldric, pale and coughing blood, led the remnants back toward the Wall.
Elaria walked beside him. Her hands were stained red. Her body broken.
But her resolve had never been stronger.
They would return.
They would tell the truth.
And if the Inquisition tried to bury it—
She would dig it up with fire.
They emerged from the cursed woods bruised, bloodied, and broken — but alive.
The Wall welcomed them like a wounded god: silent, watchful, colder than they remembered. The gates groaned open. The sentinels saluted.
No one asked questions.
Because when so few return from the frost, the truth is always worse than anyone imagines.
That night, in the underchambers below the garrison, Aldric, Harland, and Elaria gathered by torchlight. Maps sprawled across the stone table. The prisoners rested nearby, under heavy watch.
“We lost eighteen,” Aldric said quietly, his arm still bound. “But what we saw… the traitors, the rituals, that prophecy—” “The Emissary,” Elaria whispered. “And the return of the God of War.”
Harland remained silent for a long time.
“You can’t write that in a letter,” he finally muttered. “Not just because they won’t believe it. Because we don’t know who’s reading them.”
“The Inquisition already ignores our calls for reinforcements,” Aldric added. “We’ve sent seven urgent dispatches. Seven. No reply. Either they don’t care, or someone doesn’t want them to.”
The room went cold.
“Then we bring the truth ourselves,” Elaria said.
The two older men looked at her.
“I’ll go,” she said. “To the southern kingdoms. To the High Courts. To the Free Cities and even the elven enclaves if I must.”
Harland’s brow furrowed. “You’re not a diplomat.”
“No,” she said. “But I’m a soldier. A witness. And if I must die screaming in their halls to make them listen, I’ll do it.”
Aldric said nothing.
He simply nodded.
“We need you here,” she added. “If you leave, the Wall collapses. The men only hold because you stand.”
Aldric chuckled darkly. “That’s a poor foundation.”
“It’s the only one we have.”
Harland stood. His old bones cracked as he crossed the chamber and unlocked a small iron box.
From within, wrapped in red wax and bound with five seals, he withdrew a letter black as ash, etched in silver thread.
“This hasn’t been used in over a century,” he said. “But it was once given to lone envoys of the High Flame.”
He placed it into her hand.
“It grants you right of travel, audience with rulers, and sanctuary in any allied realm. If you invoke it, they must listen.”
Elaria took it with reverence. Her fingers trembled slightly.
“You’re sure about this?” Harland asked.
“If we wait, we die,” she answered. “And the world forgets we ever stood.”
As dawn broke, Elaria stood at the gate.
Clad not in ceremonial robes, but in worn travel armor. Her blades at her side.
A small satchel. A warhorse. A road that stretched through frost and empire.
The gates opened.
The wind howled. The frost bit.
Snow drifted sideways in thick sheets, stinging skin and muting sound. The great gates of the Last Vigil stood open — wide enough for one horse, one rider, and the burden of a continent.
Elaria adjusted the straps of her saddle. Her cloak whipped behind her, frayed at the edges. The barklike-charm shimmered at her throat, a dull talisman of all she had endured.
Behind her stood the handful of companions who had become more than brothers and sisters in arms. They were the last fire in a world growing colder.
Aldric Vael approached first, his breath a plume of mist. He didn’t speak immediately.
“So,” he finally muttered, “we send the greenest of us to deal with kings and councils.”
Elaria gave a tired smile. “They won’t see the Inquisition. They’ll see a girl.”
“You are the Inquisition,” he replied, quieter. “The part we still believe in.”
He pressed a worn patch of cloth into her hand — the standard of their expedition. Burnt. Torn. But whole.
“Bring it back. Even if we don’t make it, they need to know we were here.”
Harland stood beside him. No armor. Just a heavy coat and his usual scowl softened by pride.
“If they doubt you, tell them Harland Break-Knees said to go to hell.”
She chuckled. Then hugged him. A tight, brief thing neither commented on.
“The dwarves,” she said. “They’re my first stop.”
They both looked surprised.
“They remember the First Daemon War. They bled first. Lost first. They’ll understand before anyone else. And… they’re closest.”
She didn’t finish the other thought.
Before the Wall falls.
The remaining expedition stood silently by the gate. Some saluted. Others bowed their heads. One of the younger recruits, barely sixteen, wiped his nose on his sleeve and whispered, “Endure.”
Elaria swung into the saddle.
She looked down once more.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ll be fast enough. But I promise you—”
Her voice cracked, just for a moment.
“—I’ll make them listen.”
The horn at the gate blew once. Low. Mourning.
Elaria Valthorne turned her horse, heels brushing flank. And without another word, she rode into the white.
Deep within the mountains of eastern Astravara, where the veins of the world pulsed with magma and stone, lay the eternal halls of Ghor’Nazruk—a subterranean city of dwarven splendor. Its forges burned without pause, echoing day and night with the ringing of hammers against steel. Sparks danced through vaulted corridors, lighting the paths of smiths who shaped not only weapons, but legacy.
The walls of Ghor’Nazruk gleamed with sacred runes, glowing softly with celestial energy—tributes to Tianara, goddess of harmony, and Vulkanar, the god of flame and creation. These divine symbols were more than decorations; they were living vows, etched into the stone to remind every dwarf of their sacred duty to build, to endure, to create.
In every corner of the city, pride thrived—not arrogance, but the earned pride of a people who had shaped mountains into monuments. Ghor’Nazruk was not merely a fortress—it was a living heart, beating beneath the skin of the world.
Though carved in stone, Ghor’Nazruk was anything but cold.
The rhythm of dwarven life pulsed through its halls like blood through ancient veins. In the upper levels, children chased one another between granite pillars, their laughter echoing through wide tunnels as elders watched with amused pride. The scent of baked roots and mushrooms drifted from communal kitchens, mixing with the ever-present aroma of coal and molten metal.
At the heart of the city, the Grand Forge blazed like the sun trapped beneath the earth. Smiths toiled with reverent focus, their beards tied back and brows beaded with sweat, as they shaped blades, gears, and ceremonial tools. The clang of hammer on steel was not merely labor—it was a sacred chant, a daily devotion to Vulkanar. Near the Forge-Temples, stone-cloaked priests offered quiet prayers, tracing divine runes across anvils before each workday began.
Dwarves sang as they worked—old songs, deep songs, stories woven into melody. They sang of dragons slain, halls built, and lineages honored. These were not a people who feared the dark. They had mastered it.
But even in such harmony, shadows began to stretch long and cold.
It started subtly—a miner slipping on stone he swore hadn’t been there before, or a child waking from sleep claiming to hear someone laughing in the walls.
Small tremors would sometimes ripple through the lower districts, dismissed by engineers as natural settling. Yet among the miners who delved deepest, whispers passed uneasily over mugs of mushroom ale: tools vanishing from sealed chambers, lanterns flickering without cause, echoes that returned too slowly… or too quickly.
Some spoke of a strange pressure in the tunnels, a weight not of earth or rock, but of eyes. Unseen. Watching.
Still, the pride of the dwarves was not easily shaken. Ghor’Nazruk had stood for over a thousand years. No enemy had ever breached its gates. No army had ever descended its depths.
