Tyril
Tyril sat on the edge of the narrow inn-bed, elbows on his knees, staring into the dark. Shadows thickened in the corners of the rented room like wet smoke. His thoughts churned, rising and falling in frantic waves ever since Imp had spoken the impossible:
Marik may walk again.
Marik may be The Reaper.
Tyril felt as though the floor beneath him had rotted away, leaving only a thin plank over a bottomless pit.
His father… the man Tyril had slain with his own trembling hands—could be the very being destined to end the cycle. The thought crawled through his mind like a cold worm burrowing deeper with every breath.
Elvyna appeared beside him before he realized the door had even opened. Her touch on his hand felt distant, like he was remembering it instead of feeling it.
He flinched violently, half-drawing his sword. Elvyna didn't recoil. She only looked at him—fearful not of him, but for him.
She had seen him die once before. She had carried his cold body from the collapsing black kingdom, brushed blood from a face that should never have moved again. She knew the look of death. And now she looked at him as though death had never fully left him.
"My love," she whispered, voice steady but trembling beneath, "what is it you fear so much?"
Tyril swallowed, throat tight. "If… if my father is this Reaper…" He nearly gagged on the name. "Then I am the one who released him upon the world."
Elvyna's grip tightened sharply. "You do not know that."
Tyril shook his head. "Ignorance does not lessen guilt. If a child swings a sword and harms someone—who is responsible? The parent who never taught him? The one who left the weapon in reach? Or the child himself?"
"I would—"
"All three," Tyril whispered, hollow. "The parent is the Source. The sword-bearers are the Gods. And I…" His voice cracked. "I am the foolish child who ended his father without knowing what that death would awaken."
Elvyna pressed her head to his chest, listening to the heartbeat she had once prayed would return. She wanted to argue. Wanted to rage at the Gods or curse the Source. But she knew every argument crumbled beneath the weight of what Tyril felt.
"What do we do?" she whispered.
Tyril pressed a kiss to her hair, though his lips were cold.
"We learn all we can. And pray the legend offers a path that does not end in ruin."
But even as he said it, Tyril felt the veil thinning—felt something reaching through the cracks.
---
Adrian
The wind tore at Adrian's hair as Starlight flew low over the dead village. The village he'd been born in. The village where everyone he'd ever known had been slaughtered.
He had not returned since that night.
He never intended to.
But today, something pulled him back.
Starlight slowed, wings shuddering midair. Below, in the ruined street, figures moved. People walked. Shadows wandered. Faces Adrian knew—faces he had buried long ago.
Starlight rumbled uneasily. Adrian felt the dragon's fear ripple beneath him.
The figures below… were not alive. Their movements were wrong—too smooth, too slow, as though the air dragged at them. Their eyes were empty lanterns.
They were spirits.
And they were calm. Waiting. Watching.
Adrian's breath caught. He felt six years old again. A helpless child hiding beneath broken floorboards while necromancers tore his life apart.
He guided Starlight away.
He wasn't afraid of curses—they meant nothing to him after everything he'd survived. But this—this was a wound he could not bear reopening.
And yet someone had to know.
The dead did not rise here without a reason.
And The Reaper's shadow felt very, very close.
---
Cassandra
Cassandra landed hard on the flying castle's deserted courtyard. The air here was colder than she remembered—thinner, as though fear itself had drained warmth from the stones.
Every step toward the court library felt like walking backward in time.
She had bled on these stones. Screamed on them. Broken on them.
Once she had been nothing here. Less than nothing. A disgrace of the altain bloodline—beaten, tormented, left to rot by those who shared her blood.
Her fists clenched. She forced her feet forward.
Memories clawed at her as she moved, each one sharper than the last. The courtyard. The hall where they paraded her bruised body. The tower where they locked her in the dark. The cell where she'd learned what it meant to scream without sound.
She shoved it all down. She needed information, not ghosts.
But the ghosts found her first.
"Is that truly how you greet your mother, my dear?"
Cassandra spun, blade drawn.
The spirit floating before her was pale and solid, as though the shadows themselves had shaped her. Her mother's face—still beautiful, still cruel—smiled with an expression Cassandra remembered too well.
Cassandra's lip curled. "You are no mother."
