The boy awoke to the scent of fire and death.
Smoke curled through the morning light like black silk, soft and choking. Around him stretched a battlefield carved by fury craters blistered the ground, bodies lay in grotesque repose, and weapons of twisted steel jutted up like gravestones.
He gasped. The sound startled him, raw and unfamiliar. His eyes flicked open, gray and sharp, searching.
He didn't know his name.
His head throbbed with pressure, like a distant drum pounding inside his skull. The sky above was tinted a sickly orange, clouds limping across the horizon. The sun hadn't fully risen, yet light filtered through the haze like judgment.
Ash rained down in slow, lazy spirals.
His body ached, chest tight, limbs bruised, one leg partially trapped under a cracked wooden beam. He shifted, wincing as the pain shot up his side. The beam rolled away with effort.
He sat up.
The field stretched far in every direction. Charred flags lay half-buried in the mud. Rusted armor steamed faintly in the morning dew. Some corpses looked fresh, others frozen in terror, eyes still wide.
He counted at least fifty dead within reach. Possibly hundreds beyond.
A banner whipped in the wind, still attached to a broken pike. On its tattered face was an insignia: a flaming sword behind a radiant sun. The fabric was stained dark with dried blood.
A battlefield. A massacre. But who fought?
More importantly, where did he fit in?
He touched his forehead. Blood had dried along his brow and crusted in his hair. There was no helmet, no armor. He wore a thin, ash-stained cloak over a torn shirt and travel-worn pants.
Yet… his body was trained. His muscles were taut beneath the grime. Calluses marked his hands from combat.
He glanced to his side.
A weapon gleamed near a crater. Half-buried in scorched soil was a halberd long, black-shafted, its blade split and chipped but unmistakably elegant. As he reached for it, his fingers trembled.
The moment his skin touched the weapon, a pulse shot through his chest.
His breath caught.
Images flashed across his vision like lightning:
A girl screaming. Fire all around. Himself, drenched in blood, spinning that same halberd as bodies fell. A name echoed in the flames. "Kairo."
Then silence.
He dropped the halberd and staggered back.
What the hell was that?
He gasped, clutching his chest. His heart pounded like a war drum. The images felt real, too real.
"Was that… me?"
A groan pulled him from the panic. He turned.
Among the debris, a wounded soldier lay pinned beneath a broken siege cart. His armor was cracked, and the breastplate burned halfway through. The soldier's eyes fluttered open as Kairo approached.
"You… made it…" the man rasped, his voice dry and gurgling.
"Me?" the boy asked. "Do you know me?"
"You… don't remember…"
The soldier coughed up blood. His body shook. "Revenant… Breaker of Fronts… You stood in the fire… Gods, you… You shouldn't be alive."
The boy's breath stilled.
"What does that mean? Breaker of?"
The soldier's head fell sideways. He died without finishing the sentence..
Kairo sat back on his heels, staring at the dead soldier.
Revenant… Breaker of Fronts.
The words were foreign. But they stirred something deep inside him, buried, broken, chained. Not a memory, not quite. More like an itch beneath the skin. A wrongness he couldn't name.
His gaze shifted to the halberd.
It now lay quietly, unmoving. As if it hadn't just tried to awaken whatever slept inside him.
He reached out again, this time with steadier hands, and lifted it.
The grip felt… familiar. Too familiar.
Not just the way a tool fits the hand, but like an extension of the body, like it belonged to him. Like it had always belonged to him.
The shaft was carved with tiny runes he didn't recognize, except… he could almost read them. Bound in fire. Forged in ruin. More followed, burned into the dark steel in a language that twisted just beyond understanding.
A sudden gust swept across the field. Ash scattered. A few feet away, a silver disc embedded in the mud shimmered.
Kairo walked toward it, stepping over corpses. His boots squelched in blood-damp earth. He crouched to inspect the object.
It was a seal marker issued by the military. The kind used to record battlefield deployments.
He tapped its side. A projection flickered upward in a cone of blue light.
"Redgate Offensive – Cycle 984. Deployment of 4th Tribunal Phalanx under the command of Purifier Helvarn. Victory rate: 88%. Resistance forces are expected to be minimal. Expendable territory. Writ-cleansed authorized."
Then static.
Redgate.
Kairo stood slowly.
That word, too, throbbed like a half-forgotten scar.
He looked around again at the carnage. Dozens of uniforms, no Tribunal. Mostly rebels. Farmers with stolen blades. Miners in jury-rigged armor. Some wore red cloth bands around their arms.
Crimson Concord.
A memory rose, a whisper in the back of his mind.
"The Concord protects those who can't protect themselves. They fight the Writ, not for glory, but to break the gods' law."
His hands clenched the halberd.
The Eternal Writ.
Somehow, even without full memory, the name chilled him.
A law that made war unending. Peace was forbidden.
Another gust brought with it a new scent of smoke and fresh blood.
He turned.
From the far side of the valley, a green flare rocketed skyward and burst, bright, urgent, fading fast.
A signal.
Someone was alive. Someone was calling for help.
Kairo didn't hesitate.
He slid the halberd into a backstrap he didn't remember putting on, adjusted the cloak around his shoulders, and sprinted toward the flare.
He ran for what felt like hours, cutting across the broken terrain of the battlefield. The ground grew uneven, riddled with trenches and shattered barricades. Bones crunched beneath his boots. Occasionally, the wind carried echoes of steel clashing, a child crying, something monstrous growling.
He crested a ridge and dropped into a low ravine where trees once stood. Now, only burned stumps remained.
Smoke thickened.
Then he saw them.
A dozen men and women were dirty, tired, desperate, battling creatures that looked as though they'd crawled from a nightmare, hulking, malformed things with chitinous hides and claws the size of scythes.
Blightborn.
He didn't know how he had come to know the name. He just did waste-born monstrosities from the Western front. Products of war magic gone wrong were used by both sides when desperation outweighed reason.
A child screamed.
One of the Blightborn surged forward, spines snapping outward like spears. A man with a battered shield tried to intercept but was swatted aside like a twig.
The creature lunged.
Kairo didn't think.
He moved.
The halberd was already in his hands, splitting into two chained blades mid-stride. They glowed faintly red, heat shimmering along the edges.
He hurled the first blade forward.
CLANG—SKRRRAAAH!
It carved cleanly through the creature's midsection. The chain snapped tight as Kairo pulled, dragging the creature's top half sideways.
The second monster turned.
Too slow.
Kairo ducked under a claw swipe, hooked its leg with the chain, and yanked it off balance. With a single spin, he drove the halberd's blade deep into its skull.
Black ichor sprayed. The creature shrieked and then went still.
The survivors stared at him, wide-eyed, as the dust settled.
Kairo straightened, panting.
One woman stepped forward, her hands still trembling from holding a jagged, short blade. Her hair was streaked red, not from dye but blood.
"You just… who are you?"
Kairo looked down at his bloodstained weapon, then up at the green flare dissipating in the sky.
The name came again, unbidden but steady.
"Kairo," he said, surprising even himself. "I think… my name is Kairo."