What was a whisper, compared to all they had built?
In the quietest tier of Ghor’Nazruk, where the lanterns burned dimmest and the halls narrowed into the deeper mines, a small boy sat alone near the edge of a shaft. His cheeks were smudged with soot, and his fingers were raw from hours spent hauling buckets of ore for the older miners.
Clutched in his hand was a chisel no longer than a finger, and before him, the smooth stone wall bore a series of rough etchings. Not the elegant runes of the priests—these were crude, childish marks: a flame, a hammer, a watchful eye.
He whispered as he carved, voice trembling.
“Keep ‘em away. The bad things. Papa says they ain’t real. But I saw them. Eyes in the dark.”
A gust of cold air brushed past him, though no wind should’ve reached that depth.
The boy froze. His chisel clattered to the floor.
Far below, in the black, something moved.
At the summit of Ghor’Nazruk, beneath the adamantine dome of the Throne-Hall, King Reikal Thrun stood before a massive stone table inlaid with glowing lines of rune-script. Maps and scout reports lay spread across its surface like battle-scars, but the king’s attention had begun to drift.
Despite the disturbing reports from the lower tiers—talks of tremors, of unusual goblin activity—Reikal’s focus remained fixed on the approaching Festival of Flame.
“The reports are vague,” he said, waving a heavy hand. “Goblins are always digging. Miners see shadows where there are none.”
Around him, the Council of Stone murmured in uneasy agreement, though some faces were etched with deeper concern.
Durmak, the king’s aging advisor, cleared his throat. “With respect, sire… the scouts speak of goblins bypassing natural tunnel routes. Of cooperation with orcs. That is—unheard of.”
Reikal’s eyes narrowed, but his tone remained composed.
“And that is exactly why I believe it to be exaggerated. Goblins and orcs fight over moldy bread, let alone territory. A shared invasion force? Pure fantasy.”
He turned toward the high dais, where young apprentices were placing ceremonial banners along the walls in preparation.
“The Festival of Flame draws near. Our sons will stand before the forge alone and offer their creations to Vulkanar. Their moment of ascension into adulthood. That is where our attention belongs. That is where our future is forged.”
The other councilors nodded—some out of duty, others out of genuine reverence. The Festival was sacred: a test of a dwarf’s craftsmanship, spirit, and devotion. Each boy would enter the Forge of Trials alone, emerge with what he had built or forged, and present it before the priesthood. Their creation would determine the name they would carry into adulthood—a name that could only change again if they achieved greatness in war, invention, or sacrifice.
It was a rite older than the kingdom itself.
Yet not all eyes shared in the king’s calm.
The high ceiling of the Hall of the Council, lit by suspended braziers that burned with smokeless flame, cast long shadows across the runed marble floor. King Reikal Thrun, adorned in regal crimson and obsidian armor, paced before his advisors with deliberate calm. Behind him stood the immense doors that led to the Forge of Judgment, where preparations for the Festival of Flame were reaching their crescendo.
At the foot of the steps stood Thargrim, Captain of the Royal Guard.
Tall for a dwarf and grim even by their standards, Thargrim’s braided beard was bound in iron rings, each one etched with a name—names he no longer spoke aloud. As one of the first of the extinct order of Death-Forsworn, the elite warriors who abandoned clan, title, and hearth to hunt the horrors in the dark, he had seen things others refused to believe. But here, he stood again as a father, a contradiction that weighed on every word he now spoke.
“Sire,” he began, voice like gravel sliding over steel, “the tunnels beneath the southern aqueduct have collapsed. Three miners never returned. Their blood was found, but no bodies.”
The murmurs in the hall died down.
“And yesterday,” he continued, “we found a scouting party gutted. No goblin would risk the upper caverns. Not unless something stronger drove them.”
Reikal frowned. “What are you suggesting?”
Thargrim stepped forward. “That the threats we’ve heard—goblins allying with orcs, foreign tunnels breaching protected ground—they are no longer rumors. They are patterns, and they are closing in.”
Councilor Durmak scoffed. “You speak as if we are under siege already. Surely we would see their banners at our gates!”
“Not if the enemy comes from within, Durmak,” Thargrim snapped. “Not if they dig beneath our boots.”
He turned back to Reikal.
“My king… shut down the secondary galleries. Seal the under-passages to the lower wards. Post guards at every sealed threshold, and prepare the Deepward cannons.”
Reikal’s jaw tightened. “You ask me to cripple our economy on the eve of the Festival. To seal our lifeblood—the veins that feed our forges. We would look weak before the Clans.”
Thargrim hesitated. Then bowed his head. “I ask you to save lives.”
There was silence. At length, Reikal descended a single step.
“You are a trusted captain, Thargrim. A proven blade and a dear friend. But the Festival must proceed. The people need strength. Not fear.”
Thargrim’s expression did not falter, but something in his shoulders slumped.
“As you command, my king.”
As he turned to leave, Reikal’s voice halted him.
“Your son… he is among the initiates this year, is he not?”
Thargrim looked back. “Yes. Bronn Thargrimsson. He will present his creation before Vulkanar at dawn.”
Reikal offered a rare smile. “Let him show the fire of your blood. It is the first time a child of a Death-Forsworn has forged in the Festival, is it not?”
Thargrim gave a slow nod. “Aye. First… and perhaps the last.”
The forges had cooled for the night, but Thargrim stood in silence at the entrance to his home, staring at the warm glow spilling through the doorway. Inside, the sound of hammering echoed rhythmically—precise, eager, hopeful.
He crossed the threshold and found Bronn, his son, working beside a small anvil. The boy was lean, not yet hardened by years of war or labor, but the strength in his arms and the focus in his expression showed promise. Sparks lit his youthful face like constellations.
“Still at it?” Thargrim asked, setting down his helmet with a quiet clank.
Bronn looked up and grinned. “It’ll be ready by dawn.”
On the worktable lay a curious construct—part shield, part hammerhead—bound together with intricate joints and embedded channels for molten flame. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ambitious.
“You plan to offer this to Vulkanar?” Thargrim asked, walking closer, his voice thick with disbelief and—though he wouldn’t admit it—pride.
“It’s not just an offering,” Bronn said. “It’s who I am. I want to protect like you do. Maybe even better.”
Thargrim scoffed, but it was more a sigh than judgment.
“Being better than me isn’t difficult. Just don’t lose yourself doing it.”
“You sound worried.”
Thargrim paused. His eyes lingered on the forgefire, dancing behind the protective lens of the boy’s visor.
“There are things coming, Bronn. The stone speaks to me… and I don’t like what it says.”
Bronn shrugged, wiping sweat from his brow. “If something comes, we’ll fight it. Isn’t that what we do, Father?”
The words were light, hopeful. But to Thargrim, they stabbed deeper than any blade.
He reached out and clasped the back of his son’s neck gently—a rare gesture of tenderness from a man of war.
“You’re all I’ve built, Bronn. You… and the oath I swore.”
Bronn gave a faint smile, not quite understanding. “Then you’ve built something strong.”
