Kael lurched through the obsidian wastes, his body stitching itself together with grotesque efficiency, muscles fusing crooked, his missing eye sealed under a web of blackened veins.
The crown-arm thrummed, its whispers a language that turned his saliva to acid. Behind him, the Plague Barrens seethed, the Saint's laughter shattering like dropped glass across the dead horizon.
"You look like shit."
His arm sneered.
Kael spat out a tooth.
"Feel like it too."
Ahead, the Whispering Caves gaped, a jagged maw in the cliffside, exhaling fog that stank of battlefield iron.
The caves weren't stone. They were alive.
Veins pulsed through the walls like buried serpents, each throb synced to Kael's stumbling heartbeat. Above him, rows of teeth clattered together, a locust-hum of enamel on enamel. The air clung thick, iron-rich blood and lightning-strike ozone, the stench of something divine rotting.
Then the walls spoke.
Vorthax's voice oozed from the flesh, dripping with the same smug malice as when he'd haunted Kael's dreams:
"Little assassin. You can burn keeps, flee saints… but you'll never outrun me."
A wet, muscular chuckle.
"I'm in your bones now."
Kael slammed his fist into the wall. Flesh gave way like rotten fruit, spraying blackish fluid.
"Shut. Up."
The cave laughed back, the sound vibrating up through his boots, a chorus of voices he'd heard before. Some his own.
Deeper in, the tunnels opened into a chamber of mirrors, except they weren't mirrors.
The tunnels spat him out into a cavern of frozen time.
Not mirrors. Not memories.
Splinters of his past, screaming on loop in jagged glass.
* * *
The Woman He Forgot
Lira. Silver-eyed and blade-balanced atop the cathedral roof—she was the assassin who had forged him into a weapon.
Memory: Her dagger flashed toward his throat—not to kill, but to erase. The Church's brand burned on her wrist as she struck.
The Taste of Citrus
A poisoned orange—or so he'd thought. The night he fled, she'd pressed it into his hands, its segments glistening like false promises. It wasn't poison—it was a memory suppressant.
Revelation: Not poison. A mercy. The citrus was laced with forgetfulness, a kindness to erase what he'd begged her to make him forget.
The Truth About Vorthax
The Demon Lord never cursed Kael.
Memory: A blood-ringed altar. Kael on his knees, throat raw from screaming—not the demon's name in defiance, but in worship. The power wasn't taken.It was begged for.
* * *
Kael smashed a fist through the glass.
"Lies."
Shards bit his knuckles, but the images kept playing.
His arm twitched, voice unusually soft:
"Are you sure?"
New glass hissed with fog.
A reflection stepped forward, not trapped. Free.
Lira smiled, her real body leaning against the cave wall behind him.
"Hello, Kael."
She was real.
Lira stood before him, but not the ghost of his shattered memories.
Her right arm was gone, replaced by a Church-tech whip, serpentine and hissing, its hydraulic veins dripping venom.
No eyes. Only hollow sockets weeping thick, black fluid like corrupted oil.
But her smile.
That hadn't changed.
"The Church sent me to clean up their mess,"
She said, the whip coiling at her feet like a starving beast.
"You're surprisingly hard to kill."
Kael's pulse throbbed in his ruined eye.
Choices flickered:
Fight, but she had carved his skills into him. She knew every counter before he did.
Run, into the cave's gullet, where the whispers had teeth.
Talk, and risk the past swallowing him whole.
He chose the knife he could no longer stab with.
"Why'd you do it?"
Lira threw her head back and laughed, the sound wet, ruptured, something gone in her throat.
"You really don't remember?"
She leaned in, black tears splattering his boots.
"You begged me to."
* * *
The memory detonated behind his eyes.
Young Kael, naked and screaming, knees grinding into cold iron as the Church's chirurgeons peeled back his skin. Their scalpels dripped holy water, but the demon flesh they stitched into his muscles squirmed like living rot.
Lira, then still whole, cradled his head. Her thumb split open a citrus rind, pressing the juice-slick wedge to his lips.
"Eat this,"
She whispered, her Church-brand pulsing.
"Forget. Survive."
From the shadows, Vorthax's voice curled around them:
"You'll come back to me."
* * *
Present Kael gagged on the truth.
"I was their experiment first."
Lira nodded, black tears etching lines down her face.
"And you're still their weapon."
