Two days before ritual completion.
Storm clouds hung over Markand like a held breath, pregnant with static and silence. The city, once bustling with trade, was now a skeleton of curfews and patrols. Solholme's banners fluttered in every ward, and soldiers marched the cobbled streets with cold efficiency.
In the shadowed heights of an abandoned bell tower overlooking the central square, Martin Kaiser slouched against the wall, a half-peeled mango in his hand. Sweet juice ran down his fingers, which he licked absently as his eyes scanned the chaos below.
"The Storm's Creed is well-defended," he muttered, voice low.
Hovering nearby was his contracted reconnaissance spirit—an orb of flickering blue, faintly translucent, silently pulsing. It had just returned from its sweep.
"No gaps in the perimeter," Martin murmured, squinting at the hovering glyphs the spirit displayed in midair. "No air tunnels. No subterranean pipes. Just stone, zealotry, and stupidity laced in defensive wards."
The spirit pulsed three times.
That was its code for heavy magical reinforcement. Likely a network of defense glyphs synced with the ritual. They weren't just protecting the artifact—they were feeding it.
Kaiser wiped his hand clean with a napkin, then stuffed the rest of the mango into his mouth with a satisfied grunt.
"What about Solholme?" he said through a mouthful of fruit.
The spirit projected a new image. A schematic formed in the air—glowing blue lines showing Solholme's strike team in formation, backed by private battlemages and summoned constructs. It was a fortress on legs. Clearly, House Solholme wasn't half-committing.
"Oh?" Martin sat up, sharp interest in his eyes. "So they're going all in. Just for a relic they're planning to steal from a cult they're pretending to protect us from?"
The image shifted again. A new signal appeared at the city's edge.
Martin's playful expression dropped. "Show me that last one."
The spirit zoomed in. A cloaked figure in black and gray armor, insignia of Varncrest clearly etched on each shoulder plate. Glowing gauntlets hummed with silent judgment.
"Belisarius."
Martin exhaled long and slow.
"So, the watchdog's off the leash."
The presence of a Warden—this Warden—confirmed the artifact's authenticity beyond doubt. But it also complicated things. Severely.
Kaiser scratched his neck. "Fine. I wanted chaos. Let's feed the wolves."
He stood up and walked to the edge of the bell tower, gaze fixed on the layers of city life below: bored soldiers, nervous mages, twitchy informants. They were all coiled so tightly, he could hear the breaking point in their bones.
He raised his hand and formed a quick sigil—one of his personal designs, an Ascension Feedback Loop. A dozen talismans hidden across Markand shimmered in response. Glyphs in alleyways, under benches, between stones—all part of a latent circuit he'd placed over the last three days.
One by one, the talismans ignited.
Mana spiked.
The spirit recoiled, its form fluttering violently.
Then came the divine resonance.
All across the city, invisible threads snapped into a new configuration. The air thickened with divine intent—not real divinity, but something close enough to trick the spiritual field. It mimicked the conditions of a genuine ascension ritual, siphoning ambient energy, emotions, fears, belief—all of it.
The result was a city-wide hallucination that something godlike was being born.
And it was Martin's doing.
At the Solholme command post, stationed in a converted courthouse, the ritual hit like a psychic bomb.
Mages screamed. Constructs rampaged. The leyline stabilizers snapped. Half the strike team lost control, believing they were being judged by a divine being of flame and eyes. The rest drew weapons and attacked shadows that weren't there.
A lieutenant stabbed his own superior while shouting about redemption.
At the Storm's Creed's mountain fortress, the main ritual circle dimmed.
The high priest stumbled. "What's happening?!"
"The resonance—it's being stolen!"
Their artifact—meant to channel the divine essence of their unborn god—was suddenly weaker, as if someone was draining it through a hidden siphon.
In the core of the fortress, the divine embryo—the incomplete spirit-being they hoped to ascend—began to cry in pain.
Martin smiled as the power rushed toward his lattice. He wasn't absorbing it for himself—yet. The point wasn't to become a god.
It was to frame one.
A controlled surge of god-signature power would brand him as the new source of ascension. That would be enough to panic Solholme, cripple the cult's ritual, and draw Belisarius exactly where he wanted him.
And just as planned—
The sky split.
An arc of pure mana tore through the bell tower like a god's spear.
The building crumbled in a roar of collapsing stone and steel. Martin dropped down through the dust and debris, landing on the edge of a fountain in the town square, still chewing the last of his mango.
Across the square, Belisarius stood with his sword outstretched. Energy shimmered along its length. The Compliance Gauntlets glowed a dangerous blue.
"Clever rat," the Warden said coldly.
Kaiser wiped mango from his chin. "Elegant entrance, as expected."
The crowd of onlookers—most of them still stunned by the city-wide hallucination—began to retreat as the pressure between the two mages escalated.
"You fabricated an ascension ritual inside chartered territory," Belisarius said.
"I made sure no one died," Martin replied casually. "Yet."
"You redirected divine flow. You stole resonance from an artifact under warden inquiry."
Martin smirked. "Only borrowed it. I needed a distraction."
"And you think this ends with a lecture?" Belisarius's sword shifted position.
"No," Martin said, eyes gleaming. "I think this ends with you looking the other way while I clean up everyone else's mess."
Belisarius said nothing. But the gauntlets flared—scanning Martin's words for truth, deception, omission.
And then—hesitation.
Martin noticed it. One heartbeat too long before a response. That told him what he needed to know.
Belisarius wasn't here just to retrieve the artifact.
He was here to erase a failure. To make sure Varncrest's name never came up in a noble court. He had secrets to bury—and Martin, chaotic as he was, wasn't the biggest liability here.
"You're playing a dangerous game," Belisarius said at last.
Martin grinned and raised his hands in mock surrender. "I only play when I know I can rig the board."
As soldiers rushed to contain the chaos, and both Solholme and Storm's Creed fell into strategic confusion, two things became certain:
The ritual's timeline had shifted.
Martin Kaiser had just put himself at the center of a four-way war.
And he was loving every second of it.