The world had moved on. The forest that edged the Serpent's Coil was ancient, but the paths were new, or forgotten. Kaelen knew this land. He had walked these woods with a young Prince Theron, teaching him the names of stars and the simple, elegant math of a spider's web. Now, he shuffled through the undergrowth, a grotesque parody of a man, his progress marked by the snapping of twigs under his bony feet and the low, startled cries of night creatures. He was a symphony of wrongness. Birds fell silent as he passed. The air grew cold. He did not breathe, and so the world held its breath around him. His body, his terrible new body, was a constant drain on his concentration. Without the sustaining power of life, it sought to return to its natural state of dissolution. His art was now a perpetual, low-level effort of maintenance, a tessellation of will against entropy. He was rebuilding his fortress even as it crumbled. His first need was shelter, a workshop. He could not walk into a village, not like this.
The memory of sunlight was a dull, theoretical concept; he knew it would feel like fire on his exposed bones. He found what he sought in a forgotten place: the ruins of an old observatory, a place he himself had suggested be built for a long-dead court astronomer. It was a half-collapsed stone dome on a hill, overgrown with thorny vines and haunted by the scent of damp stone and old regrets. It was perfect. Pushing through the rusted iron gate was like forcing open a tomb—which, he supposed, was fitting.
The main chamber was open to the sky, the great telescope a skeleton of rusted metal. But the lower levels, the libraries and living quarters, were intact, sealed by rock-falls and time. Here, his work began in earnest. His first project was not revenge, but reconnaissance. He needed to know the world. He needed to know what had become of Prince Theron. His magic was changed. The clean, luminous tiles of force were beyond him now. His power was drawn from the earth, from decay, from the slow, patient strength of stone and the sharp, fleeting energy of death.
He sat in the dark, on the cold floor, and placed his skeletal hands upon the stone. He focused his will, not outwards, but downwards, feeling the layers of rock, the veins of ore, the slow seep of groundwater. He began to gather materials. With a painstaking slowness that would have maddened his former living self, he collected river clay, powdered limestone, flakes of mica, and the bones of small animals.
He arranged them on the floor in a circle, not with the haste of a mortal, but with the precision of a glacier. For days, he did nothing but mix the clay and powder with water, feeling the texture, understanding its potential. He was not making a mere homunculus; he was crafting a sensor, an extension of his own perception. He began to build.
He took a bird skull, fragile and light. Around it, he layered the clay, forming a rough, small body. He used thorns for claws, chips of mica for eyes. It was a crude, ugly thing. But then, he began the tessellation. He pressed his finger—the bone tipped with a shard of sharp will—into the clay. He didn't draw a rune; he calculated a structure. He inscribed a microscopic, interconnected web of hexagons onto the surface of the clay, a network that would hold the form together and channel energy.
He infused the network with a sliver of his own awareness and a spark of necrotic force, stolen from a patch of blighted moss. He placed the finished creation on the floor and stepped back. For a long moment, nothing. Then, the clay shuddered. The mica eyes flickered with a faint, sickly green light. The thing twitched, stood on its thorny legs, and took a lurching step. It was an abomination, a handful of dirt and death given motion. Kaelen felt a distant, echoing sensation through it—the cool of the stone floor, the vibration of his own footfall. He had created his first Scout. He sent it out through a crack in the wall. Its vision was monochrome, its hearing a dim echo, but it was eyes and ears. He built more.
Soon, a small flock of his clay-and-bone spies were shuffling through the forest, their tiny, silent feet carrying them towards the distant glow of the capital city, Solaris. While they traveled, he worked on himself. His body was a liability. He needed resilience. He ventured deeper into the hills, to a place where the bones of the earth showed through. He found a seam of flint, hard and sharp. Using a stone as a hammer, he painstakingly knapped shards of it, shaping them into fine, interlocking plates. He then drilled minute holes into his own ribs, his clavicle, his skull, using a sharpened bone awl and an agony of focus. He began to suture the flint plates to his own skeleton, weaving them into a armor of black, gleaming stone.
It was a brutal, self-mutilating process, but with each plate secured, he felt stronger, more solid. He was literally petrifying himself, becoming a golem of bone and stone. Weeks later, the first of his Scouts reached the outskirts of Solaris. Through its eyes, he saw the world anew. The city was triumphant. Banners bearing the golden sun of the royal house flew everywhere. The people looked well-fed, prosperous. And everywhere, in town squares and tapestries hanging from windows, was the image of Prince Theron. But not Prince anymore. King Theron.
The Scout, hidden in the thatch of a tavern roof, listened to the talk below. The story was a masterpiece of lies. The Battle of the Sunken Keep was now a glorious victory. King Theron, then the brave Prince, had fought his way through the Horde of the Shrieking Maw after his loyal protector, the Tile Wizard Kaelen, had heroically sacrificed himself in a "Grand Dissolution," a blast of pure magic that had vaporized the enemy and given the Prince the opening he needed to strike down the Horde's chieftain and break their spirit. Kaelen, the noble martyr. Theron, the glorious hero-king. The truth curdled inside Kaelen's hollow chest. His sacrifice had not been a sacrifice. It had been a murder, repackaged as a song.
His legacy was a lie used to bolster the throne of his murderer. Through another Scout, hidden in the royal gardens, he saw Theron himself. The boy was gone, replaced by a man in his prime, handsome, bearded, radiating a confident authority. He walked with a slight, barely perceptible limp—a permanent reminder, Kaelen knew, of his "stumble" in the Keep. He saw Theron laugh, clap a courtier on the back, kiss the hand of his queen, a beautiful woman with kind eyes. He saw the adoration in the eyes of his subjects. And Kaelen understood the true depth of his revenge. It could not be a simple assassination. To kill the King would only make him a martyr, another noble figure in the kingdom's glorious history. No. He had to unmake him. He had to take the perfect, glittering lie of Theron's life and introduce a flaw.
He had to make the kingdom see the cowardice, the calculation, the betrayal that festered beneath the crown. He had to tessellate Theron's downfall, one shattered reputation, one broken alliance, one lost hope at a time. He needed to become a ghost, not just in body, but in effect. A rumor. A curse. A slow, creeping crack in the foundation of the Solar Throne. In the darkness of his observatory tomb, Kaelen the Tessellated Dead looked at the flint plates on his arms and began to plan his first, subtle move. The perfect pattern of revenge would not be built with a single, brutal blow, but with a thousand tiny, calculated pressures. He would begin with the mortar holding Theron's world together: the trust of his people. He would make them doubt.