The air in the Dawinton Palace was stagnant, heavy with the weight of decades-old secrets that were finally being dragged into the light. Matthew Benric let out a sigh so profound it seemed to pull the oxygen from the room. His eyes, usually sharp and calculating like a hawk's, were filmed over with the misty haze of memory.
The river of time was flooding his mind. He saw the fire of the rebellion, the screams of the dying, and the moment the map of the town was torn in two to create Ashburg. But mostly, he saw her.
He began to weep—silent, bitter tears that traced the deep wrinkles of his face.
"Matthew," Rayn's voice cut through the grief like a cold scalpel. "Focus. You were telling me about the woman. Who was she? What happened that made Dawinton turn this town into a slaughterhouse?"
Matthew blinked, snapping back to the present. He wiped his eyes with a trembling hand, looking at Rayn with a mixture of exhaustion and wariness. "What? What did you ask?"
"The wife. Victus's mother. Who was she?"
Matthew leaned back, his gaze fixing on a spot in the shadows. "Her name was Andromeda. She was Dawinton's cousin, but blood meant nothing compared to the bond they shared. She was the love of his life—a woman of such ethereal beauty it felt like the Heavens had made a mistake letting her walk on this dirt. She had hair as black as a void and eyes that held the depth of the midnight sky. She used to call me 'Big Brother'..."
Matthew's voice broke. "But she's gone. And the way she left... it's a stain on the soul of this town that will never, ever be washed clean."
Inside the Iron Pit, the silence was absolute. Victus pressed the jade artifact against his ear so hard it bruised his skin. Every word from Matthew was a hammer blow to his heart. Freddy sat beside him, watching the Gambler Prince crumble.
"After Victus was born," Matthew continued, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register, "Dawinton couldn't take the cruelty anymore. He thought he could seek justice through the 'proper' channels. We were young, Rayn. We were fucking idiots. We believed in the 'Just King.' At that time, King Slay had just been elected. We thought he was a man of the people, a Sovereign who would protect his flock from the wolves."
Matthew spat on the floor. "We traveled to the Royal Palace. We knelt before King Slay and poured our hearts out. We told him about the rapes, the murders, the corruption of the Sterling leaders. The King... he acted so concerned. He looked us in the eyes and promised that justice would be swift. We left that palace feeling like heroes. We thought we had saved our people."
Matthew's face contorted into a snarl. "The world had other fucking ideas. We didn't know that King Slay was a political parasite. Every word we spoke, every name we gave him... he leaked it all back to the Sterling family before we even left the city gates. He sold our lives for a few chests of gold and a political favor."
"We returned to our quarters in the town after three days of travel," Matthew said, his breathing becoming ragged. "We entered the room where we had left Andromeda and the baby. And the world... the world ended right there."
Rayn leaned forward, his crimson eyes unblinking. "Describe it."
"The smell hit us first," Matthew whispered. "The smell of iron and waste. We pushed the door open and froze. The biological father of Victus—the leader of Division 1—was sitting in Dawinton's favorite chair. He was holding a bottle, casually feeding the one-year-old Victus. The baby was crying, covered in milk and tears."
Matthew's voice turned into a raspy shriek of agony. "And beside the leader's boots... was Andromeda. Or what was left of her. That sub-human piece of shit hadn't just killed her; he had dismantled her. Her body was split open from gullet to groin like a slaughtered pig. He had peeled the skin from her face while she was still alive—her skull was bare, glistening in the lamplight. Her head... he had torn it from her neck and left it sitting in her own lap. And he was stomping on her mangled torso while he fed her child."
Victus, in his cell, let out a sound that wasn't human. It was a guttural, soul-rending wail of pure, unadulterated trauma. He had been fed by the man who was currently using his mother's corpse as a footstool.
"We stood there for a full minute," Matthew said, his voice trembling. "Just... paralyzed. The shock was so deep it bypassed anger and went straight to madness. Then Dawinton snapped. He lunged with a scream that would have curdled the blood of a god. But he was only a Phase 3 then. The leader just smiled and dodged. He laughed at us."
" 'See, Dawinton?' the leader said," Matthew recounted. " 'You dare to complain about us to the King? The fact is, we are the ones who put that crown on his head. He belongs to us.' "
"Thirteen soldiers stepped out from the shadows," Matthew continued. "They caught us. They beat us until the floor was a pond of our own blood. They broke our ribs, our legs, our dignity. And the whole time, the leader kept feeding Victus. Finally, he stood up and kicked Andromeda's head across the room."
