Far beyond Valoria's borders, in a place where the sky itself seemed to have given up and gone permanently gray, Malakar knelt on a floor of cracked black stone before a throne wreathed in shifting shadow.
"You failed," said the voice from the throne. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
"The village held stronger defenses than anticipated, my lord," Malakar said, careful to keep his eyes down. "And there is a complication. A man. Human in appearance, but his power..." He hesitated, choosing the next words with obvious caution. "His power should not exist. Not at that scale. Not in a world like this one."
A long silence stretched across the throne room, thick enough to feel.
"A man," the voice repeated, almost thoughtful now. "Describe him."
"Black hair. Red eyes. He calls himself Lukas Gigonos. He wields a blade he creates from nothing, and when I tested him, he stopped an entire wave of my creatures without visible effort. I sensed only a fraction of what he actually holds back."
Something shifted in the darkness surrounding the throne — interest, perhaps, or something closer to hunger. "Someone from Another World," the voice mused, tasting the words like they meant something. "It has been a very long time since one of those crossed into this one uninvited. Longer still since one arrived already so... complete."
"My lord?"
"Nothing you need concern yourself with, Malakar. Not yet." A pause. "Do not return to Valoria. Not directly. Watch this Lukas Gigonos instead. Learn what he wants. Learn what he fears, if such a thing exists in him at all. The Heart of Valoria can wait a little longer. This — this is far more interesting."
Malakar bowed his head lower. "As you command."
"And Malakar." The voice held him a moment longer, cold and precise. "If he truly is what I suspect he might be, do not engage him again without my explicit word. Some doors, once opened carelessly, do not close again quietly."
Malakar rose, shadow curling off him like smoke as he turned to leave, already turning over in his mind exactly how one might watch a god without that god noticing he was being watched at all.
Behind him, in the dark, the figure on the throne settled back, and for the first time in centuries, allowed itself something almost like anticipation.
Back in Valoria, at the exact same moment, the Heart of Valoria's soft light flickered once, sharply, before returning to normal — and Eldrin's hand, still hovering just above its surface, froze in place.
"Lukas," he said slowly, not looking away from the light. "I don't think Malakar is the one we should be worried about."
I already knew he was right. Somewhere out there, past every border this world had bothered to draw on a map, something far older than Malakar had just noticed my name.
For the first time since I'd stepped off that trillion-year training floor, I felt something I hadn't expected to feel again: genuinely, thoroughly curious about a fight I wasn't sure I could win in one hit.
I found, much to my own surprise, that I didn't hate the feeling at all.