The Old Vein
It began with sweat.
Not from heat—but from something older. Rei's body betrayed him before his mind did. His fingers trembled. His breath grew shallow. Cold moisture clung to his brow even though the forge around them had bloomed with rising flame.
Kaia was the first to see it. She stepped closer, voice taut.
"Rei?"
He staggered.
The Skarnveil gem pulsed violently at his hip, light strobing in uneven rhythm—like a heartbeat out of time. His vision doubled. Then folded inward.
Kaia reached for him.
He fell to his knees.
"I'm fine," he whispered.
But he was not fine.
Because one moment, he was in the forge.
And in the next—He was in the Void.
The Void
It was not blackness.
It was uncolor.
A place stripped of meaning, of gravity, of time. A vast, endless plane of glass and ink, where stars floated like the broken eyes of dead gods.
Rei hovered—no ground, no sky. Just weight. Endless weight on the inside of his bones.
And then—
Clang.
Clang.
The sound echoed, but not through space. It echoed through him.
From the nothingness ahead, a shape emerged.
First came the chains.
They slithered across the unseen floor, massive and writhing, trailing smoke and runes that bled as if carved from flame itself.
Then the horns.
Curved like crescent moons, gilded in shadowlight.
Then—Baphomette.
He was not just large. He was wrong.
Not a beast. Not a demon.
An inevitability.
His hooves struck the void with echoing thunder. His cleaver dragged behind him like a gravestone being pulled across a crypt.
His eyes locked with Rei's.
And they were not eyes.
They were wounds that had learned to see.
Baphomette stopped just before him. Smoke hissed from his nostrils.
He did not speak.
Not yet.
He raised one clawed hand—and the Void responded.
A rift opened behind him, split down the center like a wound reopening.
Inside… was fire.
But not fire that warmed. Fire that consumed concept.
Rei watched—unable to look away—as things crawled from it.
Beasts made of marrow and malice.Shapes of bone and laughter.Crawlers with too many limbs and mouths that spoke in languages even gods once begged to forget.They poured through the wound of the world —out of a Rift torn not in stone, but in meaning.
Where they passed, the sky blackened.Mountains screamed.Oceans boiled.And time itself seemed to bleed at the edges.
Behind them came others — not of void, but of blood and rot.
Orcs — twisted from war and fungus, bred in caverns where light had never set foot. Their skin was grey, pitted with sores. Their eyes gleamed with greenish hunger, and their blades were crude, rust-bitten — not forged, but torn from wreckage and bone.Their laughter sounded like dry leaves burning.
Raiders followed — orcs and beasts, broken by centuries of exile and ruin.Wrapped in patchwork iron and leather peeled from their prey, they worshipped fire, rot, and the scream of dying cities.Their faces were hidden behind masks made of beast-skulls and welded teeth.And where they walked, they dragged banners dipped in the blood of those they had made kneel.
They did not conquer.They corrupted.
And the world —bled to welcome them.
Rei fell to one knee again, chest heaving. His mark burned now—white-hot. Alive. Calling.
He saw himself reflected in the cleaver's surface as Baphomette lifted it.
But it was not the Rei of now.
It was a thinner version. Starved. Hollow-eyed. Drenched in blood.
Behind that image… another.
A shadow with his face… wearing a crown of fangs.
And then the vision changed again.
The rift above the mountains of Druvadir had once torn open wide. Flame and void poured into the land. And there—before the Forge—the god of the dwarves, Mongrim, stood.
Rei watched it unfold like memory being rewritten before his eyes.
Mongrim, tall and crowned in runic light, held back the flood of the Rift with a hammer made from mountain-core. But even he was failing.
Then—another came.
A figure cloaked in black flame.
The First Riftborn.
Together, they stood against the endless hunger.
Rei saw it—the moment of sacrifice.
Mongrim cast his heart into the Forge, binding it with the soul of the mountain, becoming Skarnveil—a prison of stone and will, forged not to contain power…
…but to contain The Rift.
And those who flooded from the inside.
And the one they feared the most. Baphomette.
Chains of divine steel were woven.
The Rift was closed.
But only barely.
Baphomette had been sealed—but not destroyed.
Merely delayed.
The vision collapsed.
Baphomette stepped closer now, and his voice—not a sound, but a pressure—filled Rei's skull.
"I watched your birth, Riftborn."
"I bled in the desert where your power cracked."
"I hungered for fear, for desperation, for darkness."
"I whispered to you beneath Blackstone's ash."
Rei trembled.
"Why… me?"
The cleaver lifted—again, not to strike. But to test the air.
Baphomette tilted his horned head.
"You are not the First."
"But you may be the Last."
His breath came slow, like ash falling through water.
"The dwarves hunger. The elves fear."
"And you…"
He leaned closer, so near Rei could see the runes carved into his horns. They were not symbols.
They were names.
Dead names. Buried ones.
And Rei's was there—half-formed.
"I want to see what you become."
"Will you be the key…"
The cleaver pulsed, humming like a heartbeat from hell.
"…or the lock?"
Baphomette began to fade, slowly, unraveling like shadow smoke in water.
"You walk with chains inside you, Riftborn."
"The question is…"
"…will you pull them, or break them?"
And then he was gone.
The Void cracked.
And Rei—
**
The Old Vein — Moments Later
—gasped.
He awoke with a jolt, slamming back into his body like it had been thrown from a height.
Kaia caught him just before he collapsed.
His eyes were wide. Unseeing. Mouth parted. The gem of Skarnveil flickered like a dying flame.
Durik was shouting something.
Kaia shook him. "Rei! Speak to me!"
Rei clutched his ribs.
The mark had stopped burning.
But he could still feel the echo of that roar.
Not the Wyrm's.
The other.
His hand trembled. He stared at it like it belonged to someone else.
Something else.
"I saw him," he whispered.
Kaia leaned closer. "Who?"
Rei looked past her. Past the forge. Past everything.
Eyes haunted.
"Baphomette."
Durik's face turned pale.
"That's just an old tale," he said. "A demon made to scare dwarflings."
Rei shook his head.
"He's not a tale."
"He's bound beneath this mountain."
He looked to the Skarnveil gem, still clutched in his shaking hand.
"And now…"
His voice cracked.
"He's awake."