The night was not silent.
It breathed — slow, heavy, and ancient. The kind of breathing that belonged not to the wind or forest, but to the world itself, half-asleep and dreaming of ruin.
Ashes drifted across the valley like forgotten prayers.
They fell upon the stone ruins of Velhar — a city once carved from light, now a mausoleum of echoes. The moon hung low, pale and cracked, like a god's broken tooth, and beneath its ghostly glow moved a single figure.
Kael Veyren walked through the bones of the fallen city, his cloak whispering across the shattered marble. His left hand trembled around the hilt of his sword — not from fear, but memory. The blade was older than any kingdom still standing. It was called Revenant's Wake, and when it sang, blood remembered its ancestors.
Every few steps, Kael paused, listening. Not to sound — but to the absence of it.
Velhar had been dead for five hundred years, yet tonight, something stirred in its tomb.
The mist slithered between pillars, coiling like veins of living silver. He knew what that meant. The veil was thinning.
And the dead were trying to speak.
He stopped before the Hall of Glass — what remained of it. Its roof had collapsed centuries ago, yet shards of the crystal ceiling still jutted from the earth like the teeth of some ancient beast. When he stepped inside, the air changed. Warmer. Closer. Alive.
At the center of the hall lay a circle of burnt symbols, drawn in a language Kael knew but wished he didn't. He knelt, running his gloved fingers over the markings. The edges pulsed faintly, like embers refusing to die.
Not again, he thought. Not another summoner trying to wake what should remain buried.
But this wasn't mortal work. No human hand could weave the script of the Veil. This was done by something that remembered being divine.
The ground shuddered.
From the center of the circle, a thin crack split the floor — a black wound bleeding smoke. The air tasted of iron and frost. Kael rose, drawing Revenant's Wake. The blade answered with a sound like thunder inhaling.
The whisper came next.
Soft. Sweet. Deceptive.
"Kael Veyren…"
He froze. That voice — he hadn't heard it in seven years. Not since the night he had burned her body.
"Lira," he whispered.
The mist shifted, forming the outline of a woman. Her eyes were moons of silver, her hair like unraveling starlight. She smiled — and for a heartbeat, Kael wanted to believe.
But ghosts always smiled like that before they fed.
"You shouldn't be here," he said. His voice sounded smaller than he meant it to.
"And yet," she replied, her form flickering like a reflection in a disturbed pool, "you came."
He circled the apparition slowly. "What are you?"
"What you left behind."
The floor cracked wider. The runes flared red, then gold, then something beyond color. The air filled with whispers, dozens, hundreds, all crying his name in a hundred tones of love and hatred. Kael pressed the blade's tip to the ground.
"Begone," he hissed.
The specter tilted her head. "You cannot banish what you never buried."
And then the veil tore.
A rift split the hall from end to end, light bursting through — not gentle light, but the blinding kind that devours shadow and sanity alike. From it poured shapes — half-human, half-remembered, their bodies shifting between bone and flame. The air howled. The ghosts of Velhar had awakened.
Kael moved.
In a single motion, Revenant's Wake arced upward, its edge igniting with silver fire. The nearest phantom lunged; he turned, cut, pivoted — and the creature dissolved into mist. But for every one that fell, three more crawled from the wound in the world.
The dead screamed in a language older than mercy.
He fought through them — blade singing, cloak tearing, body burning with the rhythm of survival.
One ghost seized his arm — its touch froze flesh to ice. He drove his knee into its face, shattered it to smoke, and rolled across the marble. The runes pulsed faster now, the circle expanding.
He was losing ground.
Then the voice came again, softer. Closer.
"Kael… stop fighting. It's over. You can rest."
He looked up — and saw Lira again, standing at the center of the chaos, untouched by the storm. Her eyes no longer silver, but black as dying suns.
"You're not her," Kael said.
The thing smiled. "No. But she opened the door for me."
With that, the figure spread her hands — and the runes burst into white fire. The ground split apart entirely, revealing a heart of light beneath Velhar's ruins. Inside it, something moved.
Kael felt it — the same dread he'd felt at the fall of the Veil Fortress, when gods bled and the sky forgot its color. The same power that had burned continents.
The same power that had killed Lira.
The Seraphim are waking.
He lunged through the phantoms, cutting down anything that reached for him. The light seared his eyes, but he didn't stop. He reached the circle just as a hand — massive, winged, radiant — began to rise from the chasm.
It wasn't divine. It was something pretending to be.
Kael slammed his sword into the heart of the sigil and screamed the words that had nearly killed him once before. "By the blood of the living, by the silence of the slain — I bind thee!"
The world convulsed.
Flames roared outward, consuming everything — the ghosts, the mist, even Lira's false form. The light imploded into a single point and vanished, leaving only darkness, and Kael, on his knees, gasping like a man drowning on dry land.
When the silence returned, it was heavier than before.
He looked at the sword. Its glow had dimmed. A crack ran down the center of its blade, pulsing faintly — like a wound that would not heal.
He whispered to it, voice hoarse: "Just a little longer, old friend."
He sheathed the weapon and turned toward the shattered doorway. Dawn had begun to creep over the horizon, painting the ruins gold. But the light did not comfort him. He had seen too much of what light could hide.
Far in the distance, beyond the dead valley, he saw a single column of black smoke rising from the forests of Etrion.
Another awakening.
He sighed. The war between gods and men was not over — it had only changed names.
And in that fragile dawn, as the first sunrays broke through the ruin's edge, Kael Veyren whispered the old prophecy:
"When the dead remember their light, the living will forget their shadows."
Then he walked into the smoke.
And the world, still trembling from what it had almost seen, began to breathe again.