Tashlan, The Trisoc Palace Balcony – Dawn, Year 8002 A.A.
The sun rose over Tashlan like a monarch rousing itself from uneasy dreams. Not sudden, not gentle, but a deliberate assertion of sovereignty. The first light did not so much pierce the heavens as it unfurled them, laying claim to every dome and every minaret of the palace skyline. The burnished tiles of the roofs flamed with hues of molten amber and blooded crimson, as if the whole city had been dipped in a cauldron of glowing iron. That light gave back no warmth. It was beauty without comfort, a splendour sharpened to an edge.
Below, Tashlan held its silence like a sealed urn. A city of marble arcades, tiled courtyards, and vast ceremonial roads that normally rang with mule bells, with the clatter of carts, and with the chatter of merchants, was now still. Windows were shuttered. Market squares lay barren. Even the animals—the restless dogs, the thieving birds, the restless horses stamping at their tethers—seemed to have yielded to the strange, choking anticipation.
The winds, usually a fickle and chattering companion to the city, carried none of their usual careless song. They coiled instead like watchful serpents between the stone columns and bronze gates, whispering not of play but of judgment. They seemed to wait upon one will, one breath, one word of release. It was not the hush of peace; it was the hush of waiting for something irreversible.
And from the highest balcony of the Trisoc's palace, above every other gaze, above even the wings of the wheeling hawks that dared circle the spires, the master of all Carlon kept that silence for his own.
He stood alone.
The Tracients below named him rarely and feared to do so. A name gives shape to a man, and names bind him to human frailty. But this ruler had passed beyond such things; he had become an idea, a force given flesh. Some whispered of him as the Architect, for he had rebuilt not merely cities, but the very order of the world after it shattered. Others, braver in wine than in waking hours, muttered of him as the Iron Sovereign. None dared name him simply a man.
There was little of the ordinary in the figure he cut against the new dawn. His frame, broad and dense as quarried stone, was robed not in ornament but in a robe of gold so heavy it seemed molten, the folds like slabs of frozen sunlight. The fabric did not stir with the faint wind; it hung from him with the implacability of something that knew itself eternal. His hands—huge, thick-knuckled, the hands of one who once wielded more than sceptres—gripped the obsidian railing before him. Rings adorned them, each fashioned into a serpent devouring its own tail, each stone at their crowns catching the dawn's blaze until they burned like captured suns.
He held the rail not as a man leaning, nor as one unsteady, but as a predator fastening claws to a high perch. There was in the posture not need, but ownership. The balcony did not support him—he possessed it. The city did not merely lie beneath him—it was claimed, held, subdued, as though each house and each soul were already pressed beneath the weight of his fingers.
In his eyes, though unseen by any but the rising sun, there was no wonder at the painted heavens. No pleasure in the artistry of creation. Only the weight of patience—patience so absolute it was terrifying, like the calm of a mountain before it sheds fire and stone. His stillness was not peace, but a vessel filled to its very lip with restrained eruption. Even the air was denser around him, thickened by the gravity of will.
He did not blink. He did not sigh. He waited.
It was in that waiting, taut as a drawn bowstring, that the door behind him stirred. The hinges exhaled a single sigh, wood on metal, but in the silence of that morning it sounded profane, like a cough in a temple.
The presence that entered did not disturb—it infected. Soft, measured steps, the faint scrape of claws across marble, drew nearer. Where the ruler was weight, immovable and tectonic, the newcomer was drift and seepage, a force that slipped into every crevice unnoticed, like smoke through keyholes, like venom through the veins.
The Grand Vizier.
He wore darkness not as concealment but as a proclamation. His robes were of green so deep it bled into black, as though forest shadows and midnight seas had been interwoven by patient hands. Stitched into the fabric were ouroboros sigils, serpents swallowing their own tails, so finely wrought they seemed alive, twisting when glanced at from the corner of an eye. His hood cast his face into cavernous shadow, but from within, two slivers of cold emerald occasionally flared where the dawn-light caught. Eyes not of warmth, but of precise calculation.
He did not rush to speech, for he knew his silence was itself a language. It said: I am indispensable, and I am unafraid of the pause. He came to stand just behind his master—close enough to share breath, far enough to declare reverence. Yet his stillness, unlike the ruler's, did not speak of restrained power. It spoke of listening, of plotting, of being ready to bend like a reed in storm so that others might break.