"Oh? Then perhaps you can give me my head back?" The spirit tilted her head mockingly.
Cassandra turned away, disgust knotting her stomach. The library door was locked. She shattered it with a kick, wood exploding under her heel.
The spirit slipped inside after her like smoke.
"What is it you seek?" the spirit asked, tone playful. "Knowledge of The Reaper?"
Cassandra froze.
"How did—"
"The veil grows thin," the spirit whispered. "And when it thins… he grows strong."
Cassandra's pulse pounded. "Who is he? Tell me or get out."
The spirit drifted closer, eyes gleaming with sick delight.
"Oh, my sweet broken daughter… you will not like the answer."
Cassandra's fingers tightened on her blade.
"The Reaper," the spirit whispered, "is the orc you call Grall."
The books around them shuddered violently. Cassandra's breath turned to ice.
"Lies," she hissed, though her heart hammered as if trying to escape her chest.
But the spirit only smiled wider.
---
Grodak
Xierma had found Grodak the moment he returned. Their room felt too small for the weight of the truths they exchanged.
She explained everything her spies had learned. Everything she feared. Everything she suspected.
"The Reaper is alive," she said tightly. "The veil weakens only when the Reaper's power swells. Marik does not fit the signs. Someone else does."
Grodak frowned. "If not my father… then who?"
"I sent spies. Searchers. Scriers." Xierma's voice was quick, breathless. "Someone powerful. Someone who commands death. Someone who can bend souls. My guess was a necromancer."
She stood to leave, needing to return to her tower.
But seconds later, she burst back into the room—white as bone.
"The Reaper is Grall!"
Grodak stared at her. "Impossible."
But even as he said it, the truth began sinking into the cracks of his mind.
Grall had changed. Grown. Darkened. His eyes—if they could be called eyes—saw things no mortal should ever witness.
"What proof?" Grodak demanded.
Xierma swallowed hard. "Fluffles went to the mural—the one Grall used to move through time. He saw Grall leaving it. And behind him—" She hesitated. Breath shaking.
"Behind him, the mural's image had changed. It showed the Reaper's shadow wearing Grall's shape."
The room fell silent. The air felt colder than death.
Grodak felt something unseen clench around his heart.
If Grall was the Reaper…
Then the world had far less time than they feared.
"So?" Grodak's voice slipped into something low, raw, and dangerous—like stone grinding over bone. He did not raise his voice, but the air around him seemed to darken, tightening like a fist. The idea of anyone spying on his family made something ancient and violent coil inside him.
"He probably just went to see what Fluffles saw. Nothing more."
Xierma's face said otherwise.
Her usually cool, calculating composure was gone—replaced by something tight and brittle. Not fear of Grodak, nor even fear of the Reaper… but the kind of fear a scholar feels when the truth she spent her life avoiding suddenly bares its teeth.
"That's not all," she whispered. Her voice trembled despite her attempt to hold it steady. "As he left the mural… he spoke of the Reaper."
Grodak opened his mouth, but Xierma silenced him with a sharp, warning glare.
"I do not mean how you or I speak of the Reaper," she continued. "He spoke with… ownership. He kept saying I and me, with no hesitation. And then—" She swallowed hard. "He declared he had once been the Reaper."
Grodak felt something cold and heavy settle in his stomach. The world seemed to tilt—walls bending, shadows stretching, as if reality itself recoiled.
"How could he be the Reaper?" Grodak murmured. "He's a God. The God of Death. He earned that power by killing the previous one."
"I don't think he gained godhood," Xierma said, the pieces falling together in her mind like the clicks of a closing coffin. "I think that near-death experience—when he fought the previous Death—awoke something already inside him."
A long silence.
Grodak felt the weight of his sword like an anchor dragging him downward.
"Then how did he find out?" he asked, though his voice sounded strangely distant.
"I don't know. Maybe he always knew. Maybe—"
A new voice cut in, soft, cold, and horrifyingly familiar:
"Good guess… but wrong."
They turned.
Grall stood behind them, half in shadow, half in torchlight—as if the room itself couldn't decide whether to claim him or reject him. His eyes were hollow, ancient, and exhausted in a way that made Grodak's skin crawl.