Days Later — The Festival of Flame
Ghor’Nazruk stirred before dawn. The streets gleamed with banners of bronze and crimson, and the smell of incense mixed with the ever-present tang of hot steel. Citizens in ceremonial garb crowded the balconies of the Promenade of Fire, chanting songs to Vulkanar as the flamebearers marched past in synchronized rows.
That morning, Ghor’Nazruk shone brighter than ever.
All across the city’s central tiers, balconies were draped in crimson and gold. Columns were wrapped in silver thread, and the air hummed with the rhythmic pulse of anvils beating in ceremonial unison. The ancient Festival of Flame had arrived—an event held once every twelve years, where the sons of each clan crossed the threshold between youth and adulthood.
Across the Great Promenade, families stood shoulder to shoulder, dressed in their finest tunics, their beards braided in complex clan patterns, adorned with iron charms to bring honor and good fortune. Priests of Vulkanar burned incense over long trenches of molten rock, sending trails of shimmering smoke toward the cavernous ceiling above.
The Chamber of Becoming, a vast forge-sanctum carved in the oldest layer of the mountain, had its doors polished to a sacred shine. No one but the initiates would enter once the rite began.
One by one, they were to enter the Chamber of Becoming, where they would forge their offerings in solitude. No one, not even family or guards, could interrupt the sacred ritual.
But Thargrim’s heart was not in celebration.
His steps echoed uneasily along the upper corridors as he passed ranks of soldiers he had personally ordered into position. He had no authority to place more, but he’d rotated loyal guards from his old warband into the lower galleries, bribing them with leave time and favors. It was barely enough.
The tremors had grown stronger, more frequent, and always worse in this quadrant of the city—right beneath the Festival grounds. Yet the King had forbidden any mention of danger.
“No panic,” Reikal had said. “No fear. Let them believe in strength.”
Now Thargrim stood fully armored, helm under arm, at the edge of the Hall of Firelords, where the king’s dais overlooked the ceremonial platform. Reikal stood radiant in obsidian regalia, surrounded by priests and artisans.
“You should be among the Forging Halls,” Reikal remarked without turning. “But today, your place is here. By my side.”
“Of course, my king,” Thargrim replied automatically, but his eyes kept drifting—downward.
He longed to be by the bronze doors, to watch Bronn step forward with pride… or to intercept what his instincts screamed was coming. But he bowed his head and took his place beside the King.
The drums of the Festival began to sound.
Above the crowd, at the top of the Flame-Arch dais, King Reikal Thrun appeared, flanked by priests, guards, and the Flamebearers who would escort the boys to the threshold.
His armor gleamed obsidian black, and the Crown of Cinders—forged from the embers of the First Forge—rested heavy on his brow. But his eyes burned with pride.
The crowd fell silent.
The king raised his hand.
“Sons of stone and fire,” Reikal called, his voice echoing with regal force, “today, you do not simply take up hammer and chisel. Today, you place your names in the ledger of our people. You are the breath of our future. The flame that will carry our kingdom into the centuries yet to come.”
“We are children of the mountain. We are not given our names. We earn them. With sweat. With steel. With fire. What you craft today, alone, without guidance or comfort, will mark who you are until your last breath. And only greatness may alter it.”
He paused, letting the weight of his words settle.
“Ghor’Nazruk has stood for over a thousand years. Never breached. Never bowed. You stand atop that legacy. You walk in the light of Tianara and the fire of Vulkanar. And so I ask you—forge not only steel. Forge purpose. Forge strength. Forge honor.”
Then the Flamebearers began to call names, one by one, and the initiates stepped forward.
Among them walked Bronn, son of Thargrim, eyes filled with focus, clutching the blueprints of his creation tucked inside a leather scrollcase. He turned once, searching the crowd. He met his father’s gaze.
Thargrim raised his fist—short, sharp. Bronn nodded once and disappeared beyond the gates.
After hours since the festival had begun and the iniates took plance behind the bronze door, the crowd had dispersed and most people diverted their attention to other attractions. Most of the music toned down but the drums of the Festival still echoed across the vaulted halls when the mountain roared.
A seismic shock tore through the foundations of Ghor’Nazruk. The floor cracked beneath noble boots. Stalactites shattered in sacred chambers. For a breathless second, time stood still. Then the screams began.
From deep fissures in the stone, goblins surged forth like rats bursting from rotted grain, their eyes glowing with cruel malice. Behind them, orc warbands emerged, larger than any the dwarves had ever seen inside their own walls. Where walls had once stood, now were smoking holes. Where celebration had reigned, now came slaughter.
Civilians were cut down in the streets. Others were seized, dragged screaming into the shadows. Craftsmen with hammers became soldiers in an instant, but the enemy was already inside the heart of the city. No warning. No mercy.
In the Hall of Firelords, Reikal Thrun staggered as debris fell from above. A royal guard was crushed under a falling column. The king looked to his side, eyes wide with disbelief.
The invasion had come like a blade in the ribs.
Smoke and screams choked the once-proud halls. Fires burned where no flame should’ve touched. Ancient statues of Tianara and Vulkanar crumbled under falling rock. The ringing of forgehammers was replaced by the clang of blades, the roars of orcs, and the shrieks of goblins in bloodlust.
At the edge of the shattered promenade, King Reikal Thrun struggled to rise from beneath a fallen brazier. A shallow cut bled across his brow.
Then Thargrim appeared—a storm of iron and rage.
“Up! We move now!” he barked, already cleaving through a goblin that had charged too close.
He didn’t wait for orders. He grabbed the king by the arm and shoved him toward the broken corridor that led to the inner vaults. Behind them, a handful of guards tried to form a protective wall, but the onslaught was chaotic.
Thargrim’s axe moved like a flame across dry straw. He fought not with the poise of a royal protector—but with the desperation of a father.
For every step forward, he glanced toward the forge tier below, where the Chamber of Becoming lay sealed.
He wanted to break away. Every instinct screamed for him to go to Bronn. To cut down the cowards blocking his path and carve his way to his boy. But his grip on Reikal never faltered.
“This is your damn fault,” he growled under his breath, slamming the king against a pillar to avoid a falling beam. “You let them come through the mountain.”
“And yet you still shield me,” Reikal answered, wiping blood from his eye. “You always do.”
They ran again—stone collapsing behind them—until at last they reached a vaulted storage hall, reinforced by runic locks. It had been prepared for such emergencies centuries ago.
Thargrim slammed the door shut behind them and placed the bar himself.
His armor was smoking. His face streaked with soot and orc blood. His hand trembled.
Inside the hall, priests began tending to the wounded. Scouts scrambled to relay messages. The worst of the attack had passed.
“Commander,” a young scout reported, “it was no full invasion. A raiding force. Likely a probing strike. They breached through the southern shafts and the lower galleries. We are… reclaiming ground.”
Thargrim didn’t even turn to face the boy. His gaze was fixed on the sealed corridor outside.
Reikal stepped beside him. He didn’t speak for a long time.
“They sealed the forge chamber before the attack,” Thargrim finally said, voice hoarse. “He’s in there. My boy’s in there.”
Reikal placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder—rough, calloused, real. The king’s voice was gentler than it had ever been in council.
