The Aurelian Empire had been a jewel once: banners of crimson and gold waving over marble spires, the cathedral bells singing across the valleys, voices raised in praise and duty. In the greater world of five empires, each other realm claimed twice the guardians the Aurelian had; where the other empires boasted two knights each, the Aurelian kept faith with but one — a single light standing against a dark horizon. That imbalance had always been a quiet worry in council rooms and at bedside prayers. It became a scream when two of the seven world-knights abandoned their oaths and rode with the enemy.
Their betrayal was not an abstract thing. It slid through the ranks like rot, turning strategy to chaos and courage to panic. Armies that might have stood firm fractured; commanders folded into blame; villages that had once opened doors to the imperial banner closed them in fear. The war the Aurelian Empire could not afford to lose slipped through fingers that once clenched swords and prayers alike.
Kaelen Vael had been born into that weakness and taught to measure himself by codes that the world was steadily discarding. A low noble, he had been raised on duty, on the brittle poetry of honor, on the belief that a man's name could be his shield. He loved his fiancée the way a sun loves the dawn — not with calculation but with the simple faith of youth. The promise between houses, the engagement that should have meant alliance and steadiness, had felt like a sure thing until ambition and appetite revealed their true faces.
It began small and private, as betrayals so often do. His brother, who had sat beside him at table since childhood, smiled with the practiced warmth of a man who knows how to take. In the evenings, his brother's laughter lingered too long in the rooms where Kaelen had once believed he belonged. Whispers targeted Kaelen's engagement with soft poison — the kind that slides between two people and corrodes trust until the structure collapses. Then his brother offered the woman the promise Kaelen had offered in earnest: power, excitement, the whispered glamour of a rising house.
When she consented, when she let herself be led away from him, it did not arrive as a single blade. It came as a thousand small cuts: a look avoided in court, a letter unanswered, a conversation stopped mid-sentence. He watched her turn, the gesture a simple bow rather than the violent rupture he might have expected. She accused him later with a voice that was careful and clean, voices that tore a man's life away in the court like a well-ordered execution.
It was not just that she left him. She accused him — of a crime so brutal in accusation that even the rumor could fracture a man's standing among his peers. The accusation of rape came wrapped in the kind of performance meant to be believed: tears not so many as to seem theatrical, a trembling lower lip rehearsed for sympathy, and the slow, measured testimony that crushed his protest before it could find purchase.
But betrayals seldom walk alone. A friend — a man Kaelen had bled beside and trusted with his life — bent the dagger into his sleep. Late one night, when the house was soft with the kind of quiet that makes a man loose with private thoughts, the friend slipped something into Kaelen's drink. It was not a thing that killed, but a thing that did what cowards want most: it left a man naked before worse fates. The drug took the edge from his muscles, rolled the world around him into glass. He woke into accusation and a public nightmare, his mouth dry and his limbs heavy from the powder's embrace.
The friend later smiled in the corridors, eyes glancing away when Kaelen met him. The man's hands were quick to offer explanations that were no more than warm lies. "You were found outside the guest chambers," he said once, a practiced look of concern on his face. "You were drunken and incoherent. They… they thought—" His voice slid off. A hand laid on Kaelen's shoulder then, the kind of gesture that belongs to a brother-in-arms. But the hand was hollow. The friend's betrayal was not a single act of malice; it was quiet, complicit, businesslike.
There is an evil the world has always known: the cruelty of family when honor is broken. Kaelen's father was no tyrant by nature — he had commanded respect for years, his voice a guide in council and at table. But the father's love, when mixed with fear for house and reputation, curdled into something bitter and precise. He looked at Kaelen with an expression that contained all the old warmth wrapped in ash.
"You shame our line," his father said, as if recitation of the family's honor could somehow stitch the wound. "There must be consequence, so others see the price of weakness." He spoke of duty as if it were a recipe, step by step, not a man's ruin.
