Leaving the Chambers of the Lost felt less like escape and more like being released from a thought that had finished using me.
Azathoth's words lingered—not as sentences, but as pressure. Wait. Seven. Collect. They didn't repeat themselves. They didn't need to. My emotions were louder than memory now, crashing against thoughts that had once moved in straight, obedient lines.
It was distracting.
Dangerously so.
Whatever he had returned to me—fear, curiosity, something close to hope—it didn't matter. I refused to dwell on it. Reflection was a luxury. Survival was habit.
When I crossed back into the material world, the armor responded.
Not with command.
With truth.
It surged along my spine, a deep pulse that carried information the way blood carries oxygen—necessary, unquestioned. And for the first time since I could remember, I felt something else beneath it.
Eagerness.
The sensation startled me. I leaned into it instinctively, hungry for the clarity it promised. Was this emotion? Or simply the will to live asserting itself after decades of disuse?
The truth settled anyway.
I had a task.
Not a contract. Not a command.
A correction.
Neria.
The war I had shortened would not end. It would metastasize. The duke's absence had not removed the cause—only reshaped it. If left alone, the conflict would grow teeth, then legends, then generations of justification.
The armor did not tell me how to fix it.
Only that I must.
As I walked, something began to change.
At first, it was subtle. The weight I had carried for so long started to thin, like pressure easing from a wound that had forgotten it was injured. The claws shortened. The iron joints loosened. Plates tightened, folding inward, compressing until—
They were gone.
No sound. No ceremony.
I stopped.
My hands were bare.
Skin. Scarred, rough, unmistakably human.
I could still feel the armor, though. Not on me—in me. A presence behind the eyes. Along the spine. Like a gaze that had learned my posture so well it no longer needed to watch.
An old habit, I decided.
Or a warning.
I continued walking.
For the first time in decades, the world did not recoil from me. No red glow cut the air. No iron announced my approach. I was just another man moving through trees and dirt and light.
I realized, suddenly, that I wanted to know what I looked like.
The thought surprised me.
I followed a river until the water slowed enough to hold a reflection. When I knelt and looked down, the man staring back was not who I expected.
A thick, neglected beard. Black hair tangled and uneven. Clothes worn thin, repaired without care for symmetry. Nothing remarkable. Nothing fearsome.
And yet—
I felt no disappointment.
The idea unsettled me more than the armor ever had.
Joy followed, uninvited and sharp. At the thought of walking without weight. Of choosing direction without being pointed. Of existing without being useful.
The emotions swelled too fast.
I pulled away from the water, steadying my breath.
Was this part of Azathoth's design?
To flood me with sensation so I'd lose focus? To drown purpose in curiosity? To make freedom loud enough to become a distraction?
The thought lingered only a moment.
I discarded it.
Whatever his intentions, mine were simple.
Neria still stood.
The war had not yet learned its name.
I turned from the river and set my path south.
For the first time in fifty years, I walked not because I was sent—
—but because I chose to move.
And I suspected that choice would cost me more than any contract ever had.
---
People like to say the means must justify the ends.
I've never understood why they assume the ends are negotiable.
If an outcome is inevitable, then the path toward it isn't justification—it's confession. Fate doesn't ask how you arrive. It only records that you did.
Neria had been doomed long before I crossed its borders. Newcastle's assault had been decisive, efficient, and entirely predictable. The scale of it made morality irrelevant. No righteous strategy led to this point—only momentum. Violence accelerating because it could.
I had been sent to stop a war already in motion.
That irony wasn't lost on me.
By noon, the country looked exhausted. Not ruined—tired. Buildings stood, roads held, people moved—but everything did so reluctantly, as if waiting for permission to collapse. This was a place that had been fighting long before the first blade was drawn.
If I wanted to save Neria, I needed influence. Influence meant access. Access meant the High Table.
Every major country has one. Different titles, same function. A gathering of names that mattered, deciding which others didn't. Reaching them required reputation—something earned through spectacle or sacrifice.
Normally, I would have taken the shortest path.
But I wasn't armored.
And even if I had been, something in me resisted the thought.
Without the iron, I would have to be seen. Known. Remembered. That would take time, and time was something Neria didn't have.
I considered leaving—turning back toward Newcastle, disrupting supply lines, killing officers quietly, letting the war choke on its own logistics.
The idea felt… easy.
That alone made me distrust it.
As I passed through one of the outer districts near the High Table's quarter, a notice caught my eye.
A wanted poster.
It was poorly printed, tacked crookedly to a wall already tired of holding things together. The sketch was vague—a man with sharp eyes and a crooked grin, rendered by someone who'd never truly seen him.
Wanted for repeated theft.
Months at large.
A real slimy fella.
The words left my mouth before I could stop them.
"A real slimy fella."
I froze.
The phrasing disgusted me—not because it was cruel, but because it was casual. Dismissive. The kind of language used when dehumanizing becomes efficient.
I had used it without thinking.
Autonomously.
That realization unsettled me more than the thefts themselves.
I stared at the poster longer than necessary, then exhaled and stepped back. Whatever that impulse was, I wasn't ready to examine it yet.
The man had been stealing from shops near the High Table. Repeatedly. Boldly. And never caught.
That mattered.
I asked around. Quietly. Carefully.
People were reluctant at first. Neria didn't reward curiosity. But patterns have a way of loosening tongues, and eventually someone mentioned timing.
End of the month.
Always.
The longer the month, the more he took.
That was it. No name. No direction. Just a rhythm.
I thanked them and walked on, committing the detail to memory.
The month ended tomorrow.
That realization should have come to me immediately. Normally, it would have. Truths like that used to surface without effort, delivered cleanly and without emotion.
Now I had to remember.
The process felt clumsy. Inefficient. Human.
I hated it.
But there was no alternative.
If I wanted to be noticed without blood, I would have to intervene where order had already failed. Where someone was already bending the rules hard enough to be seen.
I turned away from the High Table's shadow and adjusted my course.
Tomorrow, a thief would steal again.
And whether he realized it or not, he had already placed himself in the path of a man trying very hard not to become what he used to be.
I didn't know yet if that restraint would save Neria.
But I knew this much—
It would cost me something.