He, too, had felt the tremors. He, too, knew the world was shifting beneath them. And though no word had yet been spoken, both master and servant already shared the knowledge: a message was coming. The world itself had written it, and soon, it would be read aloud in blood and ash.
The ruler did not turn to look upon him. He had no need. He felt the Vizier's presence the way a general feels the weight of a dagger at his belt—silent, useful, deadly if turned the wrong way.
"Great Trisoc," the Vizier intoned. His voice slithered across the marble like oil poured into water—smooth, viscous, clinging to the air long after the words had been spoken. It was a tone cultivated by years of ritual and manipulation, rehearsed to perfection, as one might polish a blade not for war, but for ceremony. It carried reverence without warmth, respect without affection, loyalty without love. A prayer offered not to the divine, but to power itself.
"May your reign outlast the sun."
The words, so often repeated in courtly corridors by flatterers and supplicants, seemed frail here in the open dawn. Yet from the Vizier's tongue they bore a different weight, for he alone knew how to say them without blinking—how to shape them into both oath and threat, both incense and smoke.
The Trisoc did not stir.
He stood as though hewn from ash and flame, a colossus in gold, unmoved by the ritual offering of praise. The dawn painted him, yet did not touch him; light seemed to bend and halt at the edges of his vast frame, unwilling to cross into the gravity of his will. His gaze was still fixed outward, beyond the waking city, beyond the rolling hills and the desert plains. He seemed to see past geography itself, staring into the heart of the distant gorge where threads of his design knotted themselves into inevitability.
When at last his voice broke the silence, it was as if frost had spread over the balcony. Cold, sharp, crystalline.
"Report."
It was not spoken as inquiry, nor as invitation. It was command—the voice of one who already knows the outcome, who merely demands the universe to confirm its obedience.
The Vizier bowed, a dip so shallow it mocked the very notion of submission. His green silks whispered as he inclined his shadowed head, as though serpents stirred beneath the folds.
"The convoy has entered the Mist Corridor of Veldt's Throat," he murmured. A pause, deliberate as the drawing of a dagger, gave room for the weight of his words to settle between them. "Precisely where the White Ghost intended. The terrain narrows their path into the funnel. A corridor without mercy. There is no retreat. No escape."
The balcony seemed to tighten. Even the air braced itself, as though it, too, were one of the pawns locked in that valley.
Still the Trisoc did not turn. He did not need to. His stillness was not emptiness—it was dominion.
"And the Wolf?"
There was in those three words something different, a sharpened tone. They carried not the cold detachment with which he spoke of armies or strategies, but the precise focus of a surgeon preparing to cut. The Wolf was not like the rest. He was no expendable piece on the board. He was the variable. The anomaly. The will that bent around no leash unless it was of his own choosing.
The Vizier's hood dipped ever so slightly, and in the shadow beneath it, a grin flickered—thin, poisonous.
"Escorting it," he hissed, every syllable curling upward like smoke from a smouldering censer. "As we foresaw. He imagines himself guardian, imagining that his will contains the threat. In truth, he has bound himself to it, following it into the snare. He stepped into the web by his own choice."
A whisper of pleasure slid beneath the Vizier's tone. "His arrogance is his leash."
At that, the silence broke—not with warmth, but with a sound that chilled the very air. A chuckle. Dry, arid, and hollow, as though it had been dragged across the bones of a desert long dead. It escaped the Trisoc's throat with no mirth, no joy. It was the laugh of inevitability realized, of a line in a design meeting its perfect conclusion.
"Poetic," he murmured. The single word rolled slow, savoured, as a sculptor might trace the last, flawless curve of his creation. "The very weapon they sought to steal from us—yes, it will undo them. Their hope will be their ruin. Their shield will be the sword that severs their neck."
The Vizier leaned forward slightly, his voice falling to a whisper so venomous it was almost inaudible, like a serpent tasting the air. "And when the Wolf breaks…" His hood tilted, his unseen gaze narrowing on the horizon. "…the Panther bleeds."
It was no mere phrase, but a shard of old dogma dredged from forgotten wars. A principle carved in blood: strike the champion, and the rest crumble. Break the strongest, and all who shelter behind him fall to ruin.