“He’s a Drakenshield. He’ll fight. He has your fire.”
Thargrim’s jaw clenched.
“That fire might already be ash.”
A long silence.
Then Reikal gave a nod—kingly, but also personal.
“Go.”
Thargrim turned slowly. “What?”
“Go to him, old friend. Before duty kills what honor hasn’t.”
Thargrim looked into Reikal’s eyes—and saw not a king, but the brother-in-arms who had once pulled him out of a burning tunnel, thirty years before.
“I need you back soon,” Reikal added. “Ghor’Nazruk still stands. But I don’t know for how long.”
“I’ll return,” Thargrim said. “Even if I come back dragging the whole mountain behind me.”
“You always do.”
The two clasped forearms—not as ruler and subject, but as comrades who had bled on the same stone, who had carried the same weight for too long.
Minutes later, deep beneath the city in the old forge galleries, Thargrim arrived breathless before the Chamber of Becoming—the ceremonial forge-chamber where the young initiates had entered hours earlier.
The great bronze doors remained shut.
Dozens of parents stood outside, sobbing, screaming, pleading. Guards held them back with pikes. Priests chanted rites of protection, trying to maintain calm. The law was clear: no one could interrupt the sacred ritual. Not even in war.
“They’re in there!” cried a mother. “Let me through! That’s my boy!”
“We heard them screaming—there were sounds, something tore through the stone!”
Thargrim pushed forward. The guards straightened instantly at the sight of him.
“Captain Thargrim,” said one, voice shaking, “we can’t… we’re forbidden. The rites—”
“I wrote the rites when your fathers were still learning to hold a shield.”
Thargrim’s voice was quiet, but sharp as a blade.
“Open this door.”
“If we break the seal—if you cross that threshold—you’ll be branded a heretic.”
Thargrim stared past them at the massive door. The sound of faint metal clashing, distant shrieks, and stone cracking echoed from within.
“So be it.”
He shoved past the guards and raised his axe.
With a blow that shattered the ceremonial seal, Thargrim entered the chamber.
What greeted him was hell.
The forgefires were dying, casting a sickly glow over the bodies of the initiates, sprawled and broken across the ground. Weapons half-forged lay in ruin. Blood soaked the stone. Workbenches had become barricades. Bronn’s strange hybrid weapon lay shattered beside another boy’s body.
Goblins twitched on the floor, cleaved in half or skewered—but many had escaped.
He limped across the room, searching each face, turning over corpses, his breaths growing shallower, his pace more frantic. Every heartbeat screamed he’s gone. But his son wasn’t among the dead.
Behind a collapsed wall of stone and brick, he found it—a tunnel, narrow and recently carved, descending into the deeper dark.
The mouth of it had collapsed, intentionally destroyed.
But there were tracks in the dust—signs of something dragged. Boots. Claws. Struggle.
Bronn had been taken.
Thargrim stood at the blocked tunnel’s edge, breathing hard, his axe trembling in his hand.
He had disobeyed orders. Broken holy law. And still—
Still, he had been too late.
“You were right, boy,” he whispered, staring into the black. “You were stronger than me.”
Around him, the sacred chamber stank of death. The flame of Vulkanar, once the city’s pride, flickered low—fighting to burn in a room drenched in blood and sorrow.
He fell to his knees.
Not as a captain.
Not as a Death-Forsworn.
But as a father who had failed.
Thargrim emerged from the ruined Chamber of Becoming covered in blood and soot, his expression carved in stone. Behind him, the sacred chamber lay in ruin. The corpses of the initiates, the scent of scorched iron, the collapsed tunnel—and the truth: Bronn had been taken.
He didn’t speak to the guards. He didn’t answer the parents’ desperate questions. His eyes were empty of words and full of one, single purpose.
He was met by a squad of the royal guard, who approached him not as allies, but as enforcers. At their head stood Marshal Yorin, eyes downcast with shame.
“The King requests your presence… immediately.”
Thargrim didn’t protest. He handed over his axe, the haft still wet with goblin blood. No resistance. No apology.
“Take me to him.”
In the Obsidian Chamber, far beneath the royal palace, King Reikal Thrun stood alone before the Flame Altar of Vulkanar. The ceremonial crown had been removed. His cloak was torn, one arm bound in cloth from a graze. When Thargrim entered, the guards closed the doors behind him.
For a long moment, the two stood in silence.
Reikal did not sit upon the throne.
“You broke the seal,” he said. Not a question.
“I did.”
“You defiled the most sacred rite of our people.”
“I did.”
“You abandoned your oath.”
“I did.”
Reikal turned. His voice cracked—not with anger, but grief.
“And did it save him?”
Thargrim looked down. His jaw clenched. His voice barely rose.
“No. I was too late.”
Reikal stepped closer. His gaze heavy with the weight of decades.
“Do you remember when we were boys?” he said softly. “The avalanche on the Black Stair?”
Thargrim blinked. The memory struck like a hammer.
“We were trapped for two days. You lifted a stone twice your weight to dig me free.”
“And you said,” Reikal continued, “that if I ever became king, I’d better be worth the stone I cost you.”
He smiled faintly, painfully.
“I fear I’ve failed that promise.”
“No,” Thargrim replied, his voice hardening. “But I can’t be your guard anymore. Not while he is out there.”
He stepped forward, standing tall—not as a subordinate, but as a man who had burned through the worst pain imaginable and come out the other side forged anew.
“I accept exile. I accept the judgment of the law. Strip me of name, of title, of clan. I ask only one thing in return—let me serve still. Let me go beyond our walls. Let me become what our people will one day need.”
“Let me be the first of a new vanguard. Let me be the sword in the dark.”
“Let me be the first Death Warden.”
Reikal stared at him.
He was no longer looking at a friend—but at something ancient and terrible: a father forged in fire and failure, who had lost everything yet refused to bend. A warrior without name. A soul without shelter. But not without purpose.
The silence stretched. The weight of tradition pressed down on Reikal like a mountain.
To accept this meant breaking centuries of custom, weakening the grip of the priesthood, giving power to those who chose service beyond the law.
To deny it meant breaking the last thread that bound him to the only man he trusted.
Before he could speak, the doors slammed open.
Three scouts stumbled into the room—two half-carrying the third. Their faces were ashen, eyes wild. They had run through fire and ruin to bring what they had seen.
“Sire!” one of them gasped, barely able to form words. “The eastern peaks—”
“We scouted beyond the perimeter—past the old watchposts—there’s…”
“There’s an army, my king. Not a warband. Not a raid. An army. Orcs. Goblins. Things we don’t have names for.”
“The ground shakes with every step they take. We—we couldn’t even count them all—”
The third scout vomited from exhaustion, collapsing to his knees.
Reikal paled.
Thargrim didn’t move.
“How long?” the king asked.
“Less than three days. Maybe two. They’re coming.”
The chamber fell into silence again—but this time, it was not the silence of grief.
It was the silence before the mountain breaks.
Three days before the daemon horde would reach the gates, beneath the lowest sanctum of the Obsidian Palace, the ancient chamber known as Vulkanar’s Silence was opened for the first time in over five centuries.