" 'I'm leaving you alive, Dawinton,' the leader said. 'Not because I'm merciful, but because I don't want to waste my time taking care of this unwanted filth. You take him. If you ever breathe a word of rebellion again, I'll make you watch while I do the same thing to the boy.' "
"He left us there in the gore," Matthew said, his eyes hollow. "Dawinton crawled across the floor, dragging his shattered body, and pulled the crying Victus into his chest. He didn't say a word. He didn't cry. He just sat there in his wife's blood and stared at the door. That was the day the Dawinton you knew was born. He realized that justice was a lie, and the only truth in this world is Power."
Rayn nodded slowly. "So he played the long game. How did he fund a rebellion if he was just a broken soldier?"
"He reached out to a ghost from our past," Matthew explained. "The Andreus Family. They are one of the 'Great Pillars' of the Four Kingdoms—a family so wealthy they could buy a mountain of gold and still have change for the moon. We had a classmate from our training days named Parlecy Andreus. She was a woman of terrifying intellect and even more terrifying resources. Dawinton begged her for help."
"She saw the potential in him," Matthew said. "She gave us the gold. She gave us the connections. She promised that if we failed, she would take Victus and hide him in the Four Kingdoms. With her backing, we spent a year preparing. We didn't attack with swords first. We attacked with the same shit you did, Rayn."
"We manipulated the people. We went door to door at night, distributing Andreus gold and exposing the Sterling family's filth. We showed them the photos of the bodies. We told them the truth about the taxes. By the time the next election came, the town was a powder keg."
"King came to the town for the election," Matthew said, a dark smirk appearing on his face. "He had spent the year being a tyrant himself, and his popularity was in the gutter. He needed a 'win' to show he was a fair ruler. When the results came in—a landslide for Dawinton—the Sterling family tried to ignore it. They prepared to slaughter us all."
"But King Slay saw the wind changing. He realized the Sterling family saw him as a toy, not a master. So he betrayed them. He validated Dawinton's victory. He stood there and watched as Dawinton finally, finally executed the man who had murdered Andromeda."
Matthew's eyes gleamed with a feral joy. "Dawinton didn't just kill him. He took three days to do it. He used every ounce of his Merchant Gnosis to keep the bastard alive while he took him apart piece by piece."
"But the town was still divided," Matthew continued. "A large portion of the population still feared or supported the Sterling family. To prevent a total civil war, the King decreed a split. Ashburg was born from sixty percent of the land. But it was a poisoned gift. We had to pay twenty-five percent of our total revenue to the Sterling town every year as 'reparation.' It took us two years of brutal, starving struggle to finally build enough power to tell them to go fuck themselves and cancel the debt."
"Dawinton wanted to become a King of King Slay," Matthew sighed. "He wanted to make King Slay to make it as strong as one of the Four Kingdoms. He wanted to march on King Slay and tear his throat out. But his age caught up to him. His wounds from that first beating never truly healed. He put all his hopes into Victus... but Victus was born of Sterling blood, and in the end, the rot was in his marrow."
Rayn sat in silence, processing the scale of the world. He had thought King Slay Country was a major player. He had thought King for this country was the ultimate authority.
I was looking at a puddle and thinking it was an ocean, Rayn thought.
He realized the discrepancy. Matthew spoke of King Slay as if he were a god, but Rayn knew from his own memories and his arrival that the place he had heard of—Whispering Vines—was just a small town in one of the actual Four Kingdoms.
If King Slay is just a splinter of a splinter... and King is just a regional manager for a bunch of nobles... then the real power isn't here, Rayn's mind raced. The 'Four Kingdoms' aren't just neighbors; they are the world. Everything I see here—this town, these divisions, these petty lords—it's all just trash on the outskirts of the true stage.
Rayn stood up, his white hair catching the dying light of the sunset.
"Matthew," Rayn said, his voice cold and resolute. "You wanted a leader who could finish Dawinton's work. But Dawinton's dream was too small. He wanted to protect a town. He wanted to be a King of a splinter."
Rayn walked toward the window, looking out over the flickering lights of Ashburg.
"I'm not interested in being a 'King' of this shithole," Rayn whispered, his crimson eyes reflecting the vast, dark horizon. "I'm going to use Ashburg as a whetstone. I'm going to sharpen my blade on the necks of the Sterling family and King Slay. And when I'm done... I'm not just going to rule a kingdom. I'm going to rule the Four Kingdoms. I will be the sole ruler of everything the sun touches, or I will burn it all to ash trying."
In the prison cell, Victus heard the declaration. He felt the sheer, mountain-crushing ambition in Rayn's voice. He realized that he hadn't just lost to a rival. He had been stepped on by a god in the making.
The age of the Splinter was over. The War of the Four Kingdoms had just found its catalyst.