Kaelen had expected disowning, or cold silence. He had not expected cruelty that tasted ceremonial. When the father ordered the punishments delivered, the men called the ritual to the inner courtyard and brought iron and oil, the implements of a justice he had never thought his blood would wield against him.
"Please...father listen to me I didn't....do
It I swear by the name of the goddess
....father I swear to you"
His words never change the face of his father
Kaelen's protest was a small thing in the echoing stone.
He had expected fury and a swift end;
pain, he knew, could be had. He had not expected the slow, swallowing agony of it.
The hand — his sword hand — first. They bound him and placed a whetstone on the table.
" father no ...not my hand ...please not my hand ahhh. Haaaaaaaaa"
The father's men held the leather straps tight while the blade's edge caught in the light like a promise.
The world narrowed to one thin, hot line of feeling. When the knife came down it was precise, clinical. There was a popping, a nauseating wetness
and a horizontal scream
left Kaelen that tore at the chest like something animal.
It was a sound full of pure, animal surprise: that a life could be rearranged in a heartbeat. He heard his own voice and barely recognized its shape.
They did not wring his hand to stop the blood.
His eyes full of hatred to he's loking at him with a intense of killing
They wrapped it and bound it away. He tasted iron and something like regret somewhere very far off.
His eyes full of hatred to he's loking at him with a intense of killing
But to his surprise it's not over yet
The eye followed.
His father's decision was not a matter of superstition but of spectacle.
To mark Kaelen as marked, to ensure any sympathy was tempered by a visible sign of shame.
They dragged a brazier close and tilted it until the oil burned like daylight.
Looking surprise kaelen try to run the guardians give him a good punch in his face making his hand bleeding more
He try to scream but they put a some clothes full of his blood into his mouth
Kaelen tasted smoke first, a hot salt at the back of his teeth. Then the flame bit. He felt the heat as if it were crawling into his skull, and the world evaporated into a tunnel of pain.
He screamed again — longer, higher, a broken metal note that answered off the courtyard walls. Men turned away; some swore softly as if to block out a memory they could not unmake.
The flames took the sight from his right eye, and when the heat ebbed it left a blank, wet blackness where color had been. He blinked, twice, thrice, trying to find sight and finding nothing. Panic swelled, hot and thin, a bubble reaching for air.
His father watched without flinching.
"You will go to the front to wash your honor
And ours too,"
the old man said when at last the ritual had finished. His voice was even, the sort of voice used for pronouncing debts and inheritances.
"You will serve as lesson and spear. Go and let the world finish what shame has started."
Kaelen's knees buckled beneath him. Blood slicked the stones and dribbled down his arm, his lip split into a bitter smile of disbelief. His breath came in ragged pulls. Rage tried to rise, a feral hot thing, but below it there was a deeper animal — a stunned, coiling grief that wrapped its tail about his gut. He tasted everything: betrayal, iron, oil, the faint curl of ash from the brazier. He had been punished for something he did not do, stripped and mutilated by his father to service an idea. The courtyard's air hummed with the distant sounds of the empire's collapse: bells that sounded like a dirge and the far-off rumble of marching.
Men took him to the stables and clothed him in plain things. He could not see depth with one eye; shadows swallowed edges. Where once he might have met a man's gaze and judged his truth, now he had to study pockets of light and guess. That loss of vision, more than the hand, felt like a theft of the world's detail: he could no longer read the small betrayals hidden on a face, the micro-tilts of a mouth that signal lying or pain.
They bound his right forearm in a crude wrap and left him to the stable straw. They had not cut his life out entirely; they wanted him to march. The wound throbbed with an inner pulse, red and complaining. The courtyard smells swam in his head: blood, woodsmoke, the stale tang of fear. He lay there and screamed until his throat soured, not begging for mercy but for anyone who might lift him from the pit they had pushed him into. No one came.