Grodak surged to his feet, blade sliding free with a metallic snarl. Instinct drove him—not hatred, but terror. Terror of losing the one person he trusted more than himself.
"Is this true, Grall?" Grodak demanded. The words caught in his throat. "Are you… the Reaper?"
"The Source says I am," Grall answered. "The gods say the same."
He did not move. He did not raise his hands. He simply existed, and that alone twisted the room into a place of dread.
"But I have no memories of being him."
"Then how did you find out?" Grodak's grip shook around his sword hilt.
Grall's gaze drifted past him, unfocused, lost in horrors Grodak could not see.
"When the knight killed me in Darkwater… the Source dragged me through the void." His voice cracked—not from emotion, but as though his throat remembered screaming. "It told me… what I was. What I am."
Silence suffocated the room.
It felt like the pause before the world ended.
Then—footsteps. Rapid, panicked.
Grall flinched.
"I should go."
He dissolved into shadow, slipping into the Shadow World with an unnatural fluidity—like smoke fleeing a flame. Grodak reached out instinctively, pulling at the tether that should have let him follow his brother into the dark—
It snapped.
Blocked.
As though something far older than Grall had wrapped its claws around him.
Before Grodak could understand what that meant, Adrian crashed through the door, breathless and pale.
"The spirits—" he gasped. "The spirits of the dead are walking the world."
Grodak stared.
The room seemed to tilt colder by several degrees.
"The veil has weakened," Xierma whispered, horror dawning. "Weakened enough for them to appear."
---
Grall
Grall fell to his knees the moment he touched the gray sands of the Shadow World.
His hands shook violently.
Not from fear of Grodak.
From fear of himself—the realization that every breath he took, every step he walked, seemed to unravel the boundary between life and death.
The fog-drenched landscape stretched endlessly. Shadows skittered at the edge of sight—some clinging to old memories, some clinging to him. All watching.
All waiting.
He found Wreag training the dead in silence near a broken shrine of bones.
"Wreag," Grall's voice cracked. "What do I do?"
Wreag turned slowly, reading the horror etched on Grall's face. Something softened in the ancient orc's eyes—sympathy, perhaps, or resignation.
"You forget who I am," Wreag said gently. "I am Talengar reborn. I hold all his memories. Including the ones of you… before you were you."
Grall winced.
Talengar had known the Reaper. Had feared him.
"The only being alive who understands what you are capable of is me," Wreag continued. "And as long as you do not go mad… the world may yet survive you."
"The others won't believe that," Grall whispered.
He didn't expect Wreag to answer.
He didn't wait for one.
Grall stepped through a self-made crack in the Shadow World—and emerged into a place of painful beauty.
Leah's grave.
He removed his helmet and placed it beside the marker, sinking to the dirt. Tears fell freely, darkening the earth.
"Hi, Leah," he whispered. "I miss you… my soul."
Footsteps approached.
A hand—cold, gentle—touched his shaking shoulder.
"I'm here, my love."
Grall froze.
His head rose.
Leah knelt beside him—perfect, familiar, wrong.
She shimmered like smoke shaped into a woman. Her smile was soft, her eyes full of love—but her edges flickered, as though reality struggled to hold her.
"No," Grall croaked. "No—you should be beyond the veil. You shouldn't be here."
"I came because I could," she said. "The veil weakened enough for me to—"
Her sentence ended in a strangled scream.
A demon ripped into existence behind her—skin like molten pitch, jaws splitting too wide, claws stretching impossibly long. It grabbed her hair, yanking her back like prey.
"You'll make a fine snack," it growled.
The claws descended.
Her head fell.
Her soul flickered like a dying flame.
"NO!"
Oathbreaker roared as Grall struck—but the demon vanished, leaving only silence.
Only absence.
Grall stared at the ground where she had been.
Then something inside him broke.
His scream tore through the Shadow World—raw, inhuman, a sound meant to unmake creation. Power burst from him like a shockwave. Plants blackened. Animals dropped lifeless. The earth itself recoiled and died.
And the power did not stop.
It surged outward, reaching into the living world.
Killing whatever it touched.
The Reaper had awakened.
And madness—final, irrevocable madness—had taken hold.