(Found tucked within the scorched chestplate of Commander Valen Alzarren, recovered from the edge of the Listening Green after the Battle of the Core. The pages are stained with ichor, blood, and ash. The handwriting shifts – sometimes precise and measured like a scholar's, sometimes a savage scrawl that tears the paper.)
Entry 1
Grasslands of below sky district. Just Past Dawn.
The earth breathes damp beneath my boots. Dew clings to the bent grass like tears refused by stone. I walk. One foot. Then the other. A rhythm meant to outpace thought, to silence the phantom orchestra of screams still tuning their instruments in my skull.
They call this victory.
Rigor sleeps in the healer's tent. Half his torso remade by flame and will. He smiled when they seared the wound shut. Feels like home, he rasped. Fools mistake his resilience for strength. It is exhaustion painted gold. We are both hollowed timbers, polished bright by war, waiting for the wind to find the crack.
Ahead—a shape in the retreating mist. A farmer. Face-down. An arrow, fletched with crow feathers, juts proud between his shoulder blades. His hand still grips a rusted scythe. Not a weapon. A tool. He died holding what he understood, defending dirt he knew by smell and touch.
I envy his simplicity. His defined edges. Commander Valen Alzarren walks on. The grass stains crimson where I step.
Entry 2
Sun Climbing. Flies Thicken.
Rigor asked me yesterday, eyes still clouded with healer's draughts: Was she human?
The chained girl. The one whose neck parted like silk under Ashbringer's edge.
Does it matter? I replied, the lie smooth as the steel I wield. The perfect commander's response. Calculated. Final.
It matters. It scorches.
Her cries were flawless. A virtuoso performance of despair. A demon's cruel mockery, I told myself. Rigor flinched at the sound. I saw only the potential threat, the variable needing elimination. But when her head fell… that scrap of parchment, folded tight, slipping from her sleeve like a fallen leaf… Rigor saw it. I did not. Or chose not to.
Would it have stayed my hand?
No.
Certainty is the first, most necessary lie of command. A thousand sleep safe behind Ghent's walls tonight because one girl died uncertain. Her ghost knots in my ribs, a cold, sharp stone beside the furnace of my rage. A necessary weight. Monsters carry their dead; saviors bury them deep and pretend the ground doesn't remember. Another body. An old woman, curled protectively over nothing. The flies are loud here. The air tastes of spoiled copper and opened earth.
Entry 3
Bodies Every Seven Paces Now.
A boy. No older than twelve summers. Curled around a wooden practice sword, the hilt worn smooth by hopeful hands. They gave him boiled leather scraps for armor. Ill-fitting. Useless. Farmers. Always farmers. Dragged from their fields to die for a commander's idea of safety.
Ghent kneels to my rage. They mistake its crushing weight for devotion. It is fear, pure and primal. My aura is the cage that holds back the abyss, the leash on the rabid dog of chaos. Break the leash, shatter the cage, and the city devours itself in a single, screaming night. So I roar. They kneel. Order carved from chaos with a blade dipped in terror. Is this justice? Or merely the brutal arithmetic of survival? Power is not a crown bestowed; it is a sacrificial blade you plunge into your own spirit, offering pieces of your soul so others might keep theirs whole. The boy with the wooden sword… his soul was light, unburdened. Mine? Heavy as forged iron, shaped by a thousand such sacrifices. The pile grows. A soldier this time, Ghent's phoenix insignia tarnished on his breastplate. His eyes are open, staring at the indifferent sky.
Entry 4
The Stench Ripens. Sweet, Sour, Cloying.
Demons weep. Humans slaughter. Where, precisely, does the line lie? Is it drawn in blood or intent? In the heat of battle against the Infernal Prince, the line vanished. It wore borrowed shadows like a crown, its movements a terrifying ballet of violence. Its skills were… versatile. Intricate. Almost beautiful in their layered cruelty. My fire is simpler. Brutal. Efficient. A hammer to its scalpel. The Mystical called it a "gimmick." A spark against the Prince's constellation.
It was right.
Fire doesn't discern. It consumes. Fuel is fuel. Threat is threat. So do I. For Ghent. For Rigor. For the fragile, blood-soaked idea of "us" I've welded together. But when the flames gutter and fade… what remains? Only ash, and the echoing questions no victory can silence. A sketch emerges from my restless quill – a phoenix, yes, but its wings are edged in black fire, its eyes hollow. Below it, the piled dead seem to writhe on the page. Three more corpses mark my path. Civilians caught in the backwash. A merchant, coins spilled from a slashed purse. A weaver, threads of bright wool still clutched in stiff fingers. A child, missing a shoe.
Entry 5
Shadows Stretch Long. Carrion Birds Wheel.
Rigor builds with fire – walls rise from his will, forges roar, hope sparks in the eyes of survivors. He transmutes destruction into creation. A noble alchemy.
I build with fear.
