The battlefield wasn't real — but the blood was.
Alexis stood amid shattered spears and scorched banners, dream-bound, watching a ritual of war unfold as if it had already happened... or was destined to.
Ares loomed like a storm made flesh — bare-chested, scar-marked, eyes like burning coals. His aura was weight, heat, and violence incarnate. But he wasn't alone.
A man knelt before him, head bowed, body bruised and bloodied but not broken.
Modern combat gear hung in tatters from his frame. He wasn't praying. He wasn't begging.
He was waiting — like a weapon about to be drawn.
Ares pressed a seething gauntlet of molten iron to the man's skull. Symbols flared, ancient and obscene — glyphs of conquest, blood oaths, and wrath unchained.
The god's voice rolled through the smoke.
"You were forged in betrayal. Sharpened in silence. Tempered in blood."
"You are no servant. No vessel."
"You are WAR."
Then came the word, the brand:
"AVATAR."
And the man… changed.
Not with light. Not with grace.
With fire.
Bones cracked. Skin split. Divine rage poured in like napalm through a shattered soul.
He rose, slow and terrible, like a siege engine built from human grief and godly fury.
And Alexis knew his name before it was spoken:
WARBRINGER.
Eyes empty of anything but purpose. Breathing steady, as if killing was oxygen.
Ares stepped back — not in reverence, but in recognition. A warrior who didn't worship, but embodied.
Then, Warbringer turned.
He looked through the dream. Through time.
Right at Alexis.
Their eyes locked — even across this vision-space, across dimensions of myth.
And in that instant, Alexis felt it: the crushing pressure of a kindred, corrupted fate.
They were both chosen. But where Alexis bore the shield, Dorian Kastor now was the sword.
"I am justice," Alexis whispered.
"And I am the reckoning," came the answer, though no lips moved.
Then Alexis awoke — violently.
His bed was smoldering, sheets burnt to ash. The Aegis Shard glowed with heat and warning beneath his skin.
He stumbled to the mirror.
For a heartbeat — just one — he saw Ares standing behind him, hand on Warbringer's shoulder.
Then nothing.
The dream was gone. But the war had already begun.
The sun had barely crested the skyline of Vathys, but the city felt muted, dimmed — as if it sensed what Alexis had just seen.
He pushed open the warped wooden door of the hut he'd rented in the outer districts — a crumbling space above a forgotten shrine, shielded from scrying by old runes and salt.
His boots hit the wet pavement. The air was heavy with the scent of rain and smog, tinged now with the phantom trace of charred flesh.
Then he saw it.
Across the narrow alley, half-wreathed in mist and shadow, stood a figure — motionless, draped in a cloak blackened and torn, as if it had burned for days and refused to fall apart.
Its edges frayed like smoke. Its hood obscured the face, but something inside it glowed faintly red — not eyes, but embers.
It didn't breathe. Didn't sway.
Just watched.
Alexis reached for the edge of the Aegis Shard's will. He didn't summon the armor yet — not here. Too loud. Too early. But his senses sharpened.
"If you're selling relics, you're about to regret it," he growled.
The figure didn't answer. But it raised a hand — gaunt, skeletal, seared by divine fire — and pointed at him.
Not with threat. Not even warning.
Recognition.
"You carry the shield," the figure rasped, voice like flint on bone.
"But he carries the flame."
Alexis stiffened. "You mean Warbringer."
A crackling sound — the figure smiled, or something like it.
"Not his name. His nature."
It took a step forward. The air shimmered with heat.
"The dream you saw… was not a dream. It was a scar. Left on the weave of the world when Ares branded the flesh of a man."
Alexis clenched his fists. The Aegis whispered, ready to strike.
"What are you?"
The figure paused. Then answered with two words:
"Ash Witness."
And without warning — it shattered into smoke, ember, and echo. Gone like a match in the wind.
But where it had stood, the pavement was scorched with a glyph burned into the stone:
—THE BALANCE TILTS—
The glyph pulsed once — then faded.
Alexis stood still. Listening. Feeling the tension in the world shift like a fault line before it breaks.
Warbringer was real.
Ares had moved a piece on the board.
And the gods no longer whispered. They declared.