The mountain trembled beneath the fury of two wills colliding.
Kael's blood-born aura flared like a second sun, casting wild crimson light across the stone cliffs above the Vault of Silence. Below him, the Purifiers surged forward, white robes billowing like the wings of death. Their blades shimmered with divine sigils, each one carved in searing light, forged to purge the unholy—and Kael, by every definition they held dear, was blasphemy incarnate.
"Stand behind me," he said without turning to Selan. The Eye of Varethos floated beside him now, orbiting his shoulder like a silent, sentient moon. It pulsed, faintly responding to his heightened emotions.
Selan said nothing, only widened her stance and began drawing sigils in the air—defensive wards shaped from shadow, layered with memory-binding charms. "You'll need time," she murmured. "I'll buy what I can."
Kael didn't argue.
The first wave hit.
Twelve Purifiers charged in synchrony, their swords forming a converging triangle of light. Kael saw it—not just the formation, but the memory behind it. One of the visions the Eye had shown him in the Vault: this same move, in a hundred timelines, always ending with his ribs skewered.
Not this time.
He pivoted low, scythe out, dragging it across the earth. Blood sprang from the rocky ground like a geyser, then hardened into a wall of jagged crimson thorns. The first three Purifiers slammed into it, impaled by their own momentum. The others vaulted over—and found Kael waiting mid-air, the scythe already turning.
He danced.
The blade became an arc of red death, severing one leg, then a shoulder, then slicing clean through a helm. Blood followed his every motion, looping around him like sentient threads, catching weapons and returning them—twice as fast.
They were trained, these zealots. Holy warriors. But Kael? Kael was something else. A myth still forming. A wound that refused to close.
Selan, meanwhile, worked from the edges, casting traps that bent perception and twisted space. One Purifier lunged for her and vanished—instantly swallowed into a memory loop, reliving the moment of their oath again and again until their mind broke under the strain.
Another charged, only to find themselves walking backward, body moving against their will. Selan's whispers echoed in their skull like a forgotten lullaby laced with rot.
Still, for every enemy they felled, more arrived. Dozens became hundreds. The hills became white with them.
And then he came.
Inquisitor Valen.
He did not charge like the rest. He walked—slow, measured, like a priest approaching a funeral pyre. His armor gleamed with immaculate purity, and in his hand was a greatsword unlike the others. It pulsed with a silver flame, its hilt etched with names: the condemned. The heretics. The ones he had personally slain.
"Kael," Valen said, stopping at the front of his formation. "You've walked far. Too far."
Kael said nothing.
Valen's voice carried the weight of centuries. "Drop the Eye. Deny the heresy. I will make your death clean."
Kael raised his scythe.
Valen nodded.
"So be it."
The world snapped.
The clash between Kael and Valen was not a battle—it was a storm given form.
Valen struck first, his blade crashing down with the force of falling stars. Kael met it, scythe and sword screaming against each other in a cacophony of sparks. The ground beneath them cracked, then shattered entirely, sending them tumbling into the crater that formed at their feet.
They moved faster than most could see—Kael shifting through blood-formed platforms mid-air, Valen blinking through divine sigils to match each angle.
Each hit Kael took burned deeper than steel—Valen's sword didn't just cut flesh, it severed sins, and Kael carried many.
But Kael fought like a man with nothing left to lose. Every drop of blood spilled became another weapon. Each wound became fuel. He reshaped the terrain with his will, walls rising from blood, spikes forming in mid-air to catch Valen's dodges.
Valen was relentless. But Kael was inevitable.
High above, Selan kept the Purifier ranks at bay with illusions and wards, but even she was beginning to tire. The Eye of Varethos pulsed harder now—Kael's strain awakening something buried in its core. It whispered—not in words, but in impressions.
Let go.
Kael stumbled. Valen's blade scraped his cheek, nearly taking an eye.
Let go. I will bear it.
"No," Kael hissed aloud. "I am the Eye. Not your puppet."
Valen raised his sword again. "You speak to the relic?"
Kael smirked, blood leaking from his lips. "It speaks to me. Because I'm the only one mad enough to listen."
He drew a circle in the air.
And bled into it.
It wasn't a spell. Not fully. It was something deeper. A glyph not written in language, but in trauma. A rune made of memory. Of loss.
His father's death. The cult. The girl. The dreams that never were.
The blood responded—not as magic, but as mourning.
A crimson pulse blasted outward.
The Eye turned black.
Everything froze.
Even Valen.
Kael stood alone in a field of statues. A moment stolen.
The Eye had paused time—but not for long.
Kael stepped forward, each movement aching.
He whispered to Valen, who stood frozen mid-strike.
"I will not become your monster. But I will be the nightmare that eats your order alive."
And with that, he drove the scythe into the ground—and released everything.
The world resumed.
Only too fast.
The Eye exploded in light.
The battlefield turned inside out.
Valen was flung backward, blood trailing from his mouth, armor cracked. The hilltop was a crater now, red and glassy from melted stone and evaporated magic.
Selan screamed something, but Kael couldn't hear.
The Eye hovered above him, dim now. Empty. Used. Or… fed?
Kael collapsed.
He awoke to Selan's voice.
"You burned it all, Kael. Even the Vault is gone."
Kael sat up slowly. The scythe was still there. The Eye now quiet. Valen—gone.
"Did we win?"
Selan didn't answer immediately.
"That wasn't a win," she finally said. "That was survival. Barely."
Kael looked at his hands. They trembled—not from exhaustion, but from something deeper.
He had seen the future.
Too many of them.
And in none of them… was he ever happy.