Pain returned first.
Not sharp like steel or sudden like flame, but slow, patient, inevitable. like something forgotten that never truly left.
A low, pulsing ache rested at the base of his spine, a molten throb behind the eyes, and a slow tightening of the lungs that fought to draw in the cold mountain air—each breath like swallowing knives.
Awareness bled in next: the wind's teeth grinding through chinks in the wooden walls, the distant bleat of goats, a groan of wooden wheels turning slowly along frost-slick paths far below.
Then came the smoke. He tasted it before he saw it—a bitter, ashen sting clinging to the back of his throat. Somewhere close, a fire struggled to stay alive.
Kael opened his eyes.
Dark wood loomed above, a sagging ceiling stained with age and decay. Thick beams crossed overhead, cracked and bent by years of snow. Moss slipped through the wood like veins, and the corners of the room sagged in silent surrender to time. On his right, a hearth crouched like a wounded beast, coughing up smoke from a fire too weak to warm anything.
He blinked once. Twice. The world did not vanish. This was no Velgrim. But also, this body was not his own.
The thought landed without delay. No panic. No disbelief. Just truth—heavy and absolute. His limbs felt foreign. His joints too light, his bones too narrow, as though his frame had been carved to house a different soul.
He raised his hands.
Gone were the hardened skin that told stories of war and steel. The grooves from reign-worn gauntlets, the faded burn from when he had grasped a divine spear mid-strike—all gone. In their place were the hands of a youth. Pale. Unscarred. Soft as a priest's word.
His breath hitched. The voice that escaped was thinner, higher.
"Where... am I?"
The sound startled him. It didn't belong. It was the voice of someone who had never shouted commands across a battlefield, never screamed in defiance as divine fire consumed flesh. It was a child's voice. Barely more than a whisper.
Slowly, he pushed himself upright. Each movement summoned a fresh protest from muscles not his own. His chest was tight, wrapped in scratchy linen bandages that rasped against skin as he moved. More bandages wrapped his arms, stiff and spotted with dried blood.
He sat still for a moment, listening to the creak of the floorboards beneath him, the faint hum of life beyond the wooden walls. Somewhere nearby, someone coughed. A woman hummed—a lullaby, he thought—but the notes trembled, as if the tune feared being heard.
Memory flickered. But not his own.
A boy. Fifteen, maybe. Beaten. Kicked by rough boots, dragged by his hair through a curtain of snow while villagers jeered. Old blood. New bruises. Hands reaching down—not to help, but to offer him up. Lifted like tribute. Laid before cold stone.
A shrine covered in ice. Ancient. A place of offering. A place of death.
Kael's hands curled around the edges of the cot as understanding bloomed within him, slow and terrible.
They had offered this boy—this body—to the gods. Left to bleed out from a wound they had made with their blade at a shrine in the mountains.
A sacrifice of his blood.
He closed his eyes, and the fire inside him flared. The gods still demanded sacrifices, then.
Some things never changed.
He rose slowly, unsteady. The room spun as blood rushed through unfamiliar veins, but he caught himself against a wall, breathing in short, sharp gasps. The cold bit deep, even indoors. His bare feet touched stone that had never known warmth.
Still, he moved.
Each step toward the window was a reclamation.
Beyond the glassless frame, the mountain village unfolded in grim silence. Winter ruled here—thin, gray snow clung to everything, refusing to melt. Unorganized farms littered the valley below like forgotten pieces on a war table, their fences crooked, animals thin and restless. The people—wrapped in coarse wool and heavy cloaks moved like ghosts. Children chased goats near the treeline. Men knelt in slush, heads bowed, lips murmuring prayers to gods who never answered.
And above them all, high on the sheer cliff face overlooking the valley, hung a god's mark.
It was carved into the stone with impossible precision, radiating a cold authority. A circle pierced by a vertical slash, flanked by nine outer runes. Order. Judgment. Obedience.
Aureon. His former patron.
Kael's jaw tightened. The boy's hands clenched again, this time without command.
The sight of that sigil fueled embers long buried. Rage. Memory. Vows made with dying breath.
He had stood beside that mark once—long ago, when he still bore a crown and carried the warblade Iron Oath. When Aureon's high priests had proclaimed him chosen. When he led legions under banners blessed with divine light.
Now the same symbol greeted him like a sneer carved in granite—unchanged, untouched by time or remorse. It mocked him, a monument to a lie he once called truth.
He was nothing now but dust to them. Forgotten. Erased.
But not completely.
