The battlefield still burned.
Night pressed low against the shattered valley, swallowing the banners and corpses that littered the ground. Broken spears jutted up like gravemarkers, while the remains of war-beasts twitched where their masters had abandoned them. Fire smoldered in pits where sorcery had torn reality open. Even the wind had gone still, as though the world itself recoiled from what had been done here.
Kael Ardyn clawed his way free from a mound of corpses. His armor was torn to ribbons, his left hand nothing but a trembling claw of flesh and blood. He should have died with the rest of them—his throat burned with the memory of a blade sliding across it, his ribs screamed where a spear had pierced him. Yet his eyes still opened, his lungs still drew breath.
And deep inside his chest, something else breathed with him.
It pulsed like molten iron, jagged and alive. A shard of black light, wedged into his very soul. He could not cough it out. He could not claw it free. It burned and it fed, drinking the silence of the battlefield, drinking the drifting embers of souls torn from bodies that would never rise again.
Kael gasped, and the world answered.
[ System Initialization… ]
[ Fragment Detected: Soulforge Shard (Dormant) ]
[ Warning: Host Integrity—Critical. ]
The words didn't come to his ears but seared themselves into his mind. He lurched forward, one hand finding the hilt of a ruined sword buried in the mud. The edge was jagged, rusted, unfit to cut even flesh. Yet the shard inside him pulsed, and veins of black fire crawled along the steel. The metal shrieked as if reforged upon an unseen anvil. Rust sloughed away. The blade hardened. Wrongness clung to it, an edge that promised to carve not only flesh but the spirit beneath.
Kael staggered upright, half-drowned in the stink of smoke and gore. His throat was dry, his head a storm of ringing echoes. But one thought struck clear through the haze.
He was alive. And he was not meant to be.
Movement stirred in the distance. He was not the only one to rise from the ruin. Figures staggered through the smoke—scavengers, deserters, looters who had crawled from the wreckage to strip the dead. One of them raised a broken halberd and laughed when he saw Kael standing.
"Another corpse that doesn't know it's dead."
Others followed, hungry eyes catching the faint glow of his reforged sword. The battlefield was over, but killing hadn't stopped.
Kael's knuckles whitened on the hilt. His body screamed for rest. His blood begged him to collapse. Yet the shard within him pulsed again, and hunger—alien and vast—flooded his veins.
[ Ability Unlocked: Wraith Claw ]
His shadow stretched, clawed fingers extending from it like hooked talons. They twitched in time with his heartbeat, sharp and unnatural.
The scavengers jeered and rushed him. Kael raised his ruined blade. His first swing was clumsy, desperate—but the edge shrieked as it struck, devouring rust and armor alike. A man screamed as his soul ripped free, sucked into Kael's weapon like smoke into a forge.
The shard roared inside him. His own voice tore free in answer.
This was no longer a battlefield.
It was a crucible.
And Kael Ardyn had just stepped into the forge.