Her whip gestured to his crown-arm.
"This? The Keep's shard? All steps in their plan."
The cave convulsed. Walls split, oozing blood that stank of the Barrens. Vorthax's laughter vibrated through the stone, through Kael's bones
"Enough stalling."
"Kill her."
Lira's whip snapped forward.
And Kael chose.
Not death.
Not mercy.
The option to use the crown: To rewrite her memories like they did his.
The crown screamed awake, violet-black tendrils erupting from his arm and spearing into Lira's temples. Her shriek wasn't human, it was the sound of a mind being peeled open, memories unspooling like gutted wire.
The cave answered in kind.
Ceiling teeth rained down.
Vein-walls ruptured, spraying arterial filth.
Lira collapsed, twitching, as the crown stitched new lies into her skull.
* * *
While Kael's own stolen past flashed behind his eyes:
Her hand on his cheek, pre-whip, pre-Church.
"Remember this instead."
and the crown obeyed.
* * *
Kael staggered into the light, alone, Lira's stolen memories writhing in his skull like eels
The Church's true heart, a black-steel cathedral buried in the Glutton's Maw. The Hollow King - Veyra's sovereign, his armor stitched from dead godskin
And her last whisper, already decaying at the edges
"The crown isn't yours. It's his. And he's waking up."
His fingers brushed the crown.
It sat inert, cold as a butchered thing, then pulsed once, a sluggish, alien heartbeat.
Not his rhythm.
Kael huffed a laugh, blood dripping from his split lip.
"Yeah. I figured."
Somewhere in the Maw's depths, something answered.
* * *
The sky was a weeping wound above the Midnight Citadel.
Kael stood at the edge of the floating fortress's shadow, his crown-arm throbbing in time with the hum of the Citadel's engines. Lira's memories had led him here, to the heart of the Church's abomination factory. The air stank of ozone and burning meat.
The Citadel was not just steel and stone. Its ribs were strung with glistening god-flesh, pulsating veins of celestial muscle grafted onto the hull. Chains of screaming prisoners dangled from its underbelly, their bodies twitching as they were hauled upward into the birthing chambers.
Kael's breath fogged in the cold.
His arm whispered,
"This is suicide."
He stepped forward anyway.
They caught him within minutes.
Cyborgs with faces of polished bone dragged him through corridors lined with glass vats, each one holding a half-dissected saint, their organs replaced with shards of dead stars. The stars pulsed, whispering in languages that made Kael's teeth ache.
The throne room doors opened with a hiss.
The Hollow King sat on a dais of frozen blood, his mask a crucified sun, golden spikes driven through a metal disc. His voice was a chorus, layered with the screams of the grafted.
"Kael Arcanis,"
He said.
"You've come to volunteer?"
Kael spat blood.
"Here to kill you."
The King laughed. Then he removed his mask.
Beneath it was Kael's face, rotted, hollow, with Vorthax's burning eyes staring back.
The King rose, his robes parting to reveal a chest split open by a second mouth. The teeth were made of blackened scripture.
"You still don't remember,"
He said.
"This is the seventh time you've stood before me."
"The seventh time you've fought."
"The seventh time you've lost."
Kael's crown burned, flooding his skull with visions:
A thousand wars. A thousand graves.
A thousand versions of himself, each one merging deeper with Vorthax.
The King gestured. The walls split open, revealing the Citadel's heart, a miniature Soulwell, its core a beating black star.
"Break it,"
The King dared.
"Again."
Kael moved.
The cyborgs lunged, blades singing. He twisted, his crown-arm lashing out, ripping through augmetic flesh like parchment. One soldier's face caved in under his fist. Another exploded as Kael drove his shard into their core.
The King watched, amused.
Kael reached the Soulwell. The star inside shrieked, its light peeling back his skin. He didn't hesitate.
He slammed his arm into the core.
The Citadel screamed.
God-flesh melted. Cyborgs unraveled. The King's body dissolved into smoke, his laughter lingering.
"You never learn,"
He whispered.
"The cycle continues."
The floor gave way. Kael fell through raining steel and dying light, the crown searing into his skull.
As the Citadel crashed into the earth, one thought burned brighter than the pain:
Find the Obsidian Desert.
That's where they buried the first war.
Somewhere in the smoke, Lira's voice echoed:
"Hurry. Before the Shattered Realm wakes."