The forest thinned as Eryndor, Lirien, and Garruk pressed onward. The rugged hills gradually softened into rolling slopes lined with silver-leafed trees whose branches chimed faintly when stirred by wind, like distant glass bells. Even the air felt different here—dry and faintly metallic, as though ancient mechanisms slumbered beneath the soil and still exhaled traces of their forgotten breath.
Eryndor barely noticed any of it.
With every mile they traveled, the pull inside him strengthened.
The relic, locked within the metal box secured inside his pack, felt less like an object and more like a second heartbeat. Its pulse was faint and irregular, occasionally syncing with the golden scripture woven beneath his skin before breaking away again, as if still searching for a rhythm that fit.
The worst part was how familiar it felt. Uncomfortably familiar.
A sensation that made his mind itch with half-remembered things he had never lived. Emotions that did not belong to him and yet settled in his chest as though they had always been there.
Garruk and Lirien remained oblivious.
Garruk tramped along with steady determination, humming an off-key tune that shifted between forge chants and tavern songs. Lirien walked beside Eryndor in silence, her gaze scanning the terrain with usual caution, watching for the slightest irregularity that might signal an ambush.
They traveled until dusk painted the horizon in muted crimson. When the light began to fade, they made camp beneath a slanted rock shelf that offered modest shelter from the wind. There were no city lights here. No road markers. Only the rhythmic chorus of cicadas and the faint glow of bioluminescent moss that traced the forest floor like living veins.
Garruk attempted to cook something over a modest fire—something that smelled faintly like charred worms and smoked gravel. Lirien, as always, sat apart and sharpened her blade with calm precision, sparks dancing from its edge in brief bursts of amber light.
Eryndor sat slightly away from both of them, staring at his hands.
The golden lines beneath his skin flickered faintly, twitching like restless ink trying to write itself into something coherent.
"You should rest," Lirien said suddenly, her voice cutting through the steady hush of night.
He glanced up at her and smiled. "I will. Don't worry."
"You have been distracted since we took the relic," she continued quietly.
He tilted his head, amused. "You are attentive as always. I am still breathing, though, so I would say I am functioning well enough."
She studied him for a moment longer, clearly unconvinced, but did not press further. Instead, she returned to her blade. The rhythmic scrape of whetstone resumed.
Later, when the fire dimmed to embers and Garruk's snoring rose like uneven thunder from the other side of the camp, Eryndor lay back and closed his eyes, but sleep refused him.
The tug sharpened. It was no longer subtle.
It pulled at him like a hook set beneath his ribs.
After several restless minutes, he exhaled softly and sat up. He opened his satchel and drew out the lockbox. The metal felt warmer than it should have. He hesitated only briefly before unlocking it.
Inside lay the jagged iron shard veined with ember-gold.
Its glow was faint but steady.
He stared at it and saw it's glow that strangely commanding, like a hand gripping the back of his mind and pulling it.
Abruptly his world shifted.
Darkness swept over him like smoke rolling across a battlefield. The forest vanished.
When the darkness receded, he stood in a vast circular hall of stone.
It was not ruined. It was perfect yet silent as if the hall suspended in time, untouched by dust or decay. At its center stood a pedestal. Upon it rested the relic—not as jagged metal this time, but as a luminous core, swirling between shapes without settling into any single form.
The air trembled around it, heavy with the weight of countless eras.
Light surged and the relic reshaped into a spear before a figure appeared.
A warrior woman—broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned, her hair braided with wolf fangs. Her face remained hazy, as though obscured by time itself. She reached for the spear without hesitation.
The weapon was long and elegant, its crimson edge humming faintly. She spun it once and the hall dissolved.
Snow and pine replaced stone as Eryndor saw a battlefield stretched before her, littered with frozen corpses and Frost golems roaming around the battlefield. They were massive and merciless, their icy bodies grinding against the earth.
the moment She appeared before them they charged at her viciously.
She leapt and in one fluid motion, the spear cut through the frost golems like sunlight through morning mist. It moved with impossible grace, a crimson arc tracing death across the field. At one point she swung the weapon in a wide crescent, and a luminous wave swept outward, erasing an entire line of golems in a single breath.
When the last construct shattered into shards of glittering ice, her form began to fade.
The spear dissolved back into the luminous core and Eryndor found himself returned to the hall.
Not long after the relic shifted again.
Now it became a bow—smooth, curved, nearly translucent.