The room was bare of banners, silent of song, and lit only by a single brazier of black flame, said to be taken from the forge of the first king.
There, the volunteers gathered—each one a veteran, warrior, scout or smith who had lost family in the raid or who no longer believed survival lay in holding tradition sacred.
At the center stood Thargrim, no longer bearing his house sigil, his beard now bound in black iron. Behind him, seven others stood silently, ready to abandon not only their names, but their place in society.
Each warrior stepped forward, one by one, and placed their ancestral rune-stones at the base of the flame. In dwarven culture, these runes bore the bloodline, honor, and soul of their family.
“From this day forth,” Thargrim intoned, “we are not fathers, sons, or heirs. We are shadows in the stone. We are the flame that moves unseen.”
“No name. No claim. No fear.”
When his turn came, Thargrim took his own rune—marked with the line of the Ironshield Forge and the blood of Bronn—and placed it with trembling hands upon the brazier. The stone cracked, and the black flame hissed as if mourning.
“I am no longer Thargrim,” he whispered. “You may call me… Wound-Eye.”
The others followed, choosing names based on deeds, traits, or scars: Ash-Tongue, Broken-Hand, Ember-Foot, Deep-Bite, Steel-Mouth, Shade-Mane, and Hollow-Song.
Together, they donned obsidian black mail, runeless, plain, etched only with a single jagged line across the chest—a mark representing the divide between the world of law and the world of survival.
Thus, the Death Wardens were born.
Later that evening, in the royal war chamber, King Reikal faced his council.
Many of the high priests and noble clan lords stood aghast as he declared the temporary legitimization of the Death Wardens as a paramilitary force. Their mission: sabotage, assassination, scouting, and rescue.
“They are not bound by your rituals,” Reikal said, voice hard. “Not until this war is over. They serve the mountain. Not the stone tablet.”
“You undermine centuries of our law!” snapped High Rune-Priest Varnek. “This order will inspire chaos—others will follow!”
“Then let them,” the king answered. “Better chaos than extinction.”
A grim silence fell.
“And what if they fall to the same darkness we fight?” asked Lord Brenn, a noble of the upper houses.
Reikal turned to the map.
“Then they fall nameless. But they fall trying to save your children.”
No one argued again.
By torchlight, the Death Wardens gathered at the collapsed tunnel Thargrim had found—the one the goblins used to retreat with the abducted initiates.
Repaired hastily by engineers working tirelessly, the tunnel was now barely large enough for movement. But it was functional. And beyond it… the unknown.
Thargrim—now Wound-Eye—stood at the mouth of the descent, fully armored in black steel, his axe sheathed in silence, his eyes burning.
“Our mission is twofold,” he said. “We find the boys, or what became of them. And we take the heads of every cursed wretch who stands between them and us.”
His voice was no longer that of a royal captain.
It was the voice of the dark flame.
“We return in three days. Or we don’t return.”
One by one, the Death Wardens entered the narrow path into the black belly of the earth, each vanishing like a flame caught in wind.
Above them, the mountain groaned.
And far away, the sound of drums began to echo through the caverns—deep, rhythmic, inhuman.
The daemon army was marching.
For two days, the Death Wardens pushed deeper into the earth.
The tunnels twisted like veins of corruption through the ancient stone, lined with damp moss and the stench of rot. The walls, once etched with dwarven mining records and ancestral runes, were now defiled with warped sigils, burned into the rock by sickly green flames. These were marks not of artisanship, but of blasphemy.
Wound-Eye — the name Thargrim now bore — led the company in absolute silence. Each step was measured, each breath shallow. Their only light came from blades laced with dark enchantments — forged in the broken forge-altars of Vulkanar, designed for those who had given up their names.
They passed makeshift altars made of bone and blood. Tools made from dwarven limbs. Signs that the enemy did not simply kill — they repurposed.
On that night, they encountered the first abominations.
The goblins who emerged from the shadows were not like those known to surface wars.
They were taller, broader, with eyes like milky orbs and veins pulsing with green corruption. Their limbs were muscular, their posture unnervingly upright. But the most horrifying detail were the twisted runes seared into their skin — runes that mimicked dwarven craft, but bent and blasphemous, as if a mad god had redrawn their meanings.
“They have dwarven blood…” murmured Ash-Tongue, voice tight with horror.
The battle was violent and disorienting. These creatures fought like dwarves, with discipline and strength, yet with the savagery of goblins. When slain, their bodies melted into pus and ash, as if they had no right to remain in this world once unmade.
Wound-Eye’s axe split skulls, but with every fallen foe, a seed of dread grew.
They were making these things.
They followed the tunnels until they reached what must once have been an ancient hall — a cathedral-like vault, now desecrated beyond recognition.
At its center stood a massive pit of rotting corpses, some still twitching, others breathing in ragged moans. The walls pulsed with sick green light. On broken pillars, effigies to Thanarok had been erected — made from bones and dwarven armor, bound by sinew and rusted chains.
Surrounding the pit, scores of hybrid creatures knelt in mindless worship. Warped goblins. Orcs clad in black armor etched with the cruel runes of Mordhekan. And worst of all — dwarves, or what remained of them: slack-jawed, chained, branded with rune-burns across their faces.
“They’re turning our people,” whispered Shade-Mane. “One by one…”
“This isn’t war. It’s… harvesting,” said Hollow-Song.
Wound-Eye gave the order: no wide engagement. Observe. Map. Kill only what stands in your way.
The Death Wardens crouched in the shadows of the defiled chamber, half-hidden behind collapsed statues and decaying bones. The stench of rot mixed with molten iron, and every flicker of the sickly green fire cast monstrous silhouettes on the walls.
Then it happened.
From a side corridor, a group of armored abominations marched into view — larger, stronger, more disciplined than the slavering beasts worshipping at the pit. These were dwarves once. Now… twisted constructs of flesh and iron, shaped by cruel hands and warped rituals.
And leading them…
Wound-Eye froze.
He knew that gait. That hesitation in the left foot. That slope of the shoulders. That half-forged weapon on the back — the hammer fused with a shield, still bearing the shape of something proud and impossible, now twisted and deformed.
His hand lowered.
His breath stopped.
“Bronn…”
One of the creatures staggered in mid-step, as if the word had struck something deep. Its head turned with painful slowness. Its mask — fused to the face with metal seams — hissed and cracked as it tilted.
And then came a sound.
A voice not meant to speak anymore.
A whisper that scraped against the soul.
“Faa…ther…”
Wound-Eye stepped forward, his brothers calling after him in hushed horror.
“Wait—no—”
But he was already walking. Drawn like a blade from its sheath.
“Bronn. I’m here. It’s me. You’re safe now, lad.”
The creature trembled, its runed fingers twitching as if resisting invisible strings.
“It… hurts. Father… it… hurts so much…”
“Come back to me. Please. Fight it.”
Wound-Eye removed his helmet, his face soaked with tears, eyes burning.
“You’re stronger than this, son. You’re mine.”
The creature reached out — not to strike, but to touch. For a moment, it was as if a soul flickered within.
But then, the other hybrids turned.
The chamber awoke.
