Part 1: The Anniversary of the Sun
The Kingdom of Gaan had not just survived the year; it had gorged itself on it.
It had been twelve full months since the "Great Mercy." Twelve months since King Leonus had returned from the Copper Grove, alone, with a story that had since become scripture. The tale went that Alaric, the Iron Pillar, had wrestled the Demon of the Curse into the void, sacrificing his body to seal the rift between the mortal world and the hells of the Blood Hag.
The people called it the "Year of the Gilded Leaf." The crops had grown with a ferocity that bordered on aggressive. The rivers sparkled with a clarity that looked painted. The Blood Curse was a fading nightmare, a bedtime story used to frighten children into eating their vegetables.
But inside the Royal Palace, the silence was deafening.
King Leonus stood before a massive map of his kingdom in his private solar. He was no longer the vibrant lion of his youth. One year of peace had aged him ten. His golden hair was streaked with grey, and his skin had the pallor of a man who lived indoors, hiding from the very sun he had paid so dearly to retrieve.
He traced the empty space on the map around the Copper Grove—a circle of silence that had been slowly expanding for twelve months.
"Three more," Leonus whispered to the empty room. "Three patrols in a week. Gone."
"The roads are dangerous, Your Majesty," a voice soothed from the doorway.
High Pope Benedictus entered, his robes heavier with gold thread than they had been a year ago. The Church of Dawn had canonized Alaric as a Saint of Sacrifice, and the tithes flowed like water. The Pope looked fed; the King looked eaten.
"Dangerous?" Leonus turned, his eyes bloodshot. "They are not being robbed, Benedictus. They are being erased. The Reports say the horses' hearts exploded. What kind of bandit does that?"
"A mage, perhaps. A rogue element," the Pope dismissed, waving a hand adorned with ruby rings. "You obsess over shadows while the sun is shining, Leonus. Tonight is the Anniversary Gala at the Blackwood Estate. Sir Kaelen has prepared the security personally. You must attend."
Leonus looked at the map again. He felt it in his teeth—a low, constant vibration that he had felt every night for a year. A scratching at the back of his mind.
"I tried to send a mage," Leonus murmured. "To scry the Grove. To see if the seal was holding."
The Pope paused, his smile tightening. "And?"
"The scrying crystal cracked," Leonus said, his voice trembling. "It didn't show the Grove. It showed... an eye. A red eye."
"Stress," the Pope stated firmly, walking over to place a hand on the King's shoulder. "You are carrying the weight of the lie, my son. It is heavy. But it bought us this paradise. Do not crack now. Sir Kaelen is the future of the Guard—a true knight, unlike his father. He will keep the peace. Go to Blackwood. Drink the wine. Forget the Grove."
Leonus closed his eyes. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe that the transaction was final. But deep down, he knew the truth about debts to the Gods.
Eventually, the collector comes knocking.
The Blackwood Estate: The Feast of Fools
Thirty miles east, the Blackwood Estate was a beacon of defiant opulence.
Baron Valin, the Lord of Blackwood, had outdone himself. The estate was ablaze with magical lanterns. The gardens were filled with the laughter of the Gaan nobility, who drank vintage wine and ate exotic fruits, secure in the knowledge that their world was safe.
But on the outer balcony, away from the laughter, Sir Kaelen stood watch.
He was not drinking. He was not boasting.
Sir Kaelen, the "Sun-Touched Knight," was the youngest Champion in the history of Gaan, but he bore the weight of the title with a solemn gravity. While the guests inside celebrated the peace, Kaelen was scanning the dark treeline of the eastern woods. His armor was polished, yes, but it was scratched—scars from actual patrols, not tournament play.
"You are ruining the aesthetic, boy," a sharp voice hissed.
Baron Valin waddled onto the balcony, a goblet of wine in one hand and a half-eaten turkey leg in the other. He was sweating, his face flushed with gluttony. "The Duchess of Oakhaven is asking for you. She wants to hear about the time you slew the Wyvern."
"The West Gate patrol is late, Father," Kaelen said quietly, not turning around. His hand rested on the pommel of Dawnbreaker. "By twenty minutes."
"Oh, for the love of the Gods," Valin groaned. "They are drunk! It is a festival! Let the men have a pint. Why must you be so dour? You act as if we are at war."
"We are always at war, Father," Kaelen replied, his voice calm but firm. "Peace is just the time we spend sharpening our blades. The merchants have been whispering about disappearances near the Grove. I don't like the silence tonight."
