The forest above the village whispered with frost.
Kael moved in silence, his boots crunching over packed snow as he followed the old path up the eastern ridge. The world around him felt suspended—muted by snow and shadow. Pines loomed like silent sentinels, their limbs heavy with ice, bowing low under winter's weight.
The path had overgrown—long abandoned—but he remembered it. Not with this body, but with the one that had bled and burned to build an empire. Even now, though reborn in weaker flesh, his muscle memory guided each step. His fingers flexed without thinking at every turns, brushing aside branches that had long grown wild.
Every footfall pulled him further from the present and deeper into a past that wouldn't die.
This was where he had buried it. Not just a sword.
A symbol. A promise. A piece of himself torn from the world and hidden away for the day he might rise again.
Once, Kael Draven had been more than a warlord. And in his hand, he had carried a blade unlike any forged by human hands.
Ashreaver.
Forged not in fire but in wrath. Quenched in the ichor of a fallen demigod, bound with Kael's own soulfire. An artifact of will and blasphemy. It had been more than a weapon—it had been a declaration, an act of defiance made steel. It did not sing when swung. It roared.
Ashreaver had carved through divine flesh like fire through dry parchment. Celestial paladins had learned fear in its wake. Shrines fell. Angels bled. Thrones cracked.
But in the final battle—at the black altar beneath the Skarhold sky, with Aureon himself descending in radiant fury—the blade had shattered in Kael's hands.
Some said it was divine will. Others claimed the betrayal of allies weakened its soul. Kael knew the truth: no weapon, no matter how mighty, could withstand the full judgment of a god—least of all, the God of Flame and Order.
Still, even broken, the blade had refused to die.
And Kael, in his last moments, in a body dissipating into ash, with lungs full of blood and soul slipping into the abyss, had buried it beneath this cliff. With one last spark of power, he sealed it in stone and whispered a vow into the earth.
"If I return… you will burn with me."
Now he had returned.
He stopped beneath a crooked pine that leaned toward the ridge like a mourner frozen in time. Snow blanketed its large branches in silence. The tree had aged since he last saw it—the bark peeling, branches twisted—but it still pointed toward the outcrop of jagged stone at the cliff's edge.
Kael knelt, brushing aside the snow with bare fingers. The cold bit through his skin, but he welcomed it. He needed to feel the world again. Needed to earn this moment with flesh and pain.
At the base of the stone outcrop, nearly lost beneath lichen and frost, lay the carvings.
Old runes of war. Forgotten to most. But Kael remembered them. These were his markings
He pressed his hand against the stone and whispered a word that had not been spoken in two centuries.
The runes pulsed—faintly, like embers stirred in ash.
Kael exhaled, then dug. His hands worked furiously, clawing at the frozen dirt, throwing aside rocks, peeling away layers of frost and time. Blood slicked his knuckles as the stones resisted. His nails cracked. His muscles strained.
Still, he dug. Until his fingers struck iron.
He paused, his breath caught in his throat. Then slowly, reverently, he brushed away the last veil of earth.
Wrapped in cloth so aged it crumbled at his touch, laid the remains of Ashreaver.
He unwrapped it slowly, almost afraid the truth would not match his memory.
But it did.
The hilt remained untouched by time—blackened iron, wrapped in god-leather, carved with runes that still shimmered with faint inner heat. The pommel bore the mark of the Warlord's Crest—a broken sun surrounded by ten swords.
A third of the blade remained—jagged where it had broken, its once razor-sharp edge now dulled by centuries buried beneath earth and frost. But it was far from dead. The fractured metal pulsed faintly, threads of molten red-orange light crawling along the severed edge like coals that refused to fade into ash. A soft, almost undetectable warmth radiated from the blade's core, beating in rhythm with Kael's own heartbeat.
He knelt on the frozen ground, his breath fogging the cold air. His eyes locked onto the broken blade as though it were an old friend—scarred, battered, but still fiercely alive.
Slowly. Reverently. Wordlessly. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around the hilt.
The moment his skin made contact, a searing white-hot pain exploded through his arm—a furious line of fire that raced from his palm, searing up his forearm, slicing through muscle and bone, and stabbing deep into his spine. The agony was blinding, unrelenting, as if the blade itself was demanding blood, demanding remembrance.
Kael gasped sharply, dropping his head back, his teeth clenched against the sudden torment.
And then—
Visions tore into his mind with the force of a thunderclap.
He was back on the battlefield at Siran's Gate.
Smoke swelled from shattered battlements. The air reeked of burnt flesh and broken promises. Flags, tattered and stained with blood, whipped violently in the storm-swept wind.
Ashreaver blazed fiercely in his grip, a roaring inferno against the divine armor of celestial warriors. The sword was alive—singing with wrath and power—cutting through gleaming divine plates as though they were made of parchment.