With a guttural scream, one of the hulking orc-commanders barked in Daemonic Tongue. The creatures surged forward.
“To me!” shouted Wound-Eye. “Form the blade!”
The Death Wardens dropped their torches and closed ranks, forming a crescent around the center of the hall. Blades of obsidian and darkfire clashed against bone and corruption.
The twisted dwarves attacked with terrifying precision — they remembered tactics, flanking, formations. But they felt no pain. No fear.
Bronn turned too.
He screamed — a sound between agony and rage — and charged his father. Wound-Eye parried once, twice, each clash of their weapons like a hammer driving nails into his soul.
“Stop… please… fight it!”
“I’m not… me…”
And then, the words that broke him.
“It’s still me… Please… let me go.”
It was begging.
“End… it.”
Wound-Eye drove his axe into his son’s chest.
The creature dropped to its knees. As its breath fled, it whispered once more.
“Thank… you…”
And collapsed.
Wound-Eye screamed into the void — a raw, primal roar — then rose, face dead of emotion.
“Burn it all.”
With warcries echoing, the Death Wardens fell into retreat formation. Ember-Foot and Hollow-Song planted blackfire charges on the support pillars. As the Warden line withdrew under waves of advancing enemies, the chamber began to collapse in thunder and ash.
The pit, the altar, the grotesque hybrids — buried under stone and flame.
They sprinted back through the tunnels, wounded, bloodied, burned, with Wound-Eye carrying the shattered handle of Bronn’s forge-weapon — the only piece that hadn’t turned to sludge.
Behind them, the mountain screamed, and the echoes of war-drums resumed.
They had learned what they needed.
But they were late.
By the time the Death Wardens emerged from the hidden tunnel beneath the forge-tier, smoke already filled the upper halls. The city was on full alert. Bell-horns called every warrior to arms.
Wound-Eye approached the king’s chamber without removing his armor. He entered the war room, helmet still on, blood still fresh on his pauldrons.
King Reikal stood by the war-table, surrounded by captains.
When he turned, his face twisted in silent horror.
“You’re late.”
“They took our sons,” Wound-Eye said. “And they’re turning them into weapons.”
He tossed the broken handle of Bronn’s creation onto the table.
“We buried them under a mountain of fire. But it won’t stop what’s coming.”
Reikal clenched his fists.
“They’re here.”
Wound-Eye looked toward the ceiling, where the faint rumble of siege towers and distant roars echoed through the stone.
“Then let them come.”
“Death Wardens,” he turned to his brothers. “Armor up. We make our stand above.”
When the daemon host arrived, the world itself seemed to shudder.
The mountains trembled under the march of ten thousand war beasts. Siege towers of black iron creaked with infernal gears. Goblin sappers scuttled through the outer cliffs like locusts in the stone. Orcish warbands, branded with the runes of Mordhekan, howled beneath banners woven from skin.
Above it all, a corrupting mist swept over the peaks — the silent touch of Thanarok, blighting the rock itself.
Ghor’Nazruk stood.
The gates were sealed. The catapults roared. Thousands of warriors stood shoulder to shoulder atop obsidian walls, singing the battle-chants of their forefathers.
And when the first wave struck, the dwarves met it with steel and fire.
But it would not be enough.
While the surface burned, a darker assault unfolded below.
From forgotten shafts and ancient mineroads, daemon-forged goblins and twisted dwarves emerged in waves, ambushing patrols and igniting inner districts in flame. No line was safe.
Every night, another street fell.
Guards were stretched thin. Civilians barricaded their homes with furniture and prayers. The Death Wardens, immune to tradition and mercy, became the only force able to intercept, assassinate, and sabotage deep within the city’s infected zones.
Wound-Eye fought on four fronts in three days, never sleeping, never speaking outside commands.
By the seventh day, the city was a bleeding fortress, besieged from the outside and rotting from within.
In the Citadel Hall, King Reikal stood before the great war-table, watching his realm carved away inch by inch. The mountain screamed. The people wept. The walls cracked.
“They are dismantling us,” he said to Wound-Eye, his voice hollow. “Not with fury. With patience.”
“The reinforcements won’t arrive in time,” Wound-Eye answered. “Even if they come, they’ll find bones and ash.”
Reikal’s hands trembled. His beard was singed. His armor dented from the last defense at the second wall. He stared at the miniature of Ghor’Nazruk carved into the stone table.
“This city was our crown. Our pride. If we leave it… we abandon our soul.”
“Better a soul with breath than a crown of corpses,” Wound-Eye replied coldly.
A long silence.
Then the king whispered:
“Do we have a path?”
Wound-Eye nodded.
“We found a forgotten channel beneath the third forge-tier. Old lava tunnels. Deep. Stable. We can move our people.”
“How long?”
“Six days. Five if we’re lucky. The Wardens will secure the route.”
Reikal exhaled. His shoulders dropped, heavier than they had ever been.
“Then begin the evacuation.”
The message went out in secret. Families packed silently, holding onto heirlooms and hopes. The Death Wardens cleared the path inch by inch, sealing doors behind the convoys to slow the pursuing filth.
But the warriors remained.
Reikal would not leave. Nor would his captains. Nor Wound-Eye.
As the people fled, the king retrieved the weapon of legends: the Hammer of Vulkanar, now reforged and awakened by the high priests in desperation. Its head shimmered with golden runes, weapons forged from divine flame, fueled by the wrath of an entire people betrayed by the god of war.
“We’ll buy them every hour,” Reikal said, strapping the hammer to his back. “With our bones, if we must.”
“No name. No retreat,” said Wound-Eye. “Until the last gate falls.”
On the twelfth day, the outer walls collapsed.
Daemon siege-beasts, massive constructs of flesh and iron, shattered the obsidian barrier with coordinated strikes. The enemy poured in.
What followed was not a single battle — it was a war of attrition waged street by street, hall by hall.
Fires raged through the market tiers. Sacred halls were flooded with poison mist. Noble houses became bunkers, then crypts. Corpses of defenders were used as barricades. And always — always — came the sound of drums, and whispers from the fog.
The defenders split into cells, commanded by wardens, captains, and iron-blooded veterans. Each zone became a fortress, defended to the last dwarf.
The Citadel Hold was the heart of the resistance. Reikal led charges himself, his hammer breaking daemon armor with a single blow. Each swing burned brighter. Each step grew heavier.
By the fifteenth day, only four districts remained.
The enemy had begun resurrecting the fallen — not as soldiers, but as corrupted mockeries, sent to demoralize those still fighting.
“We are running out of time,” said Ember-Foot.
“Then we’ll hold it by the throat,” Wound-Eye answered.
Days after the first assault, the Citadel Hold was silent.
Not the silence of peace — but the kind of silence that only comes before ruin. The last hundred of warriors of Ghor’Nazruk rested where they could: beneath cracked pillars, beside cold forges, among the bodies of brothers too tired to bury.
Wound-Eye stood alone atop the eastern balcony, where once the banners of the clans fluttered above celebrations of new forges and newborns. Now the wind carried only ashes and distant screams.
Behind him, King Reikal approached, wearing his royal breastplate, battered and blackened, the Hammer of Vulkanar slung across his back.