"Merchants!" Valin spat, taking a bite of the turkey. "Liars and thieves. They just want lower tariffs. Come inside. The King is expected within the hour. I need you standing by my side, looking heroic, so I can ask for that tax exemption on the grain silos."
Kaelen finally turned to look at his father. There was no hate in his eyes, only a weary disappointment. "You worry about the grain tax. I will worry about the lives of your men."
"You are as stubborn as that fool Alaric was," Valin muttered, turning back to the party. "Just don't make a scene."
Kaelen watched his father leave. He sighed, adjusting his white cloak. He didn't want to be a hero for the applause. He wanted to be a hero because he remembered Alaric. He remembered the Iron Pillar teaching him how to hold a shield when he was just a squire. He believed in the sacrifice. He believed he owed it to Alaric's memory to be the vigilant watchman the Kingdom needed.
"Stay here," Kaelen ordered the two squires by the door. "If the King arrives, signal me. I am going to walk the perimeter."
He walked down the stone steps into the garden, leaving the light and the music behind. He moved with a practiced, silent grace, heading toward the darkness of the West Gate.
The Shadow of the Year
The forest edge was a wall of black.
Where the manicured lawn of the Blackwood Estate ended, the ancient woods began. Usually, this border was a place of noise—owls hooting, foxes barking. Tonight, it was a vacuum.
Standing just inside the treeline, hidden by the canopy of an old oak, Alaric waited.
He did not breathe. His chest did not rise and fall. The air around him was simply sucked into the vents of his helmet, filtered through the rot of his own body, and expelled as a faint, crimson mist.
A year in the wild had changed him. The "iron golem" that had stumbled out of the mud was gone. In its place was a creature of refined, focused horror. The armor was no longer just fused to him; it was him. The metal had taken on the texture of organic matter—pitted, scarred, and covered in a thin layer of red lichen that pulsed.
He watched the party. He saw the lights. He smelled the roast boar.
And he smelled Him.
Sir Kaelen.
The scent was different from the others. The Baron smelled of grease and fear. The guests smelled of perfume and lust. But Kaelen... Kaelen smelled of steel, oil, and a clean, sharp determination.
It was the smell of a threat.
Alaric did not feel respect. The Sanguine Depravity had burned that capacity out of him long ago. He only felt the binary of the hunt: Target. Obstacle.
Kaelen was an obstacle.
Alaric stepped out of the woods.
As his iron boot touched the manicured grass of the estate, the ground reacted. The green grass instantly turned grey and brittle, dying in a perfect footprint of decay.
He walked toward the West Gate.
The two guards stationed there were alert. They were good men, trained by Kaelen himself. They stood with halberds raised, scanning the darkness.
"Halt!" one guard shouted, spotting the massive silhouette emerging from the treeline. "State your business!"
Alaric didn't stop.
"I said halt!" the guard yelled, stepping forward to block the path. "This is a restricted—"
Alaric raised a hand. He didn't cast a projectile. He simply clenched his fist.
The guard's heart seized. It wasn't a natural attack; it was a theft. The Sanguine Void in Alaric's soul reached out and drank the electrical impulse that kept the man's heart beating.
The guard dropped without a sound, dead before he hit the gravel.
The second guard gasped, eyes widening. He opened his mouth to scream, to sound the alarm.
Alaric tilted his head. The red eye of the Hag, floating invisible in the ether, focused.
The second guard choked. His lungs filled with blood. He fell to his knees, clawing at his throat, drowning in dry air.
Alaric walked past them. He didn't look down. They were not the meal. They were the crumbs.
He reached the heavy iron gate. It was locked, barred with a beam of oak and reinforced with steel bands.
Alaric placed his palm against the iron bars.
Rust.
The magical corruption flowed from his hand. The black iron of the gate turned orange, then brown, then flaky red. In seconds, the metal that had stood for a hundred years aged a thousand. The hinges groaned—a sound like a dying beast—and then disintegrated.
The massive gate collapsed inward, falling into a pile of red dust.
Sir Kaelen was halfway down the gravel path when he heard the gate fall.
It wasn't a crash. It was a heavy, soft thump, followed by the hiss of disintegrating metal.
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He didn't freeze. He drew Dawnbreaker in one fluid motion, the holy blade flaring to life with a blinding white light.
"To me!" Kaelen shouted, his voice commanding, expecting the guards to rally.