The Trisoc's lips, rarely moved by mortal concerns, curved into a slow, terrible smile. The sight was more dreadful than any scowl, for it bore no hint of humanity—only the triumph of a mind that had arranged the pieces to perfection. It was the smile of a mathematician admiring the elegance of a theorem proven in fire and flesh.
"Or burns," he said at last. A word not spoken, but sealed. Not prediction, but sentence.
The balcony seemed to darken, though the sun had risen higher. The gold of dawn deepened to red, a slow bleed across the sky. Shadows stretched long and unnatural. And as the light washed across the city of Tashlan, it was no longer the color of triumph, but of sacrifice. The streets, the courtyards, the walls—all seemed drenched in the hue of fresh blood, as if the city itself had been laid bare upon an altar.
And there, above it all, its masters watched with unblinking eyes. Two figures upon a high perch, sovereign and vizier, their gazes locked not on the life beneath them, but on the distant snare where destiny would soon be tested.
The city waited, silent as prey before the strike.
The dawn itself felt like a wound that would not close.
_________________________________
Midlands of Carlon – Veldt's Throat, The Mist Corridor – Dawn, Year 8002 A.A.
Elsewhere, under the very same sun that gilded the towers of Tashlan, the Mist Corridor awoke.
But here, the light did not glory; it probed. It pressed down upon the ravine in weak, exhausted shafts, like a wounded warrior too weary to wield its own blade. The beams fractured on the mist and bled into pale ribbons, painting the canyon in diluted gold and ashen grey. What dawn had been in Tashlan—glory, proclamation, triumph—was here suspicion, half-truth, and menace.
Veldt's Throat was not a place so much as a wound carved into the earth. Some said it was the scar of titans who had once grappled here, others that it was the slow work of time gnawing like a wolf upon a carcass it would never finish devouring. Its cliffs leaned inward like jaws, great fangs of basalt and granite studded with veins of dull metal, streaked with the leprous green of ancient copper. The air did not move freely within those jaws. It coiled. It smothered.
The mist was the worst of it. It did not drift as honest fogs do across fields and rivers. It lingered. It circled. It clung to every shape and hollow, breathing and withdrawing like a thing alive, hiding more than it revealed. The soldiers whispered that the mist had intention—that it carried voices, that if one listened long enough one would hear his own name spoken back to him, soft as a lover's murmur, dreadful as a ghost's sigh.
And into that wound of stone and silver haze, the convoy had marched.
Carlon's finest—disciplined, proud, bedecked in the crimson and obsidian of empire—were now reduced to stillness. Their banners drooped like drowned cloth, their armor dull in the choking light. Where once they had marched with the cadence of thunder, they now stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blades ready but eyes uneasy. The air pressed upon them. The mist robbed them of distance, robbing them of certainty. No bugle could rouse courage here, for even sound seemed swallowed before it could spread its wings. They had the look of prey that knows it has wandered too deep into a snare.
They were trapped.
The walls around them told the story clearly: slabs of stone torn from cliff and gorge, slammed into place by force and fury. There was no grace to the spell, no symmetry of high imperial magic. The seams were raw, the edges jagged. Yet the very crudeness of the barrier made it terrifying—it was strength distilled to its simplest expression. A wall was a wall, and these walls had teeth. Forward and back alike had been sealed, as though the very earth had turned against them.
And at the heart of this stone jar, beside the object of so much intrigue, stood the Wolf.
Adam Kurt.
He was motionless. Not a statue, not a sentinel, but something older and deeper than either. His stance was not merely readiness—it was rootedness. He stood beside the humming crate as though the ground itself had claimed him, as though invisible cords stretched from his soles into the stone, binding him to this moment, this soil, this inevitability.
His cloak did not stir. Though a thin breath of air played at the mist, it seemed to dare not touch him. Around his head, the blindfold—woven with subtle runes that faintly glimmered in shifting lines of power—was alive to the unseen. It pulsed like a quiet heart, registering what mortal eyes could not: the tension of magic, the pressure of will, the vibrations of something vast approaching. His sight was not blindness but a different form of perception, tuned not to the superficial dance of color and shadow, but to the deeper movements of intention, of soul.
And something was drawing near.
It was a presence descending, not with noise, not with haste, but with inevitability.
White.
Against the obsidian cliffs, against the fanged maw of Veldt's Throat, he appeared not as intruder but as judgment. A stark, unyielding form, marked by scars that spoke not of survival alone but of conquest through endurance.
Quiet.
