Kael reached Halruun at a bad time.
The road into the nation was clogged long before the walls appeared—wagons creaking under the weight of grain and iron, cattle herded by shouting boys, banners half-unfurled so they could be rolled quickly if scouts returned with bad news. Watchfires burned even in daylight, their smoke smearing the sky with unease. Every mile closer to the capital, the air thickened with urgency, with decisions made too late and hope bought on credit.
Halruun was ruled by Tharos, a god who did not descend, did not speak directly, but whose will pressed down on the nation like a constant hand on the shoulder. His statues lined the roads—stone figures with serene faces and swords held upright, as if peace were something that could be enforced by posture alone. Kael felt the pressure of it as he crossed the border, subtle but present, a demand for alignment, for belonging.
Sereth Vale lay to the east, beyond a chain of low mountains already dusted with early frost. Old enemy. Older grudges. The kind that survived generations because no one alive remembered how they had started, only that they must not end quietly. Scouts whispered of troop movements. Traders spoke of skirmishes disguised as accidents. Farmers sharpened tools that had never been meant for war.
Halruun was preparing.
Conscription posters covered every flat surface—walls, carts, tavern doors. Names were being taken in squares and temples. Mercenaries arrived in knots and bands, some proud, some desperate, all smelling of travel and steel. Adventurers came too, drawn by the promise of sanctioned violence and divine favor.
Kael watched it all from the edge, hood low, hands loose at his sides.
He was noticed anyway.
It started with questions that pretended to be casual. A clerk in a tabard asked where he'd come from. A recruiter in polished armor asked how long he planned to stay. A woman with a soldier's posture and a smile too practiced asked what he could do with a spear.
Kael answered carefully. Briefly. Truthfully enough to be boring.
It didn't work.
By the third day, the offers began.
The first was coin—heavy purses opened just enough to let him see the gleam. More money than most men saw in a year, offered for a single campaign. Bonuses for initiative. Shares of plunder "should Sereth Vale be persuaded to reconsider its borders."
Kael refused.
The second offer was status. A rank, unofficial but real. Authority over a small unit. Freedom of movement within the army's lines. Access to supplies others begged for.
Kael refused again.
That was when the tone shifted.
They stopped asking what he wanted and started showing him what Halruun could give.
It began with a feast.
Not in the open halls where officers dined stiffly under banners and prayers, but in a low-roofed building near the barracks, thick with heat and noise. Smoke curled from braziers burning tobacco and something sweeter, heavier. Music pounded—drums, strings, voices roughened by drink. Bodies pressed together in careless proximity.
Kael stood near the door at first, observing.
Liquor flowed freely, dark and clear, poured into cups without measure. Bowls of crushed leaves and resin passed from hand to hand, smoke inhaled deep and exhaled laughing. The edges of the room blurred with intoxication, with the relief of people given permission to forget what waited beyond the walls.
And there were women.
And men.
All adults, all dressed to invite attention or shed it quickly. Soldiers pulled lovers onto laps. Mercenaries disappeared behind curtains. Laughter rose and fell, sharp with want and fear tangled together.
Kael had seen intimacy before. He had known desire, known the comfort of a body shared without expectation. This was different.
This was spectacle.
This was incentive.
A man with rings on his fingers and the smile of someone used to arranging outcomes approached Kael with two cups.
"Relax," he said, pressing one into Kael's hand. "No contracts tonight. Just… appreciation."
A woman followed, dark-haired, confident, eyes assessing Kael without apology. She leaned close enough that he could smell oil and smoke on her skin.
"You don't have to decide now," she murmured. "No one does. You just have to feel what you'd be walking away from."
Around them, clothes loosened. Hands roamed. Breath hitched and turned into laughter again. It was not obscene, not hidden—just human bodies seeking distraction from an ending they all felt approaching.
Kael drank the liquor.
It burned, then warmed.
He did not smoke.
He did not touch anyone.
He watched instead, and in that watching, he understood.
Halruun was not bribing him with pleasure.
It was offering him forgetfulness.
Join us, and you will not have to carry what you are. You will be one of many. Your choices will dissolve into orders. Your consequences into shared guilt.
Tharos's shadow lay over it all, unseen but heavy. A god who demanded unity, who rewarded obedience not with joy, but with absolution.
"You look like a man who could have anything here," the woman said, her hand resting lightly on his arm. "Why refuse?"
Kael met her gaze.
"Because none of this is mine," he said.
She studied him, then laughed softly and stepped away, unoffended.
The man with the rings frowned.
"You think Sereth Vale will show mercy?" he asked. "You think staying apart keeps your hands clean?"
"No," Kael replied. "I think joining gives them to someone else."
The next day, the offers sharpened.
A private audience with a general. A blessing implied, if not spoken. A house in the capital, staffed and discreet. Companions chosen for him, presented as comforts rather than rewards—men and women both, beautiful, experienced, very aware of the role they were meant to play.
One sat beside him during the meeting, her knee brushing his, her voice low.
"You don't have to love the god," she said. "You just have to stand where he points."
Kael felt the familiar pressure then—the strange strength coiling, responding to the weight of attention, the shaping of expectation. This was how it happened. Not through miracles, but through systems eager to claim usefulness.
He stood.
"I won't fight your war," he said calmly. "Not for Tharos. Not for Halruun. Not against Sereth Vale."
The general's expression hardened.
"Everyone fights," he said. "They just pretend otherwise."
"Then pretend without me," Kael replied.
He left the chamber to the sound of murmurs, to eyes following him with calculation rather than admiration. Outside, the city throbbed with preparation—armor being fitted, prayers being shouted, bodies being spent in alleys and halls before they were spent on fields.
That night, Kael walked through the lower districts. He passed another feast, louder, wilder. He saw the way fear turned into hunger, into touch, into forgetting. He smelled opium thick in the air and watched a soldier weep against a stranger's shoulder while music drowned his sobs.
This was Halruun on the brink.
Not noble.
Not wicked.
Human.
Kael felt no contempt for it. Only clarity.
If he stayed, he would become a symbol—either for Tharos's cause or against it. Either way, he would feed the machine that turned people into offerings for old grudges.
At dawn, he left the city by a road less guarded, past another line of statues, past another conscription post where a boy barely old enough to shave argued with a clerk about his age.
Kael did not intervene.
That was the hardest choice of all.
Behind him, Halruun marched toward war, intoxicated on promises and bodies and the comfort of obedience.
Ahead lay Sereth Vale, and beyond it, more lands that would test him in different ways.
Kael walked on, carrying the weight of what he had refused—and the knowledge that refusal, too, would have consequences.