The morning sun crawled over the frozen battlefield like a wounded animal, casting long shadows across graves that had no headstones. The air reeked of smoke and something worse, the sweet, cloying smell of dreams rotting in the mud. This was not just a war camp anymore. It was a graveyard where the living still walked around, pretending they had not already died.
Inside the command tent, Jarek's officers sat like broken statues. Captain Voss had not spoken in hours, only stared at his hands, the same hands that had strangled a child soldier two nights ago. A boy no older than fourteen, dressed in enemy colors, crying for his mother as he died. Lieutenant Karr kept touching the empty space where his wedding ring used to be, before he pawned it for medicine that could not save his daughter anyway. These were no longer soldiers. They were ghosts wearing armor, haunted by every choice that had brought them to this frozen hell.
At their center sat Jarek Wan, the Demon General, the Emperor's favorite monster, a man who had never lost a battle but had lost everything that mattered.
God, he was beautiful in the way broken things sometimes are. Twenty-five years old with amber eyes flecked with gold and shadow, like looking into the heart of a dying star. Women wrote poetry about those eyes, whispered his name in dark corners, created fantasies about taming the untamable. They did not know that three women had already tried to love him, and three women had died before their wedding nights, cut down by enemies who wanted to wound him in the cruelest way possible.
The world said he had killed them himself. Jarek let them believe it. It was easier than admitting the truth, that the great Demon General could not even protect the women foolish enough to love him.
Now he sat perfectly still, one hand wrapped around his father's war axe, fingers drumming a rhythm that sounded like a death march. Tap. Tap. Tap. The only sound in a tent full of dead men walking.
His other hand held a cup of tea that had gone cold hours ago. He stared at the horizon, seeing ghosts in the morning mist.
When the tent flap burst inward, everyone jumped except Jarek.
Two men stumbled inside wearing imperial gray robes that looked as though they had been pressed five minutes ago. Not a wrinkle. Not a stain. Not a single sign they had traveled through hell to get here. They moved like sleepwalkers, carrying between them a wooden box that gleamed as though it had never seen dirt.
Captain Voss's sword was halfway out of its sheath before Jarek's voice cut through the tent like ice water.
Stop.
One word, delivered so quietly it was almost a whisper. But every man in that tent froze as though he had shouted. That was Jarek's real power, not the axe, not the reputation, but the absolute certainty that when he spoke, the world listened.
The older envoy dropped to his knees so fast he nearly cracked his skull on the frozen ground. His voice shook like he was confessing sins to a priest. Your Excellency. A decree from the Divine Emperor himself.
Jarek set down his cup with deliberate precision. The ceramic clicked against the wooden table like a bone breaking. Read it.
The envoy's hands trembled as he broke the imperial seal. Golden wax crumbled away like dried blood, and the scroll unfurled with a sound like wings beating. His voice cracked as he read:
By Imperial Command: General Jarek Wan will cease all military operations immediately. The war is declared ended. The General will return to the capital and wed Princess Mira Li within one month's time. There will be peace. This is the Emperor's will.
The silence that followed was not just quiet. It was the kind of absolute stillness that comes right before an earthquake splits the earth open.
Jarek rose from his chair like smoke given deadly form. He took the scroll, fingers tracing the golden seal that had haunted his nightmares for seventeen years. The same seal pressed into the wax on his father's death warrant. The same seal that had signed the order to poison the wine cup that killed the rightful emperor and left an eight-year-old boy screaming in an empty palace.
The tent faded away. Suddenly he was small again, watching his father's funeral pyre burn against a winter sky while courtiers whispered about sudden illness and the First Emperor's kind offer to adopt the poor orphaned prince. But Jarek had seen the smile on that bastard's face as the flames consumed his father's body. Even at eight years old, he had known he was looking at his father's murderer.
The scroll crumpled in his grip. Wax bit into his palm through his leather gloves, and his blood, royal blood, true blood, mixed with the seal of the usurper who had stolen everything from him.
When he spoke, his voice was soft as silk and sharp as the winter wind. Is this supposed to be a joke.
The younger envoy stepped forward, chest puffed with imperial authority. The Emperor's will is not negotiable, General.
Jarek's amber eyes fixed on him with the intensity of a predator selecting prey. The temperature in the tent dropped ten degrees. I have buried three wives because of the Emperor's will. His voice grew quieter, more dangerous. And one father.
The officers shifted in their seats. Every man in that tent knew the story. Every man had lost his family to imperial justice. They were orphans and widows bound together by shared grief and the promise of revenge.
Jarek turned toward the tent opening, his boots crunching on frost that seemed to form wherever he stepped. Beyond the flap, he saw the ruins of the world he had tried to save. But in his mind, he saw it whole again, green fields where children played, markets full of laughter, towers reaching toward heaven instead of crumbling into hell.
All of it stolen. All of it poisoned. All of it destroyed by the same imperial seal now demanding his submission.
He closed his eyes and let himself remember his father's hand on his shoulder, his mother's lullabies, the weight of a crown that should have been his. Then he opened them again, and his face was death itself.
Tell your Emperor, he said, turning back to the envoys, that I graciously accept his offer.
The younger man blinked in confusion. You… accept.
Jarek smiled. It was the most terrifying expression any of them had ever seen, beautiful and empty, promising winter without end. Princess Mira Li will make a lovely bride. And when I am done training her, she will be the perfect weapon to destroy her own father.
The envoys fled like their robes were on fire, abandoning their wooden box in their haste.
Jarek sat back down, picked up his cold tea, and drained it in one bitter swallow. Gentlemen, he said to his officers, we prepare for peace.
They all understood. Peace was just another kind of war. They bowed and filed out, leaving him alone with his ghosts and his plans.
That was when he saw it, a shadow moving wrong across the ridge. Too fast, too fluid, leaving trails of steam where it touched the frost. The air itself seemed to scream.
Then came the sound. Not an animal, not a human, but something caught between worlds. It clawed through the morning silence and reached inside every man's chest to squeeze his heart with frozen fingers.
Guards stumbled from their posts, faces white with terror older than memory. Battle-hardened veterans pressed themselves against tent walls and whispered prayers to gods who had stopped listening years ago.
But Jarek smiled. Truly smiled, for the first time in months.
His hand found his father's axe, and something like joy bloomed in his chest.
The scream came again, closer now. Not a threat.
A greeting.
Something had finally come for him. Something that recognized what he truly was beneath all the masks and lies.
And maybe, just maybe, the morning would bring the kind of war he had hungered for his whole life.