The descent bore no sound of loose stone, no stumble, no slip. His silence was not stealth but declaration: I do not need to announce myself. My arrival is its own thunder.
Relentless.
Every step downward, each foothold, each shift of muscle carried the same absolute gravity as the movement of glaciers. There was no hurry, because there was no uncertainty. He came because he must.
Karadir Boga. The White Storm.
The legends had stripped him to symbols—storm, avalanche, mountain-cleaver. But here he was in the flesh, and the reality was colder than the myth. His fur, pale as winter's breath, caught the fractured dawn-light in a ghostly shimmer. His body was a ledger of violence—pale scars etched like runes into his hide, horns worn down not by vanity but by war. His eyes—two golden embers, calm and merciless—swept across the valley and fixed themselves, unerring, upon the Wolf.
There was no anger in that gaze. No heat of passion, no flame of vengeance. Only inevitability. The look one gives not to an enemy, but to an avalanche tumbling down the mountain—the certainty that what is set in motion will meet its end.
Adam felt it as much as saw it through the language of his blindfold. That pressure, that glacial will pressing into the fabric of the gorge, into the marrow of all who stood within it. And in that stillness, in that recognition, a truth unfolded within him with the weight of an axiom:
There is no avoiding this.
The Ronins, the trapped convoy, the scheming hand of Tashlan, the rebellion's raw walls of stone—these were context, not cause. These were the dressing of a stage. The true heart of the moment was older than politics, older than the currents of empire. It was the Wolf and the Storm, bound not by chance but by inevitability, drawn together by threads that had been knotted long before this dawn.
Inside him, Kurtcan stirred.
The ancient presence was not a parasite nor a passenger, but the deepest marrow of Adam's being—heritage and burden braided together, wolf of wolves whose voice was older than empire. Its rising was not sudden, not intrusive, but natural, inevitable—as though the approach of the White Storm had struck some subterranean chord, vibrating through Adam's bones until the wolf within could no longer remain still.
"Karadir," Adam whispered inwardly. Not aloud, not for mortal ears, but spoken in the chamber where instinct and memory mingled with spirit. It was a thought cast like a stone into dark waters, and the ripples reached the presence entwined with his soul. "That's him. That's the signature I felt in the air back at the camp. The silence that screams."
Yes.
The answer was not syllables, but sensation. A draft of glacial breath across frosted glass. A taste of snow and iron. A certainty that did not argue, but declared.
A remnant. A blade honed on the backs of the forgotten. He carries the weight of all they could not bear.
Adam's jaw tightened. Beneath the blindfold, his eyes sought the figure—white, scarred, inevitable. The recognition settled into his stomach, cold and heavy, like a stone lowered into water. "He feels like me."
No.
The wolf's tone deepened, shifting from chill to abyssal.
He feels like you… if you were untethered. If the path beneath your feet had split and you chose the descent into the ravine, not the climb to the peak. He is kin not by blood, but by divergence. You are the echo of what he might have been—he is the echo of what you might yet become.
A silence stretched within Adam, heavier than the stones hemming them in. He felt it not as condemnation, but as warning.
If you had let go.
The thought lodged sharp in his chest. Not accusation, but possibility. A road unwalked, yet never entirely closed.
Around him, the world held its breath.
General Gon's talons grated furrows in the stone as he shifted his bulk, his armored form anchoring the defensive turtle around the black, humming crate. He barked short, guttural commands—no poetry, no flourish, just the blunt discipline of survival. The soldiers obeyed, locking shields, lowering spears, each motion stiff with the knowledge that none of it might matter. His forked tongue flickered, tasting not only mist but fear, ozone, the metallic tang of inevitability.
Across the haze, crouched low, Garo was a coil of tension. His eyes narrowed to slits, fixed on the pale figure etched into the cliffside like a ghost carved in stone. His blade lay across his knees, steady, ready—but in that stillness Adam sensed not calm, but strain, as if every sinew of the warrior was braced against the coming flood.
Then Karadir spoke.
The voice was not thunder. It was not roar. It was something deeper.
The cliffs themselves seemed to carry it, stone becoming vessel, canyon becoming mouth. Each syllable reverberated not as sound alone, but as weight. It was not that the earth respected him. It was that the earth had no choice.
"Three seconds."
No more. No less. A declaration as bare and absolute as a law of nature.
The words did not threaten. They described.
