The smoke rose from the horizon like a hand reaching toward heaven — and failing.
Kael Veyren followed it.
The wind carried ash and whispers, faint voices calling names that no living tongue should know. Beneath his boots, the grass was blackened, and the earth cracked like old parchment. The forest of Etrion had burned in silence, as though the fire had never been born at all — only remembered itself back into being.
He walked for hours, his breath misting in the cold dawn. The sword at his side, Revenant's Wake, throbbed faintly, as though sensing something waiting ahead. Every time he touched its hilt, he heard the faint hum of a heartbeat — not his own.
By midday, the smoke had thickened into a pale gray wall. He reached the forest's edge and stopped.
Etrion was dead.
Yet somehow, it was still breathing.
The trees were not merely burned — they were hollowed, each trunk carved with sigils that shimmered faintly like dying stars. Ash drifted down in soft spirals, but the air was heavy with light — thin ribbons of gold weaving between branches like veins of trapped sunlight.
Kael stepped inside.
The world went quiet.
Even his footsteps made no sound. The silence here was alive — vast and listening. The deeper he walked, the more he felt the weight of unseen eyes pressing against him, tracing his movements like fingers on glass.
He whispered to himself, half out of habit, half out of defiance.
"Show yourself."
Something moved between the trees — too quick to be seen, too heavy to be imagined.
Kael drew his sword. The light from Revenant's Wake cut through the ash, and the silence shuddered.
Then he saw it.
A shape unfolded from the smoke — long-limbed, faceless, its body made of roots and black feathers, moving like liquid shadow. Its chest glowed faintly, and in that glow, Kael saw flickers of faces — hundreds of them — screaming silently inside the creature's ribs.
A Veilborn.
The kind that crawled out when the dead forgot their place.
Kael tightened his grip. "Another revenant," he muttered. "But whose memory are you?"
The thing tilted its head, and the air rippled. When it spoke, it didn't use sound — it used thought.
"Yours."
Then it lunged.
Kael met it mid-stride. The blade flashed, cutting through its arm — but instead of blood, a storm of ashes burst out, forming new limbs instantly. The creature struck with the force of collapsing trees, knocking him backward. He rolled, cutting through the air again. The sword screamed — not from metal, but from the echo of the dead within it.
"Revenant's Wake!" Kael shouted. "Answer me!"
The blade's light flared, and the silence shattered into sound. For a moment, Kael could hear them — the voices trapped inside the sword. Their cries filled the air, rising like a chorus of the condemned. The creature hesitated, its faceless head twitching.
That pause was enough.
Kael drove the sword through its chest. The world went white.
When his vision cleared, the forest was still again. The creature was gone, its ashes scattered, but the faces that had been trapped within it lingered in the air — faint, shimmering outlines fading slowly into light.
And in the silence that followed, a voice — not from the forest, but from the sword — whispered inside his mind:
You freed one. But not her.
Kael closed his eyes. "I wasn't trying to."
You will.
The light died. The sword cooled.
He sheathed it slowly, then looked around the forest. He noticed something new — a symbol carved into one of the nearest trees. It was the same one he had seen glowing in Velhar: a circle of wings surrounding an eye of flame.
The mark of the Seraphim.
Someone had been here before the fire. Someone had tried to call them.
He knelt, brushing his fingers against the charred bark. The sigil pulsed faintly at his touch. For a second, he felt the warmth of another hand over his — smaller, softer, and achingly familiar.
"Lira…" he whispered.
Then the forest answered — not with words, but with echoes.
All at once, a thousand whispers filled the air. Some pleading. Some laughing. Some repeating one word over and over, until it became unbearable.
"Wake… wake… wake…"
Kael stumbled back, gripping his head. The word grew louder, blending into the hum of the sword at his side until it was no longer a sound but a command.
Wake.
And then he saw it — a light blooming through the trees.
At first, he thought it was fire. But the longer he looked, the more he realized it was not burning — it was becoming. A sphere of white radiance pulsing with veins of gold hovered above the earth, bleeding thin streams of energy into the roots of the forest. The trees, once dead, began to move — their branches twisting, growing faces from their bark, human and godlike all at once.
Kael backed away. "No," he breathed. "Not again."
The ground split open. From beneath the forest floor, something vast began to rise — a figure with skin of gold and eyes of lightning, its body fused with roots and bones. Wings unfurled from its back, made of light so bright it seared the air.
A fallen Seraphim.
But not whole — broken, twisted, half-alive, half-memory.
It looked at Kael and spoke in a voice that seemed to come from the sky itself:
"Child of the Wake… why do you still carry my heart?"
Kael froze. His hand moved instinctively to his sword.
The blade was glowing again — pulsing in rhythm with the Seraphim's voice.
Realization struck him like a blade through the chest.
Revenant's Wake wasn't forged to kill them… it was forged from them.
The Seraphim's golden eyes blazed.
"Return what was taken… or drown in the dream you broke."
Light erupted. The forest screamed.
Kael ran — but the light followed. It wasn't chasing him. It was awakening him.
And as the forest of Etrion burned again, not with fire but with remembrance, Kael understood what the sword had been trying to tell him all along.
He had never escaped the war.
He had only been walking its aftermath.