“Even the forge-fires are silent tonight,” the king said.
“They burned too hot for too long,” Wound-Eye replied. “Like us.”
They stood together, side by side as they had in their youth — two boys who once dared climb forbidden stairs to see the sunrise over the stone peaks. Now they watched the embers of a dying world.
“I’ve been thinking,” Reikal began, “about the first time we fought side by side. That goblin nest near the River Cinder.”
“You nearly lost your foot to a trap,” Wound-Eye said.
“And you carried me half a mile to safety.”
“No,” Wound-Eye corrected. “I threw you into a cart and cursed you the whole way.”
Reikal chuckled — the first true sound of joy in days. But it faded quickly.
“This was never supposed to be our end, Thargrim.”
Wound-Eye didn’t correct the name.
“It’s not the end,” he said. “Only… a new carving in the mountain.”
Reikal sighed, deeply.
“You were always the better of us,” he said. “Fiercer. Sharper. I had the crown, but you… you had the weight.”
He reached into his belt and drew a sealed letter, marked with the royal sigil and the sacred rune of the Dwarf-Kings’ Council.
“If I fall… if this truly is the end… I need you to do what I cannot.”
Wound-Eye took the letter slowly.
“What’s in it?”
“A call. Not to vengeance. But to unity. I’ve written to the other kings, but also beyond. Elves. Humans. Gnomes. Even the beastkin. If the Daemons can twist goblins, orcs, and even dwarves… then we can no longer afford pride. We must unite.”
Wound-Eye blinked slowly.
“They will spit on this, Reikal. Spit on your name.”
“Then they spit on my grave. But you will carry the truth. You must. Not as my guard. Not as my brother. But as a son of the mountain. Swear it.”
A long silence.
Then Wound-Eye bowed — not in formality, but with reverence and grief.
“I swear it. On stone. On forge. On my son’s grave.”
Reikal placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Then all is not lost.”
Moments later, a captain approached, bloodied and panting.
“My king. They’ve breached the lower cistern. The main gate won’t hold another hour.”
Reikal nodded.
“Gather them. All of them.”
Within the Hall of Stonehearts — the final bastion — the last defenders of Ghor’Nazruk stood in a broken circle. Some wore full armor. Some wore none. Some held family blades; others gripped mining picks or forge hammers.
They were not soldiers anymore.
They were dwarves.
And before them stood Reikal Thrun, King of Iron, Hammer-Bearer, Last Flame of Ghor’Nazruk.
“Brothers. Sisters. Sons of stone.”
His voice echoed through the hollow space, louder than the war drums outside.
“The enemy claws at our doors. They scream for our flesh. They hunger for our souls. They say this is our doom.”
He lifted the Hammer of Vulkanar, and the runes along its head burned with golden fire.
“But listen! Listen to your hearts! Listen to the mountain!”
“We do not fall screaming. We do not die forgotten. We stand, and we burn so that others may live. Let the tales be told! That Ghor’Nazruk was not broken — it was sacrificed!”
“Fight, not to survive — but to carve a space for our people in legend. For every fallen brother. For every stolen child. For every flame extinguished.”
He slammed the hammer against the stone floor.
“When they break through, show them we are not ashes. We are fire!”
And the warriors roared. A final time.
The doors began to tremble.
Daemon hounds howled beyond. Runes of unmaking glowed red through the cracks.
The Death Wardens flanked the entrance. Wound-Eye stood to the king’s left, blade in one hand, oath in his heart.
The stone cracked.
Then, the final charge began.
And Ghor’Nazruk burned.
The gates of Stonehearth Hall shuddered one last time. With a thunderous crack and a gust of corrupted air, they collapsed inward, crushed beneath a siege-titan’s cleaver forged from daemon bone and molten metal.
And the enemy flooded in.
Orcs bearing the mark of Mordhekan — flesh engraved with brands that bled with every heartbeat — charged first. Behind them came goblin hybrids, twisted dwarves, and hulking daemon-warped beasts. Smoke and screams followed.
But the dwarves stood.
Eighty-seven remained.
Some too wounded to lift a weapon. Some blinded. Some already bleeding out. But they stood.
“No name. No fear,” the Death Wardens growled.
“For stone! For forge!” the others roared.
And they met the tide.
The battle was not elegant. It was savage, intimate, and filthy. Blades clashed with teeth. Shields were shattered under claws. Helmets cracked like clay under warhammers.
Wound-Eye fought as a revenant — an echo of vengeance. His axe sang as it tore through goblin flesh, severed heads from shoulders, and dug into the bones of traitor-dwarves who screamed in forgotten tongues.
But even his fury was not enough.
The enemy was endless.
Dwarves fell, one after another — crushed, burned, consumed. Friends died beside each other without time for last words.
Until a deep horn blew through the shattered hall, and a silence fell like death’s cloak.
Through the smoke strode a giant.
Twice the height of a dwarf, thick with sinew and daemon armor, bearing a twin-bladed greataxe and wearing a crown of broken dwarven helms. His skin was scorched black, veins glowing beneath like magma.
His voice was a growl in perfect Dwarvish.
“I am Varkhul the Binder, born of Mordhekan, forged in Thanarok’s pits.”
“You have fought well, sons of stone. But the fire is dead. You will kneel now — or burn like your king.”
He pointed the axe at Reikal.
“Come then, false king. Let us finish your song.”
King Reikal stepped forward, alone, drawing the Hammer of Vulkanar.
“You speak our tongue, monster. But you do not understand it.”
He raised the hammer high.
“Each word is a legacy. Each swing is a prayer.”
And they clashed.
The sound was like gods battling beneath the earth — hammer against axe, fire against rot. Sparks flew, stones cracked, and warriors on both sides were thrown back by the sheer force of their duel.
Varkhul was relentless, pressing the king with brute strength and cruel speed. He laughed with every strike.
“Where are your runes now, king? Where is your god?”
Reikal bled from a dozen cuts. His armor cracked at the chest. The hammer grew heavier with each block.
But he did not yield.
Varkhul knocked the king to his knees with a blow that dented the floor. He raised his axe high for the final strike.
“I will wear your skull as my crown.”
Reikal looked to the surviving dwarves — barely a dozen still standing, Wound-Eye among them.
He whispered one final time:
“Vulkanar. Forge me into your fire.”
He stood, lifting the Hammer of Vulkanar with both hands, and with a war cry that shattered the stone around them, he charged.
“FOR THE FLAME!”
The hammer blazed like the heart of the sun.
The impact struck Varkhul in the chest — and fire erupted from the blow, a storm of divine heat and molten fury. The daemon general screamed as his body ignited from within, runic armor melting, soul torn from flesh.
The explosion consumed half the chamber.
The last of the invaders were vaporized. The pillars cracked. The ceiling groaned.
And when the light faded—
King Reikal was gone.
Only the hammer remained, glowing white-hot, embedded in blackened stone.
Wound-Eye, coughing smoke and blood, stumbled forward.
He knelt before the hammer, pressing his forehead to it in silent grief. Then, with trembling arms, he lifted it.
“Your fire lives on.”