Surrender the cargo. Or be buried with it.
"One."
The syllable dropped like a hammer. Sparks flew in the silence it struck, invisible but searing. The soldiers flinched. A shield slipped, clattering against iron, the sound shameful in its nakedness. A prayer was murmured, rushed and desperate, snatched back into silence by the mist. Even Garo's grip on his blade shifted—imperceptibly to most, but not to Adam's senses. Not fear. Anticipation wound so tight it bordered on fracture.
"Two."
A pebble broke loose high above, the smallest of things. Yet its fall, click-click-click against the cliff, resounded like a herald's drum in the pregnant hush. A mount screamed—a harsh, shrill sound, too animal, too honest—and was silenced by the choke of reins.
Adam felt the world drawn taut, every breath a bowstring. The silence before the third number was thicker than iron, heavier than any wall. The mist itself seemed to coil inward, pressing close, eager, like a crowd leaning forward to hear the end of a story it already knew.
And in Adam's chest, Kurtcan's voice rumbled again—low, unyielding, not in warning but in readiness.
Steel yourself. The storm counts not to threaten, but to measure. Each number is a step toward inevitability. When he speaks the last, the world will move.
Adam's hands flexed unconsciously at his sides. His heart beat not in fear, but in rhythm with the count.
The third number hung unspoken in the mist, yet every soul felt it trembling in the marrow of their bones.
And then Karadir paused.
The third number—the final syllable of doom—hung unsaid on his tongue, suspended like a sword that refused to fall. For a heartbeat the White Storm, who had counted armies to their graves without faltering, who had spoken death as if it were a simple arithmetic, hesitated. His gaze, pale and cutting as winter's sun, sharpened. The cargo no longer filled his vision. His eyes found the lone figure standing beside it—motionless, cloaked in mist and quiet defiance.
Recognition broke upon him like a wave against stone.
The shoulders. The stance. That peculiar stillness, a silence that was not absence but gravity. It was a signature he had not seen since the days when memory itself still felt young.
"…It can't be."
The words were not intended for anyone else, but the canyon betrayed him. The gorge carried them outward, so that every soldier, every rebel, every trembling beast heard the crack in the White Storm's certainty.
And then he descended.
Not in a plunge of rage. Not with the violence of a predator leaping upon prey.
He descended.
The sheer cliff face, which mocked all others with its unforgiving angles, softened beneath his steps. The stone did not crumble—it yielded. It was as if the land remembered him, as if the bones of the world longed to carry the weight they had once borne. Hooves met rock, not with the crash of impact, but with the inevitability of frost settling on a windowpane.
When he reached the valley floor, no stone had shifted. No dust had risen. The White Storm stood among them as naturally as dawn itself.
And the world went silent.
The rebels hushed their breaths. The soldiers of Carlon froze, their shields raised but forgotten. Even the mist seemed to thin, as though it understood that its veil was no longer needed. All background dissolved into irrelevance.
There were only two.
Two figures carved against the pale morning, divided by years, by choices, by the yawning canyon of fate—but bound still by recognition.
The White Storm spoke. And those who had feared his voice for years heard it now stripped of its iron. Not commanding. Not terrible. But searching. Almost unbelieving.
"Is that really you, Lord Kurt?"
The title hung in the air, ancient, half-forgotten, spoken like a word from a dream.
Adam smiled. It was not triumph, nor cruelty, nor even joy. It was smaller, quieter—the kind of smile shared at gravesides, where sorrow and memory mingle. The weary acknowledgment of two ghosts meeting once more upon the threshold of the present.
"Karadir Boga." He gave the name back to him like a relic, dusted with reverence. "It's been a long time."
Karadir stared.
The mask of the hunter, so steady, so unyielding, cracked. The man before him was familiar, yet entirely remade. Taller. Harder. But it was more than time's chiseling—it was shaping. Not the raw block of promise he had known in the halls of Valoria, but something carved, honed, weathered. A sculpture wrought by flame and storm, polished by grief until only the essential remained.
"You've changed," Adam said gently. It was no boast, no accusation. Simply a truth.
Karadir's throat worked. His reply rasped, jagged with recognition. "So have you." His eyes roved over the blindfold, the aura of stillness that wrapped Adam like an invisible cloak. "You're… calm."
Adam inclined his head, as if conceding the point. "You're… not."