Silence answered him.
Kaelen slowed his pace, shifting into a combat stance. He saw the pile of red dust where the gate used to be. He saw the two bodies of his men lying on the ground.
And then he saw the shadow.
It stood amidst the dust, seven feet of blackened, pitted plate armor. Where there should have been a face, there was a darkness that wept red steam.
Kaelen's breath hitched. He recognized the silhouette. Every knight in Gaan had studied the statues of the Iron Pillar.
"Lord Alaric?" Kaelen whispered, the name slipping out before he could stop it. "Is... is that you?"
The monster stood motionless. The red mist hissed.
"You are supposed to be dead," Kaelen said, his voice hardening, pushing past the shock. "You are a hero. A Saint."
Alaric took a step forward. The gravel crunched loudly under his weight. He did not speak. He did not acknowledge the title. He simply raised his head, and the single slit of his visor glowed with a rhythmic, baleful crimson light.
Kaelen looked at the dead guards, then back at the legend standing before him. He realized with a sick sinking feeling that the statues were wrong. The Saint was not a savior.
"You killed them," Kaelen said, his grip on his sword tightening until his knuckles turned white. "They were good men."
Alaric continued to walk.
"I order you to halt!" Kaelen shouted, stepping into the path of the beast. "I am Sir Kaelen of the Blackwood, Champion of the King! Yield, or I will strike you down!"
Alaric stopped. He was ten feet away. The sheer size of him blocked out the moon.
He looked at Kaelen—at the shining white armor, the holy sword, the cloak that was too clean for the world Alaric now lived in.
For the first time in a year, the rusted grating of Alaric's voice broke the silence. It was low, painful, and utterly devoid of humanity.
"Yield..."
Alaric slowly raised a gauntlet, his fingers curling into a fist.
"...No."
Part 2: The Shattered Sun
The refusal hung in the air, heavy and final.
"No."
As the vibration of Alaric's voice faded, the sound of boots pounding against gravel shattered the silence. From the garden path behind Sir Kaelen, a squad of six House Blackwood knights sprinted into view. They were not the sleepy gate guards Alaric had dispatched earlier; these were Kaelen's personal retinue, the "Gilded Guard." They were men clad in polished steel and velvet surcoats, trained in the capital's finest academies to protect the future of the realm.
"Sir Kaelen!" the lead knight shouted, seeing the massive, rusted silhouette looming over his commander. "Formation! Protect the Champion!"
They moved with clockwork precision. In seconds, they had fanned out, three dropping to a knee with shields locked to form a steel wall, while three stood behind with halberds lowered, creating a phalanx of discipline.
Alaric did not flinch. He did not shift into a combat stance. To the "Lap Dog," they were not soldiers. They were not even threats. They were simply biomass.
He took a step. The ground trembled.
"Strike!" Kaelen commanded, his voice tight with a dread he couldn't suppress.
The three rear knights thrust their halberds forward in perfect unison, aiming for the gaps in Alaric's armor—the armpits, the neck, the groin.
THUD.
The sound was dull and heavy. The steel tips didn't pierce; they skidded harmlessly off the blackened, fused plates of Alaric's chest and shoulders. The force of the impact didn't even make him stumble; it merely knocked a cloud of red rust dust from his pauldrons.
Alaric walked through the spears.
He reached out with his left hand and grabbed the shaft of the nearest halberd. He didn't yank it; he simply squeezed. The seasoned oak wood, reinforced with iron bands, splintered like a dry twig.
The knight holding it gasped, stumbling forward. Before he could draw his sidearm, Alaric backhanded him. It was a casual motion, like a man swatting a fly, but the force was cataclysmic. The knight's helmet caved in, and he was launched sideways, ragdolling into the stone wall of the gatehouse with a wet, sickening crunch.
The formation broke instantly.
"Enough!" Kaelen roared.
The Sun-Touched Knight could no longer stand behind the line. He vaulted over the shield of a cowering squire. Kaelen was fast—faster than any man in Gaan. He moved in a blur of white cloak and shining steel, channeling every ounce of his mana into Dawnbreaker. The holy blade blazed with a desperate, white-hot fire as he lunged for the dark slit of Alaric's visor.
It was a perfect strike. Technical perfection.
The blade connected.
But there was no sound of metal on metal. Instead, there was the sound of a hot iron being quenched in oil—a wet, screaming hiss.