A god screamed overhead—a sound that cracked the sky like the roar of a collapsing mountain, echoing across the blood-soaked snow beneath his feet.
Then he saw him—Aureon, the god of flame and judgment—descending like a radiant storm, his spear blazing with searing light, his eyes burning with unholy fury. The very air trembled beneath his arrival.
Kael's allies faltered, the protective sigils around them flickering and unraveling like brittle threads.
He felt the shock as the blade cracked—the final fracturing of his soulfire tethered to the steel. The pain of it was more than physical; it was the tearing of his very soul.
He burned—alive, seared by divine flame, his flesh melting beneath the god's wrath.
He fell.
He died.
And yet, through the fire and shadow of death, the blade still called him back.
Kael's breath came ragged as the visions faded, leaving his body trembling but alive. The ache in his arm remained, but beneath it lay a deeper truth: Ashreaver still remembered. It still waited.
And so did he.
He staggered back, his hand still locked on the hilt, his chest heaving. Steam rose from his skin as the heat of the vision faded.
The blade pulsed once—like a heartbeat.
Then silence.
Kael sank to his knees and laughed softly, brokenly, through the pain.
"It remembers me," he whispered.
Even shattered, it had waited. Even dying, it had endured.
Just like him.
He rewrapped the remains in new cloth and slung the bundle across his back, adjusting the leather strap to rest between his shoulder blades. The weight was familiar. Comforting. Dangerous.
There were places—hidden in the world's cracks—where steel like this could be reforged. Ancient forges. Forbidden rites. Creatures that knew how to reawaken weapons born of wrath.
Not yet. But soon. He turned and looked down from the ridge.
The village below flickered with light—warm glows from hearths and lanterns, scattered like fireflies against the snow-veiled dark.
Innocent lives. Quiet souls clinging to warmth, to ritual, to the fragile comfort of routine beneath the ever-watchful gaze of gods.
They didn't know what had stirred tonight. What had risen from ash and memory. What old oath now walked the earth again.
But they would.
Soon.
Kael squared his shoulders and began the descent, the broken blade wrapped across his back like a buried truth unearthed.
He had fire. He had will. Now, he had a weapon.
----------------
Elsewhere…
Deep beneath the Temple of Radiance, carved into the white cliffs above the capital of Solmaris, a sacred flame wavered over a pool of still water.
The chamber was circular and vast, every wall adorned with ivory statues of winged figures—saints, seers, martyrs—all frozen in eternal watchfulness. Their eyes, though sightless, seemed fixed upon the pool's heart. No breeze should have touched this place, yet the air here was cold. The wind sighed down the hollow spaces like a chorus of distant ghosts, but the water's surface did not stir.
The Seer of Aureon stood alone before it. His violet robes hung loose and uneven. Dried blood stained his temple, where the vision's force had struck him to his knees. His hand hovered inches above the pool, fingers trembling—from the memory of what he had just felt.
A single word had carved itself into the marrow of his thoughts, as fierce and irrevocable as a scar:
Ashreaver.
He swallowed, his throat tight, kneeling before the pool. "Confirm it," he whispered, barely able to hear himself.
At once, the sacred flame swelled, its pure white light dimming to a molten gold. The reflection of the chamber vanished from the pool, replaced by a void of shifting shadow.
A voice answered—cold, sexless, yet bearing the weight of multitudes. It spoke not as one, but as a thousand whispers laid atop each other until no single tone could be discerned.
"He has reclaimed the Ashreaver. The Warlord rises."
The Seer closed his eyes. The words should have been impossible.
An image pressed unbidden into his thoughts. The boy called Tarin, whose eyes had held a trace of defiance when they met his. The boy who had sparked something almost… human in him, before he had chosen him for the altar.
But what had stood in that snowbound village today was not Tarin. It had to be him. He had prayed to be wrong, but he had been right. He had felt it in the blow to his face, in the shattering of his mask—the raw force of forbidden rites. He had lived in the era when such power rose to defy the gods two centuries ago.
The Seer rose to his feet, slow and unsteady, as though gravity itself had grown heavier. His steps carried him toward the far wall, where a sealed altar of black stone lay half-buried in shadow. The sigil carved into its lid gleamed faintly, fed by a power older than kingdoms.
He pressed his bloodied palm to the mark.
Stone ground against stone, the sound echoing in the cold air.
Inside lay a scroll bound in dark wax, stamped with the Mark of the High Flame—a seal that had not been broken in over a century. It was a relic of fear, written in another age, when the gods themselves had struggled to bind a single man.
His fingers hesitated over the seal for the briefest moment. Then he tore it away.
The parchment unfurled, spilling words penned in ancient script. Orders. Instructions. Contingency plans long forgotten.
His lips shaped each syllable in silence until he reached the final line. His voice cracked when he spoke it aloud, the words scraping raw in his throat:
"Then the hunt begins."