The words were neither insult nor challenge, yet they struck deeper than any blade. Karadir flinched—not outwardly, not in body, but in spirit. He closed the gap between them, his voice dropping low, urgent, raw. "Why are you here? Why stand with them?" He jerked his horn toward the caged imperials, disdain roughening every syllable.
Adam's calm did not waver. "I could ask you the same. The boy I knew fought to preserve order, not dismantle it."
"You travel with them?" Karadir pressed, ignoring the deflection.
"I escort the cargo."
Precise. Bounded. Revealing nothing more.
Karadir's jaw tightened, his horns catching the wan dawn-light like dull blades. He drew the mask back over himself, the White Storm reasserting its weight. "Then we are enemies."
Adam shook his head, slow and sorrowful. "No. Not today." His words carried the quiet gravity of a verdict already passed. "Today, we are only ghosts. Walking old ground."
A wind stirred the mist between them. The gorge seemed to exhale, carrying with it the dust of battles long past, as though even the air remembered the fields they once trod together.
Karadir leaned close, lowering his voice further, as though afraid the canyon itself might overhear. "What is in that crate, Kurt? Tell me truly."
Adam did not blink. "I don't know."
"Liar." The word rang sharp with old familiarity, sharper than any blade. "You never set your hand to something you did not understand."
"I'm not lying." Adam's tone was level, but its stillness carried a ring of truth that even Karadir could not dismiss. "I know its nature, not its name. I feel its silence. That is all."
Karadir's gaze shifted to the runes seared into the crate, his instincts bristling. He felt the way silence clung to it—not absence, but smothering. "Whatever it is, they've bound it too deep. Too quiet. That kind of silence hides only monsters."
Adam's voice softened, but carried steel within. "Or miracles."
The word struck Karadir harder than any spear. Idealism. Hope. He had buried too many to let such things live in him. His jaw clenched, and his reply came low, bitter as ash. "I have buried too many friends to believe in those anymore."
Now they stood, not a breath apart but a blade's edge. Still. Immoveable. Two pillars of fate braced against one another, prepared for what must follow.
Karadir exhaled, long and resigned. The recognition had run its course. The ghost had been named. The past could not shield the present.
"Step aside, Kurt."
Adam's answer was quiet. But it was final.
"No."
The canyon shivered at the word.
_______________________________________
He is not the man you knew.
The voice inside Karadir was not memory, nor longing, nor anger. It was the cold, tactical instinct that had preserved his life through countless campaigns in the highlands. The part of him that reduced faces to vectors, allies to variables, foes to threats.
Karadir did not answer aloud. His eyes remained locked on the blindfolded wolf before him.
No… he thought. He is something else. Not the burning, brilliant commander I remember. That fire is gone—banked, buried. In its place… a stillness. A silence too deep to measure.
I'm not talking about his calm.
The voice came sharper now, a hiss through the marrow, laced with urgency.
Look closer. Look at his shoulder.
Almost unwilling, Karadir obeyed. His gaze flickered downward, toward the place where Adam's sleeveless robe bared the fur and flesh of his upper arm. And there—etched in ink the colour of old blood and tempered iron—he saw it.
The mark.
Hazël #1.
The First. The apex. The highest place in the hierarchy woven into the very weave of the world. The brand reserved not for prodigies, not for generals, but for the singular peak of living power.
Karadir's throat tightened. His own number—#7—suddenly felt like a brand of mediocrity, an echo of what he had once believed to be strength.
Hazël #1.
The man before him was not simply Adam Kurt, not simply the wolf who had once commanded his loyalty and respect. He was something beyond allegiance. Beyond rebellion. Beyond reason.
The White Storm swallowed, the motion dry, difficult. The gorge felt thinner, the mist heavier, the very air collapsing around him. The idealistic Lord in ArchenLand was gone. The ghost was gone. In his place stood the First, and all illusions dissolved before the truth of that mark.
How strong has he become? Karadir thought, horror coiling like a serpent through his chest. What has a thousand years carved into him?
The inner voice abandoned all hesitation, all sentiment. It was cold steel now.
Considering his rank, if you do not take this battle seriously, we die here today.
The words tolled inside him like a bell struck in a tomb. No longer memory. No longer reunion.
This was no confrontation with a relic of the past.
This was survival. Against the sharpest blade in the Trisoc's arsenal. Against the man he had once followed into any fire.
And now, that fire burned against him.