Step by step, he approached the towering structure, his sharp eyes tracing its knife-edged silhouettes from afar. The training that made his sword a whisper in battle sharpened his sight as well; filigreed reliefs, runic seams, and the unsettling geometry of the place resolved long before most men could have picked out a doorway.
Only when he neared did the temple reveal its true scale. From a distance it had been a shape on a horizon; up close it was a mountain pretending to be a building.
Renher felt small—no weakness in the feeling, merely a fact to be filed away. He paused at what should have been the front entrance and, to his left, caught the subtle angle of a hidden stairwell set into the elaborate exterior, a ribbon of stone fifty paces off that no sane architect would bury unless he wished it unseen.
He took a single step.
Terror struck like a hammer to the chest.
His body locked. Breath thinned. Somewhere, a heartbeat pounded—not the temple's, not the world's, but his own, made enormous. Time lifted its face and stared down at him, expressionless, while every buried thing in him rose at once.
The pain of never seeing Kaileen again.
The failure of orcs left alive.
The childhood night without a mother and the cold that followed.
The years of training carved into bone and sinew.
And worst of all, the blank page of the unknown.
It would have been easy to drown there. He had not lived his life that way. Renher dragged a deep breath into a tight chest and reminded himself of what he knew to be true: the present existed, the blade had weight, duty had teeth. He had never been a man to live in graves or mirages.
A leader.
A warrior.
A man with responsibilities he had accepted and burdens he carried willingly.
The fog receded as if some invisible hand drew a curtain back. His muscles loosened. The terror did not vanish, but it stepped aside to let him pass.
The corridor beyond waited: a throat of darkness leading to a hovering something at the far end. It was the sort of distance that refuses to resolve—always a few paces farther than the foot can make. The object itself was a sphere and not a sphere, liquid and not liquid, darkness that refused to be shadow and yet swallowed every shadow touching it. The air around it hummed wrong, a sound more felt than heard, and whispers rode that hum—multitudes speaking a language his ear did not know but his instincts recoiled from.
Renher's fingers twitched. A swordsman's hand will always prepare to answer a question the eyes cannot yet see. He glanced back to orient himself—and felt his stomach drop.
The staircase stood behind him. He had no memory of climbing it.
Had the temple drawn him forward? Or had he come here willing and only forgotten the price? Questions without answers, and so he did what he always did: he moved. Boots clicked once, then twice, and each sound was swallowed the instant it was born.
The distance did not close.
The air changed.
Pain exploded at the base of his skull, bright as iron and absolute. The floor caught him without ceremony. Limbs refused command. The instinct to fight roared up; the body did not answer.
What attacked me?
The thought had nowhere to go. He lay there, emptied by the pain, and dragged his gaze back to the thing at the corridor's end. Something moved inside the sphere—no, it exhaled. A thread of smoke darker than the dark around it uncoiled and drifted outward like a living shadow.
The world dimmed. His breath slowed to the pace of regret. Light left the stone. Just before it did, a face rose in him—Kaileen—warmth as cure, a memory so solid it hurt.
Darkness took him.
It could have been a breath. It could have been a century.
A lightning jolt tore through him.
Renher inhaled hard, slamming upright on instinct, a hand snatching for a sword that was not in his hand, eyes hunting the room for angles and exits. The canvas ceiling swam into focus, the cross-beams, the smell of oil and leather and men. His blade lay on a folded cloth beside the cot, ordinary as sunrise.
Not a temple. A tent.
Too many people. He felt it first in the way space pressed on him, then saw them: Alison, Thymur, the archer and lancer captains, several aides. Relief washed through the room like air after rain.
Alison—closest to him—set both palms to Renher's forearm. A soft gold glow flared, and Renher felt mana pour into him in steady, practiced measure. The archer and lancer captains joined a beat later, their flows weaving with Alison's.
"Enough," Renher said, the voice quiet and cutting. "Stop."
The light guttered out. Silence took its seat. When he turned his head, Thymur was there to meet his eyes, calm as polished stone.
"You fell asleep," Thymur said, mouth quirking. "And refused to wake."