His name had been carved into stone. Chiseled into the banners of a hundred conquered cities. His deeds sung across continents—until the gods grew afraid. Until betrayal by light-wrapped liars, until divine fire swallowed his body and ground his empire into ash.
He remembered the battlefield.
His steel snapping against blessed shields. Sky split open by judgment. His closest friends falling, one by one, to divine avatars. He remembered the agony as celestial flame consumed him, his body crumbling, his soul torn.
And he remembered the vow he screamed into the void as death claimed him:
"I will return."
And now he had. Not as a king. Not as a warlord. Not yet. But as a boy discarded like refuse on the altar of Aureon. Their cruelty had not ended with his death—it had recycled him, twisted the blade anew. He was reborn in filth. Stripped of power. Shackled in a stranger's flesh.
Kael's breath frosted the air. He didn't look away from the mark on the cliff.
"You should've burned my soul to ash," he whispered. "Should've ground it beneath your thrones."
Because this time, he would not rise to serve. He would rise to slaughter. The fire had survived. A restless soul, a spark defiant enough to claw back across the veil of death.
Kael turned from the window. A rough wooden chair sat nearby, carved by a hand that had never known grace. A cup of broth steamed on a low table beside it. Someone had cared enough to tend to this boy's body. To feed him. Bandage him.
He was not alone here. Not yet.
He sat in silence, letting his mind adjust to the unfamiliar weight of his new body. Every sensation felt wrong. The pitch of his thoughts was different. Emotions surged quicker—hot, untempered by age and battle. The heart was younger, but the soul within was ancient.
He reached inward.
There.
Buried beneath layers of fog, beyond the echo of the boy's final memories, pulsed a flicker of power. Dim, but real. Not divine. Not anymore. But old. Forbidden. The remnants of what they called Godbane—arts whispered in heretic circles, cursed by every temple.
The boy had died using them. Torn reality to strike a god once.
He would do worse, this time.
Movement outside the door caught his attention. Soft shuffles. People stood there hesitant to come in.
The fire inside the cottage had found its rhythm. Kael rose and walked to the door. Each step steadier than the last. The vessel was weak, but his will had never been stronger.
He pulled it open.
A woman stood in the threshold, a young girl standing silently at her side. She was thin, bent-backed, wrapped in layers of patchwork wool. Her hands were stained with soot and root-sap, and a crooked scar traced her jaw. She held a bowl of broth in shaking hands and stared at him as one might regard a waking storm.
"You shouldn't be up," the woman said quietly.
Kael said nothing.
She stepped closer, placing the bowl on a low table beside the cot. Her eyes hovered on his face, searching.
"You were dead when they brought you down," she murmured. "I saw it. Skin blue. No breath. But then…" She gestured vaguely. "You screamed. Like something was ripped back in."
He met her gaze but kept silence.
"What's your name?" she asked.
Still, no response.
"I'm Maren," she said after a pause. "Herbalist. Widow."
"They took you to the shrine," she went on. "Every winter, the cold star comes, and the elders choose a name. A sacrifice—so the roads stay clear. So the crops don't rot. So the wolves keep to the ridge."
He let the silence stretch.
"You may not have deserved what they did to you," she added at last. "But belief's not the only thing that kills."
The girl lingered a moment longer, her gaze flicking up to the bandages on his chest, then to his emerald eyes.
"You're not the same," she whispered. "You look the same, but… your eyes are old now."
Then she fled without warning.
Maren gave no comment. Neither did he.
She turned to leave, but hesitated at the door. "If you remember who you are, you best keep it quiet. We're too far from the cities for the priests to care—but their ears travel, and names carry weight. Sometimes enough to crush whole villages."
Then she was gone.
Kael stared at the closed door. The room settled back into silence, broken only by the weak crackle of the fire and the wind beyond the walls.
His name. But which one?
Was it the name of the warlord who brought nations to their knees—or the name of this sacrifice, whose body still lived?
No one here knew the truth. The world believed him dead, unmade by godfire. But here he stood, alive.
He walked to the hearth, knelt, and picked up a blackened stick from the edge of the coals. Its end was still smoldering—just enough.
He moved to the far wall, pulled aside a moth-eaten tapestry, and exposed bare wood.
Then, carefully, he wrote.
KAEL DRAVEN
The charcoal flaked as he carved the letters, slow and deliberate. Not to announce. Not to boast.
But to remember.
The world had buried him. But gods rot like any other tyrant—and he would see their thrones crumble.
One name at a time.
And now reborn in the body of a sacrificial lamb, he would become the butcher. One that would make the gods tremble.