The Obsidian Desert stretched before Kael like a sea of shattered bones.
Each step sent black grains skittering, not sand, but the ground-up remains of demons from the First War. The air shimmered with residual magic, whispering in voices that raised the hair on his neck. His crown-arm pulsed, reacting to something buried deep beneath the wastes.
"This is where it began."
The arm murmured.
"Where they sealed the Shattered Realm."
Kael's boots sank as he walked. The deeper he went, the heavier the air became, thick with the scent of old blood and scorched metal.
Then he saw it.
A spire of black glass jutted from the dunes, its surface etched with faces. They weren't carved. They were trapped.
One of them was his.
Kael dropped to his knees, clawing at the sand with bare hands. The grains cut like razors, painting his fingers red.
Deeper. Deeper.
Until his nails scraped cold metal.
A coffin.
Not just any coffin, his name was engraved on the lid in the Old Tongue.
"Kael Arcanis. First and Last of the Bloodline."
He wrenched it open.
The corpse wore his face.
Not rotten. Not decayed.
Perfectly preserved, as if death had refused to touch it.
Its eyes opened.
"You're late."
Then it lunged, dragging Kael into the coffin with impossible strength. The lid slammed shut.
Darkness.
Then, Kael remembered.
* * *
Fire raining from a sky split open.
Demons and men melting together in the heat of dying gods.
A woman with silver eyes (Lira, but not Lira) driving a blade into his chest.
"This is the only way,""The Realm must be sealed."
And then. A hand reaching through the rift.
Vorthax's hand.
Not to destroy but to save.
* * *
Kael gasped back into the present, the coffin shattering around him.
The corpse was gone.
In its place, a shard of mirror, showing not his reflection, but Vorthax's.
The Demon Lord smiled.
"They told you I was the enemy."
"But who built the cages, Kael?"
"Who locked away the Realm?"
The ground shook.
Something stirred beneath the desert.
Above him, the sky cracked and for the first time in a thousand years, the Shattered Realm breathed into the world.
The sky bled.
Kael stood at the edge of the rising ruins, his boots sinking into ground that hadn't seen light in centuries. The air tasted of rust and lightning, thick with the echoes of screams long since silenced. The Forsaken Ruins didn't just emerge, they unfolded, stone grinding against stone like the jaws of some great beast waking.
The city was frozen in the exact moment of its destruction.
Buildings hung suspended in mid-collapse.
Soldiers locked in battle, their blades eternally inches from killing blows.
A rain of arrows hovered in the air, never to land.
And at the center of it all, a tower split in half, its jagged edges framing a pulsing rift, a wound in time itself.
Kael's crown-arm burned.
"This is where they tried to stop it,"
the arm whispered.
"Where they failed."
He stepped into the ruins.
The moment his foot touched the cracked streets, the city shuddered.
Time lurched forward. The arrows fell. The buildings collapsed. The soldiers died.
And then in a breath.
The city rewound, the rubble lifting, the dead gasping back to life, their wounds stitching shut in reverse.
The battle began again.
Kael watched, numb, as the same sequence played out, the same warriors killing each other in the same ways, over and over.
One of them turned to him.
A knight in shattered plate, his face hidden behind a visor crusted with old blood.
"You're new,"
His voice was raw, as if he hadn't spoken in centuries. (Maybe he hadn't.)
The knight's name was Dain, and he remembered the First War.
"We were winning,"
His gauntleted fingers tightening around his sword.
"Until the Hollow King betrayed us."
Kael's stomach twisted.
"The Hollow King?"
Dain's laugh was a hollow rasp.
"You wear his crown and don't even know?"
* * *
A flash of memory, the Hollow King's rotting face, his Vorthax eyes.
"You never learn. The cycle continues."
* * *
Kael's teeth ground together.
"What did he do?"
Dain pointed to the split tower, the rift pulsing like a heartbeat.
"He opened the door."
The closer Kael got to the tower, the worse the crown burned.
The air thinned, his breath coming in sharp gasps. His veins blackened, spreading like cracks through his skin.
The rift wasn't just a tear in time.
It was a mouth. And it was hungry.
Dain grabbed his shoulder.
"Don't. No one comes back from that."
Kael shook him off
"I'm not no one."
Then he stepped into the rift.
* * *
The Other Side
The Shattered Realm was not a place.
It was a being. A consciousness. And it recognized him.
The ground beneath his feet was warm flesh, the sky a ceiling of ribs, the air thick with the scent of blood and burning metal.
Before him stood Vorthax, but not as Kael had ever seen him.
No crown. No armor.
Just a man, his hands stained with the same black veins that now crawled up Kael's arm.
"They lied to you,"
"I didn't start the war. I tried to end it."
Kael's pulse roared in his ears.
"Then who?"
Vorthax smiled, sad.
"You did."
The ground split open, and Kael fell into a memory that wasn't his own, one that began with a knife in the dark and ended with the world in flames.