Eveline Marrowen had never seen the heavens bleed.
She stood on the western rampart of Ashfall Outpost, high in the Ironcrag Range where the qi thinned to a faint whisper and the wind carried the metallic tang of old battlefields.
Realm 8 – Starblood, Her blood thrummed with spiritual vitality: wounds closed in moments, poisons slid away like rain. Yet tonight the air tasted wrong — sour, foreign, as though something had slipped through a crack no one was meant to see.
Below, lanterns flickered across the outpost. Two hundred souls — mostly Realm 3 to 5 disciples, a handful of guards at Realm 6 — slept or trained under indifferent stars. The frontier was punishment posting for her failed diplomatic errand with the Argent Cathedral three years earlier. Three years of writing reports no one read.
Tonight the clouds were wrong.
A thin vertical line appeared directly overhead, perhaps ten li up. Not a rift, not a tribulation cloud — just a tear. The edges shimmered violet-black, colors that did not belong to Aetherion's qi spectrum. The tear pulsed once, slowly, like a distant heartbeat.
Eveline's Starblood recoiled. Her veins prickled with sudden cold.
She gripped the rampart stone. "What in the nine hells…"
"Anomaly," came a low voice behind her.
Elder Huo Tan stepped onto the rampart. Realm 9 – Astral Lord, peak. Gray robes bore the faint silver thread of the Umbral Rose Covenant. Four hundred and eighty years had left him looking forty, but his eyes carried the weight of six millennia survived. He had outlived three sect masters and two emperors of the western continent.
"Send word?" Eveline asked.
"Jade slip to Dawnspire Relay. They'll forward it if they deem it worth the ink." His tone was dry, but his fingers remained near the hilt of his saber.
The tear pulsed again.
This time something emerged.
Not a creature. Not qi. A whisper — thin as spider silk, carried on wind that should not have reached this altitude.
…tyrant…
…false order…
…the Ladder cracks…
The words bloomed inside Eveline's skull like cold needles. Her knees buckled for half a heartbeat before she locked them. Beside her, Huo Tan hissed through clenched teeth.
The whisper faded.
Then someone down in the outpost screamed.
A young disciple — Realm 4, barely twenty — stumbled out of the barracks, clutching his head. Blood leaked from his ears. He pointed upward.
"The sky! It's cursing the sovereign!"
Panic spread like fire in dry grass. Disciples poured out, weapons half-drawn, faces pale. A few dropped to their knees in the old imperial salute — forehead to stone, instinctive, ancient. Others stared upward in defiance or terror.
The tear widened — just a finger's breadth.
Another whisper rolled out, louder, layered with voices that should not have overlapped.
The one who abandoned us… the one who planted the blade…
A boy — no older than sixteen, still at Ember Vein — screamed in raw, terrified fury.
"That tyrant! Lucian Thaloryn! You let the heavens rot!"
The instant the forbidden name left his lips, the world answered.
Not with lightning. Not with flame.
Thunder rolled — deep, bone-deep — from nowhere. No clouds. No storm. Pressure thickened the air. Eveline's Starblood churned painfully, channels squeezed by an invisible fist.
Lanterns dimmed. Shadows stretched wrong.
The tear snapped shut like a mouth closing.
Thunder lingered in chests, in skulls.
Huo Tan exhaled slowly. "He heard."
Eveline swallowed. Her throat was dry. "The sovereign… hears his name?"
"Legends say so." The elder's voice was very quiet. "Speak 'Lucian Thaloryn' with true intent — hatred, fear, desperation — and something listens. Not spies. Not scrying. Listens. Like the name is a thread tied directly to a throne no one has seen in ten thousand years."
Eveline had heard the stories. Everyone had. The Last Palace: a name in crumbling scrolls, a half-myth of an eternal seat hidden beyond mortal reach. Some said a blade taller than mountains marked its place — a distant silver-white gleam on the eastern horizon, called the Mandate. A sword planted to end chaos. A reminder the world was ruled.
Most dismissed it as fable. Sects grew arrogant. Kings forgot.
Until tonight.
The boy was on his knees now, sobbing. Blood still trickled from his ears. Two older disciples dragged him back toward the barracks, murmuring apologies to the empty sky.
Huo Tan turned to Eveline. "You will write the full report. Every detail. The whispers. The name. Do not embellish. Do not omit."
She nodded numbly.
"And Eveline?"
"Yes, Elder?"
"If you ever feel the urge to speak that name yourself… don't."
He walked away, robes whispering against stone.
Eveline stayed on the rampart until the first gray light of dawn touched the Ironcrags.
The tear was gone.
Far to the east, beyond a thousand li of mountains and plains, a faint silver-white point gleamed on the horizon — unchanging, eternal.
The Mandate watched.
And somewhere beyond sight, in halls vast as voids, a man stirred.
He had not moved in ages.
He did not need to.
The name had been spoken.
The cosmos remembered.