He saw another figure appeared.
A thin hooded man with intricate runes carved into his arms. His presence was calm, steady as a still lake. He touched the bow and traced its curve with deliberate fingers before drawing the string without an arrow.
And the world became desert.
Sandstorms raged. The sky burned with ash. From beyond the dunes, thousands of armored Svapada charged through dunes, their forms monstrous and relentless.
He calmly looked at the approaching beasts before he inhaled once.
A single arrow of pure mana formed.
He inhaled again.
The arrow vanished, being absorbed by the bow.
When the patterns along its surface flared to life. Massive arrows—each the size of palace pillars—manifested around him, suspended in air.
He released the string.
The arrows did not fly, They became wind. Tempest and storm.
They tore through the charging beasts, blasting open an entire canyon in their wake. When the last of the armored Svapada fell, the hooded man smiled faintly beneath his shadowed hood.
He faded.
The third figure was an elderly matriarch. Stepped into the vision right after the Light around the relic swelled and transformed it into a savage yet beautiful hammer. Her spine bent with age, but her eyes burned like coals that refused to die. She lifted the hammer without fear.
The hammer was massive and heavy. It was glowing like molten metal. A complicated runes were engraved deeply on it's surface, creating an exquisite and beautiful pattern. She smashed the hammer into the earth as the world around him shifted to mountains. Her hammer strike split a ridge in two and sent avalanches roaring through an army of winged beastfolks.
Each of her strike reshaped the land itself, mountains bowing to her will.
One by one, the visions continued.
A young man, maybe barely older than Eryndor wielding a pitch black dagger that unravelled shadows themselves. A knight clad in grey armor wielding a halberd that parted sea waves full of leviathans.
A masked assassin using twin blades of pure light that hummed like whispering spirits. Generations. Bloodlines. Ancestors. All wielding the same relic. All shaping it through will. All connected to him. Because with every transition, every flicker, Eryndor felt it in his chest, the faint echo as if each of those hands, each warrior, each soul shared a fragment of him.
Or he shared a fragment of them.
Then the light in the hall dimmed. The shifting relic grew still before it's light condensed until the pedestal shattered as a heat rolled outward the relic like a newborn sun being born. The relic then suddenly soared into someone grasp. There Eryndor saw him again, one figure stood in the darkness. Taller than any human Eryndor had ever seen and cloaked in sunfire liked armour with golden eyes that burning with purpose. The Radiant Emperor.
He raised his hand.
The relic reshaped into the massive black greatsword Eryndor had seen in the previous dream. White flame danced along its edge like a chorus of stars.
The world shifted again. Eryndor found himself again stood above a crushed valley consumed by war. He had seen them, War with not just armies but all beings involved. Colossal mythical Svapada. Devatas from Deus, or even Pandava. Swarms of iron constructs from Dwarve Grandmaster. The Wars of All Beings.
The Emperor stepped forward.
Facing the enemies swarm, He swung his greatsword.
The sky cracked when a single arc of light vaporized thousands and carved a scar across the horizon.
The Emperor strode through titans as though they were paper silhouettes. The land trembled beneath his command.
At the height of the war, the Emperor raised the blade and plunged it into the earth.
Flame erupted and everything went white.
Eryndor gasped awake.
Cold night air filled his lungs. His vision swam as though he had surfaced from deep water. The golden scripture beneath his skin flared brightly before dimming once more.
His hand trembled as it brushed the lockbox.
It was empty.
He sat upright slowly, staring at the hollow interior.
The relic was gone.
There was no crack in the box. No broken latch. It had not been stolen. It had simply… vanished.
He stared at the emptiness for a long moment.
"Well," he muttered softly, a bitter smile tugging at his lips, "this is going to be difficult to explain."
Across the camp, he saw Garruk snored loudly, utterly unaware that reality itself had shifted.
Lirien sat with her back to him, motionless.
Eryndor did not know whether she slept.
He turned his gaze toward the dark forest beyond the fire's dying glow.
He did not know whether he should be frightened.
Or exhilarated.
The legacy inside him had never felt clearer. The relic, though absent, still pulsed faintly within his senses as if it had not truly left at all.
In the end, Eryndor exhaled softly and shook his head.
Whatever fate had prepared for him would come regardless of his readiness.
At the very least, he would meet it with a smirk.
And perhaps, if the gods were generous, with something sharp in his hand.