The surviving Death Wardens gathered the last defenders — only twelve still breathing — and made for the escape route, dragging the wounded.
Behind them, they planted blackfire charges, enchanted to bring down the very foundation of the entrance of the Citadel.
As they reached the end of the lava tunnels, Wound-Eye turned for one last look.
Ghor’Nazruk — the City of Flame, Jewel of the Deep — stood silhouetted in the distance.
He whispered:
“Stone remembers.”
And pressed the trigger rune.
The tunnels collapsed in a thunder that echoed through the mountains. The smoke plume was seen from a dozen leagues away.
Ghor’Nazruk was lost.
But in the dark, the fire remained — in the hands of Wound-Eye, bearer of the Hammer of Vulkanar, and the letter that would change the fate of all Astravara.
The war was far from over.
But the flame had been passed.
The road to Durath’Khar was long, cold, and cruel.
The last survivors — twelve in all — marched in silence through the Deepways, the hammer of Vulkanar clutched in Wound-Eye’s arms like a dying ember. Behind them, the tunnels groaned with the weight of destruction.
Three days into their march, they encountered the reinforcements.
Five companies of iron-clad warriors stood in grim silence as the survivors approached. When they heard the words — “Ghor’Nazruk has fallen” — even the bravest among them lowered their weapons.
“Too late,” said Wound-Eye, without blame.
The commanders bowed their heads. Quietly, they began placing defensive bulwarks in the deeper passages, not to reclaim what was lost, but to contain what now stirred beneath.
Durath’Khar, the Mountain Jewel, greeted them not with celebration, but with silence.
Word had spread.
When the gates of Durath’Khar opened, the sight that met Wound-Eye and his surviving Death Wardens was not one of order or preparation.
It was a city unraveling under silent fear.
The plaza outside the inner gate overflowed with refugees — miners, artisans, mothers with infants swaddled in soot-stained cloth. They had fled the outer settlements when word of Ghor’Nazruk’s fall reached the sentries. Now, huddled against stone walls under makeshift tents, they wept, murmured prayers, or sat in silence too exhausted to mourn.
Children cried from hunger. Healers wandered with empty satchels. Some carried the wounded on planks, their blood trailing across ancient stone as they passed murals of dwarven victories now long-forgotten.
Soldiers lined the perimeter, but they too were uneasy. Their eyes darted toward the tunnels behind the arriving Wardens, half-expecting the daemon horde to emerge from the dark at any moment.
When Wound-Eye and the other eleven approached — armored in blackened mail, weapons broken, blood-crusted, dragging the Hammer of Vulkanar — a hush fell across the square.
The people parted.
A girl dropped a toy shaped like a pickaxe. A mother clutched her son tighter.
The Death Wardens were specters — not heroes.
And Ghor’Nazruk was no longer a city.
It was a funeral name.
The survivors were brought directly to the Throne of Ironflame, a great council chamber carved into the heart of Durath’Khar’s highest peak. The air smelled of incense and old oaths. Eight thrones encircled a fire-pit fed with runes of truthlight — a fire that had not dimmed in over a thousand years.
The kings were assembled: monarchs of the Seven Strongholds, each dressed in ceremonial armor, some decorated, some weathered by age. Thurog Durn, High King of Durath’Khar, presided from one of the central seats. His gaze was heavy with the burden of what he feared had come true.
Wound-Eye stood alone in the center, the Hammer of Vulkanar slung across his back, a letter clutched in his gauntleted hand.
He removed his helmet.
His hair was gone. His face was burned. His eyes hollow — and yet beneath it all, unbroken.
“My name… is Wound-Eye,” he began.
“But I was Thargrim. Captain of the Iron Guard. Shield of Reikal, King of Ghor’Nazruk. And I carry his last words.”
He placed the hammer and letter before the council.
“The city is gone. Our kin are ash. The walls we thought eternal have been swallowed by darkness.”
“I bring not warning. I bring witness. I saw our sons twisted into beasts. I saw Reikal die with the hammer in his hands. And I tell you now: they are coming for us all.”
The kings stirred. Some whispered. Others clenched their thrones. One demanded, coldly:
“Why should we believe you? You wear no house crest. You claim no name.”
Wound-Eye turned to face them all.
“Because I buried my son with my own hands, and what he had become should never be seen again.”
“Because your cities still burn hearth-fires while ours were devoured from within.”
“Because Reikal — your brother in stone — gave his life so that I might bring you this.”
He held up the sealed letter, then slammed it down beside the hammer.
“He asks not for vengeance. He begs you to set aside old grudges. To look beyond dwarves. To the elves, to the humans, even to the wild tribes of the beastkin.”
“They are flawed. So are we. But alone, we will fall like Ghor’Nazruk.”
The firepit crackled.
The council sat in stunned silence. For the first time in living memory, the hall was not a court of law or lineage — but a tomb of pride.
Thurog Durn rose slowly from his throne.
He picked up the Hammer of Vulkanar, cradling it in arms that had once trained with Reikal in their youth.
“This… was never meant to be seen here,” he whispered.
Then, to the others:
“What more proof do we need? One of our own cities is gone. Our blood runs on the stone, and the horde beneath still grows.”
“The Daemons are united. If we are not… we are dead.”
There were murmurs. One king wept. Another stood in solemn agreement.
At last, Thurog declared:
“We will honor Reikal. We will answer the fire.”
That evening, the Sacrosanct Inquisition of Divine Flame was born — not as a kingdom’s decree, but as a necessity for survival.
Riders and skyships were dispatched to elven Viridiana, to human Eldoria, to the gnomes of Ravelspire and the halflings of the Westfold.
Messages were carried by embers in rune-sealed steel, bearing a call not to kneel to dwarves — but to stand with them.
The dwarves knew they would be viewed with suspicion. But pride was no longer their greatest trait.
Now, it was resolve.
In the following days, messages were forged in gold, sealed in obsidian, and carried on gryphons and riders to the far corners of the world.
The dwarves, ever proud and cautious, still viewed the other races with wariness:
The elves, with their ancient arrogance.
The humans, ever-changing and untrustworthy.
The gnomes, clever but selfish.
The halflings, too peaceful to be roused.
The beastkin, fragmented and wild.
But pride had a new rival: necessity.
Astravara had seen its first great fall. The war had only begun. And if the fires of creation were to endure, they would have to burn as one forge.
In the depths of Durath’Khar, as dawn rose over a world forever changed, Wound-Eye stood before a newly built statue of King Reikal — hammer raised, eyes set on the east.
And he whispered:
“You burned so others would stand. I will carry your flame.”
That evening, the Sacrosanct Inquisition of Divine Flame was born.
In a quiet hall, lit only by the golden light of forge-fires, Wound-Eye watched as young scribes penned copies of the king’s letter. The hammer rested beside him, its glow faint now, but steady.
An acolyte approached, hesitating.
“Sir… what should we tell the elves? The humans?”
Wound-Eye stood, back straight despite the pain.
“Tell them that Astravara is burning.”
“And if they do not help us, then soon they will burn with it.”
The Song of Ghor’Nazruk is ended.
But the War of Flame and Shadow is only beginning.
Chronicles of Astravara 
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