Chapter 12: Exile by Fire
They came for him at night. No trial. No announcement. Just the flickering glow of torchlight weaving through the fog-drenched forest outside his makeshift shelter.
Aleister barely had time to grab his coat before the sentinels stormed in.
"By decree of House Trienn and the Nethran Council, you are to be removed from Nethran territory. Effective immediately."
His card pulsed faintly in protest, tucked in the folds of his coat. The glow was deeper now, a black-red shimmer that throbbed against the air. It didn't fight. Neither did he.
He recognized the lead sentinel. Ser Marvik. Once a low-ranked enforcer during Aleister's scavenging days, now adorned in the new insignia of the Nethran Flame Guard. Marvik didn't speak to him directly. He didn't need to. His silence carried contempt like a blade.
Aleister was bound at the wrists and walked through the night with ten soldiers flanking him, all wearing Arcgloves. They didn't draw them, but they kept their palms exposed, as if daring him to try something. He didn't.
The path twisted through charred roots and old bone-markers. The forest around them whispered warnings. In the silence between boots and breath, Aleister thought he heard the Grove calling again. Faint. Distant. But present.
At the edge of the Nethran boundary, the guard threw him to the dirt.
"This is the border," Marvik finally said. "Beyond this point, you are no longer our concern."
Aleister stood. The ground here was dry, different. The humidity of Nethra broke against the colder, harsher winds of the borderlands. He could smell metal in the air, the residue of long-fought wars.
"If I come back?" he asked.
Marvik narrowed his eyes. "You won't."
And with that, they turned, vanishing into the trees as if they had never come.
Alone now, Aleister stood on the jagged line between two worlds. Behind him, Nethra. Ahead, the burned expanse of the Ash Vale, a forbidden strip of land littered with relics, wreckage, and wild Arcflows no one dared to map.
He knew what this was.
It wasn't banishment. It was execution by wilderness.
But something had changed.
His card thrummed again, and this time it responded not with color but with direction. The shimmer pulled forward, not left, not right, but deeper into the Vale. Like a compass pointing toward something unseen.
Aleister tightened his coat. Every step forward now felt heavier. Not just from the terrain, but from the weight of all that had come before. His brother, silent in the Light Nation. His card, no longer dormant but undefined. Irikrit, whispering still from the corners of his soul.
And the memory of the Grove.
"We will show you what the runes fear."
He walked.
Through the broken trees and scorched stone, through the places where the sky seemed to blur and Arc-glimmers danced like insects in the mist. He passed broken machines once used in wars no one remembered. He saw a burned flag with a rune he didn't recognize.
And as the sun threatened to rise behind a shroud of clouds, he reached a hilltop lined with black obelisks.
One of them pulsed when he approached.
He placed his hand on the cold stone. His card reacted instantly.
From the stone came a hum. Not a voice, not a word. But a pulse. Like a heartbeat.
His.
Symbols flared across the obelisk, not in runes, but in fractured light and in the air above it formed a shape. A projection.
Not a person.
A mask.
The thirteenth mask from the Grove.
And it spoke: "You have stepped past what nations fear. Welcome to the exile of fire. Welcome to the becoming."
Then it vanished.
Aleister stood still.
Then he smiled.
Not out of joy.
But out of clarity.
He was not rootless. He was not empty.
He was free.
And fire was only the beginning.