They whisper Savior as I pass through the broken streets. Their eyes, wide and white-rimmed, scream Monster. Both are truths etched onto my bones. To shield them from the wolves outside, I became the wolf within the gate. The hand that kills without hesitation. The voice that commands absolute obedience. The shadow that chokes dissent before it can draw breath. Absolution? A child's fairy tale, scented with flowers that don't grow on battlefields. There is only the next choice. The next cut. The next life weighed against a thousand others in the cold ledger of command. The ink digs deep here, tearing the fragile page. Lysara. Her name surfaces, unbidden. My daughter. Conceived in a fleeting moment of something resembling peace, before duty became a cage for us both. Does she whisper "Savior"? Or does she see only the monster, the shadow that darkened her mother's door and left only cold coin and colder warnings? Does she flinch when they speak my name? The weight of that thought is a different kind of corpse on this walk. The bodies are constant now. A grim cairn marking every stride. Soldiers, farmers, townsfolk – the distinctions blur in death. All fuel for the pyre of Ghent's survival.
Entry 6
Twilight. A Hill Crowned With The Dead.
Valen! they roar on the battlefield, a wave of sound crashing against the enemy lines.
Who answers?
Is it the boy who cowered in the root cellar, flinching from his father's drunken fury and the scent of cheap ale? The raw, terrified thing that learned early the only safety lies in being the fist, not the face?
Is it the conqueror-king who carved Ghent from warring factions, who made the city kneel not through benevolence, but through the sheer, terrifying force of his will and Ashbringer's flame? Who built order on foundations of fear?
Or is it the weapon? The Illuminated One? The living siege engine bound to a beast that tramples fortresses, the commander forged solely for war, who sees threats and variables where others see people?
Masks. Polished masks, worn smooth by necessity. Beneath them—
(A long, savage scratch mars the page, deep enough to show the parchment beneath. The next words are shaky, the ink blotted as if by sweat or… something else.)
—ash. And something else. Something that bleeds. Something that remembers a daughter's first laugh, a sound purer than any victory cheer. Something that recoiled, just for an instant, at the perfect mimicry of a sob.
I carved out my heart long ago, hollowed it to make room for the crushing weight of Ghent. Why, then, does this phantom organ still beat? Why does it hurt? The hilltop is a charnel house. I stand amidst them, the architect of their deliverance and their demise. The setting sun paints the scene in hues of blood and rust.
Entry 7
Full Dark. Cold Metal Taste on the Air.
Enlightenment. A pretty word for becoming untethered. For seeing the strings that move the puppets, including one's own. The Mystical named me "Illuminated." Light reveals every crack, every flaw, every ugly compromise festering beneath the gilded surface. To rise above humanity, to touch the realm of the Sages and the Stem… one must first cease to be of humanity. You must become the idea, the force, the principle.
Rigor understands this cost. He always did, in his quiet way. When he looked at that chained girl… he saw a person. Potential. A story interrupted. I saw a threat vector. A statistical probability requiring neutralization. A flaw in my control of the situation.
My core flaw is not cruelty, though I wield it readily. It is not rage, though it fuels me. It is Absolutism. The need for control so complete it admits no ambiguity, no mercy, no doubt. I see the world as it must be to survive – a complex machine where every gear must turn precisely, every variable must be managed or eliminated. Every death is a calculated move on a vast, bloody board. Every scream is a data point silenced. Every potential threat, human or demon, is a spark that must be smothered before it can ignite the tinderbox. Order must be absolute. Control must be total. The cost is irrelevant… until the pile of corpses stretches behind you, a shadow longer than any you cast.
(The writing here becomes precise, cold, like a tactical report)
Lysara visited the camp once. After the Skirmish at Blackwater Ford. She was ten. Her mother kept her distance, face pale. Lysara didn't run. She stood straight. But her eyes… wide, dark pools reflecting the campfires… they held no child's awe. Only a deep, chilling recognition. She saw the monster behind the title. The shadow within the savior. She saw the Absolute Control, and she flinched. Not from fear of what I might do to her. But fear of what I am. My living consequence. My heir to the ashes. She didn't speak. Just looked. And in that silence, the weight of every body on this field settled on my shoulders. She left without a word. A different kind of casualty. The hill is silent now, save for the wind sighing through the grass and the distant cry of a carrion bird. The Stem glows on the horizon, cold and beckoning. My path is littered with the dead. My legacy walks in the world, fearing my shadow.
Final Entry
Moonrise. The Stem A Cold Finger Against The Stars.
The Sages await at the summit. They offer a mantle woven of starlight and unfathomable responsibility. Do they know what they summon? Do they see the butcher, the monster, the broken engine of control? Or do they only see the Illuminated One, the necessary force?
Perhaps that is precisely why they chose me. Only the truly broken understand the desperate, brutal cost of holding fractures together. Only the damned possess the clarity to build a semblance of heaven from the wreckage of hell.
I will climb.
I will wear their light like armor forged from doubt.
I will carry the central, scorching question – my flaw, my fuel, my burden – like Ashbringer at my hip:
Is Absolute Control the only path to salvation? Or is it the architecture of the deepest, most inescapable hell?
Let the answer, whatever it may be, find me. Let it sear the masks away. Let it scorch.
(The word "scorch" is underlined three times with such force the nib tears through the parchment. The edge of the page is blackened, as if held too close to a flame.)