When the day opened, they dragged him to the hall. The woman whose accusation had led to this — now allied with his brother, hands folded in the quiet couture of the noble — refused even to look in his direction. She may have felt triumph; she may have clenched a private disgust at what was left of him. He could not know. People in the hall murmured: some with pity, many with contempt. A few averted their faces — not in shame but in the practiced manner of those who do not wish to be implicated.
Before they sent him away, he found his friend among the ranks, the one who had spiked him and manufactured a nightmare. The man's gaze skimmed past him like a wind that would not stay. Kaelen's voice, thin as the breeze between columns, reached for him.
"Why?"
"What did I do"
he whispered. It was not a demand that could be enforced. It was a raw, human sound grasping for the truth.
The friend turned, for a heartbeat, and something like regret trembled in the man's jaw. He did not speak. He offered no apology and clasped a hand in formal salute before leaving. It was the smallness of that omission that struck Kaelen with more force than a blade: the refusal to own what he had done.
The friend's silence was the covenant between the betrayers.
They led him to the outer gate with the rest of the convicts and conscripts bound for the front. The sky above was the color of old pewter. Cities smoldered on the horizon like slow, malevolent stars. Soldiers fell into lines, and Kaelen shuffled with them, each step a time-split of memories.
He felt every eye on him, every whisper like a weight at his back.
Children peered from shuttered windows; an old woman spat at his boots and muttered a prayer that was no comfort.
The world had no room for him, and he wore the community's judgment like a taut rope around his chest.
As the column creaked forward, as the road opened into a ribbon of dust and ruin, something cold settled in Kaelen — not healing, not the calm of surrender, but a frost of clarity. Rage, once a red heat, cooled into something harder and more precise. The sound of his own ragged breathing became like the rhythm of a drum. He tasted the bitterness of betrayal like an omen.
A soldier near him muttered about the defecting knights and how their desertion had hollowed the empire's backbone.
Another spoke of a burned town and children with no mouths left to cry.
The news stitched into Kaelen's shame, layered upon his wounds.
The betrayals were not only private; they were cosmic, and a man's shame here felt like a nation's, rolled together and ground into the dirt.
They turned onto the main road that would lead to the frontline.
The wind tugged at the torn banners above them, whispering with the kind of voice that announces funerals.
Kaelen pulled his cloak closer, imagining the invisible line where he might have been safe and finding nothing but further emptiness. He could not see the future;
he could only watch the road stretch and think of the faces that had made him what he was — stitched now into a tapestry of treachery.
When the line slowed into a march, and the sun cut through the clouds in a thin, bitter blade, Kaelen shut his remaining eye and let the silence gather. Then, in a voice that was not quite strength and not quite madness, he said, speaking not to any man in particular but to the road and to the ashes of all it had taken from him:
"I WILL KILL EVERYONE
I WILL MAKE A GENOCIDE IN
IN THIS EMPIRE "
It was not a promise sweet with victory or adorned in heroics. It was an oath made in the raw place where a man's life has been unmade: a vow that came out of hurt so deep it turned into a dark currency.
It was not even a carefully chosen sentence — more a spasm of want, an echo of pain shaped into threat.
His syllables were coarse, edged with the rasp of pain, and they snagged the air between the marching men.
Some heard and looked away; some stiffened; others pretended not to notice. For Kaelen, the words landed like a stone thrown into a deep well: the ripples would not be seen for a long time, but they would not stop.
And so the column moved on, over broken bridges and charred villages, across the scarred expanse where the empire bled. Kaelen marched with them, limp and half-blind, and the road swallowed his footsteps. Behind him were the halls that had birthed betrayal; ahead was a battlefield that had been called a sentence. There was no redemption here yet, no system stirring in the dark. There was only the slow, grinding machinery of war and the heavy, private hatred of a man who had been emptied.
The frontline waited like a closed mouth. Kaelen kept his vow inside him — small, hot, and dangerous — while the world closed around him: the sky, the road, the men whose names he would not learn. The road ended not with salvation but with the inevitable: ash, blood, and the distant roar of an enemy that required no invitation to kill.
He walked on.