The red vapor venting from Alaric's armor surged, reacting to the holy magic. It lashed out like a living thing, wrapping around the holy sword like a parasitic vine. The gold light of the blade screamed, flickered, and died, suffocated by the Sanguine Depravity.
Kaelen's eyes widened. He watched in horror as the blood-red mist turned the consecrated steel into a brittle, rusted scrap in a matter of seconds. The metal flaked away in the wind, aged a thousand years in a single heartbeat.
Alaric reached out. His gauntlet, slick with the blood of Kaelen's squires, closed around the decaying blade. With a single, effortless twist of his wrist, the "holy" sword shattered into a dozen pieces.
Kaelen stumbled back, holding a useless, corroded hilt. His world fractured along with his weapon.
Alaric's hand didn't stop. He grabbed Kaelen by the throat, lifting the armored knight off the ground with one hand. Kaelen kicked uselessly, his boots dangling a foot above the gravel, his armor groaning under the pressure of the iron grip.
"He's so heavy with 'justice,' isn't he, my pet?" the Hag giggled, her voice echoing from the floating red Eye that hovered inches from Kaelen's face. "Lighten his load."
Alaric's grip tightened. He didn't use a knife. He didn't need one. He reached into the invisible currents of the air, tapping into the Sanguine Depravity.
The blood that had pooled around the fountain—the blood of the men Alaric had already slaughtered—began to tremble. It rose from the cracks in the cobblestones like a legion of red snakes. They slithered through the air toward Kaelen, drawn to the heat of his living body, defying gravity as they swirled around the pair.
"Alaric... brother..." Kaelen choked out, his face turning purple as he clawed at the iron fingers crushing his windpipe.
"Brother... is dead," Alaric rasped. The voice was a ruin, a sound of grinding stones.
Alaric made a jagged, upward gesture with his free hand.
The rising blood suddenly hardened. It ceased to be liquid, turning into four massive, obsidian-black spikes of congealed gore. They hovered for a fraction of a second, vibrating with a low, humming dread.
Then, they lunged.
The first spike drove through Kaelen's stomach, pinning him against the air as Alaric let go of his throat. The second and third lanced through his palms, the sound of metal and bone tearing echoing through the silent courtyard. The fourth spike shot upward, entering through the soft tissue under the chin and erupting through the top of the helmet, silencing the knight's gurgling pleas forever.
Kaelen hung there, suspended in the air by a cross made of his own men's blood.
But Alaric wasn't finished. The Hag demanded a message.
He grabbed the horizontal cross-beam of the blood-spikes. With a violent, guttural growl, he wrenched the entire structure.
CRACK.
The wet, sickening crunch of a spine being pulverized rang out like a bell.
He flipped the cross.
Now, Sir Kaelen hung upside down. His blood, pulled by the dark gravity of the spell, began to flow in reverse—streaming out of his mouth and nose, drenching the white-and-gold surcoat until it was a solid, dripping red. The inverted cross stood as a monolith of blasphemy in the center of the Baron's estate.
Alaric stepped back, his chest heaving. He watched as two smaller splinters of blood-glass shot forward from the structure, lancing directly into Kaelen's dead, open eyes, sealing them in crimson crystal.
"Exquisite," the Hag whispered. The Eye zoomed in, the red iris dilating until it nearly filled the orb, broadcasting the horror to the King miles away. "A martyr for the mud. The King will see this. The Pope will see this. They will know that their property has returned to claim the debt."
Alaric looked at the inverted corpse. He felt no satisfaction. He felt no relief. He only felt the cold, gnawing void where his heart used to be, and the burning thirst for the next name on his list.
He didn't look back. He didn't check the windows. He turned and walked into the darkness of the woods, vanishing as silently as he had arrived.
The sun rose five hours later.
The birds began to chirp, a cheerful, oblivious sound that drifted over the walls of the Blackwood Estate.
Baron Valin opened the heavy oak doors of the manor. He was rubbing his eyes, hungover from the wine, irritated that Kaelen hadn't returned to the party the night before.
"Kaelen!" Valin shouted, stepping out onto the terrace. "Where are you, boy? The guests are waking up!"
He walked to the edge of the balcony and looked down into the garden.
The scream that left Baron Valin's throat was not human. It was the sound of a father's soul disintegrating.
Below him, bathed in the soft, golden light of the dawn, stood a cross of black, crystallized blood. And hanging from it, inverted and drained, was the Sun-Touched Knight.
The False Peace was over.