Renher didn't smile. He didn't remember the moment of sleep. He remembered a corridor that moved while he stayed still. He remembered whispers and pain and smoke. His fingers gripped the edge of the blanket as if it were the lip of a cliff.
Thymur read the look and filled the room with information instead of comfort. "We intended to march before sunrise. When you didn't appear, we searched the barracks and training yard."
Alison stepped in, voice steady, hands betraying the nerves his face would not. "I thought you'd overslept. Went to your tent. Called you. Nothing." He let out a breath through his nose, sharp. "I left. Came back to duty. Then your bird found me."
Renher lifted his gaze toward the entrance. Horus crouched there, still as iron, eyes on him with that unnerving avian intelligence.
"He would not leave," Alison said. "Kept screeching, circling. Dragged me back here. You were out cold."
"We tried waking you," Thymur added. "Shouting, shaking." A beat. "Fire didn't seem appropriate."
"And what worked?" Renher asked.
Thymur didn't blink. "Shock spell."
That accounted for the jolt that ripped him from the abyss. Renher's eyes found Horus again and the falcon cocked its head as though to say, Are you back now? He gave the bird a small nod: seen, understood, honored.
The memory of the corridor pressed against his ribs. Dream was too soft a word. He had bled there. But there was a war waiting, and men who needed him present.
"How long?" he asked.
"Long enough," Thymur said, which meant they had already spent time they could not afford.
Alison moved a half-step closer. "You should rest."
"We march," Renher said.
Alison's mouth flattened but he accepted the order with a crisp nod. The captains peeled off to transmit it down the chain. The tent felt wider without them. Renher stood, rolling the stiffness from his shoulders, and reached for his sword.
"Stay," he said, without looking. Thymur stopped at the flap.
A subtle twist of the wrist, a whisper of mana, and the air inside the tent thickened like water. Thymur preferred wards that did not announce themselves.
To the world, they were emperor and general. Inside canvas walls, they were boys who had not died and men who had learned to be careful with which truths left the room.
"I swept the perimeter," Thymur said. "No residue. No charm hanging in the air."
"I trust you," Renher replied, and meant it.
Thymur tipped his head. "So. You know something."
"And so does the Mage Leader," Renher said.
"Do we trust him?"
"No."
Silence settled again, not empty, merely patient.
"It wasn't a dream," Renher said finally. He didn't dress the word. "I was in a place that tastes like the underside of a grave. A temple that eats light. There was a sphere in a corridor, a… living dark. It whispered. When I turned, something struck me. I fell. Before the world went, I saw a thread of black smoke escape the sphere."
Thymur's eyes narrowed. He gave nothing else away.
"A cursed artifact?" he asked.
"Worse," Renher said. He didn't know why he was certain. He was.
Thymur paced once, twice, thoughts moving ahead of his feet. Renher could not read them—not fully. He had known Thymur since they'd broken knuckles on the same stone, and still there were doors in the man no one else got to open.
At last Thymur stopped, face gone hard. "Ren," he said quietly, "that reads like a death omen. Not a conjurer's trick. The temple could be a god's house—but the barren land you described doesn't match any god we know. That emptiness… that's a shrine to something forgotten."
"Forgotten Gods," Renher said.
Thymur's jaw tightened. "I've heard the Tower Master use that phrase. Once. He forbade questions." He drew a breath and forced the door open anyway. "The sphere at the center, fed by whispers, paired with a blow to the neck? It has the shape of a ritual. If blood is involved… sacrifice follows."
Renher ran the thought along the edges of his instincts. It fit. It also felt like a trap with a name stamped on it.
"Why me?" he asked.
"Because you lead," Thymur said. "Strike the head."
Renher's gaze sharpened. "The orcs are doing something. If they're tied to this, my… vision"—he made himself use the softer word—"is their current."
Thymur nodded once. "Before men learned breathing techniques—before Order settled into our bones—the orcs were the world's fist.
When we rose, their temples fell. Their gods were starved of worship. If they've found a way to feed those gods again…"
"Then the valley we're marching into is an altar," Renher finished.