Prologue

The sky over the eastern marches was wrong.

It was not dark—darkness could still be measured. This was a bruised red-gray, like flesh pressed too long beneath iron. The clouds did not drift. They stagnated, clotted in place as if the heavens themselves had begun to rot.

Below them, the Blight advanced.

It did not rush. It never rushed. It spread the way an answer spreads once spoken—slow, inevitable, impossible to take back.

Steel rang against chitin and bone. A Bastion force was breaking.

Ward-lines cracked one by one, runes screaming as they failed. Magic circles collapsed mid-cast, their limiters eaten alive by something that did not recognize the concept of restraint. Where spells struck true, Blight-things burned, folded, burst apart into steaming masses of half-remembered anatomy. Where they did not, men died screaming as their bodies were rewritten while still conscious.

“Hold the left flank!” someone shouted.

There was no left flank anymore.

A Blight mass surged through the fog—an amalgam of limbs and teeth and organs that should never have learned how to crawl. Its surface pulsed with half-formed runes; parasitic logic scavenged from dead mages. It screamed—not in pain, but in correction.

A swordsman met it head-on.

He was Engraved, his blade etched with identity runes, his stance absolute. For a heartbeat, reality bent to him. His sword cut clean through three layers of impossible flesh, severing definition itself.

Then the creature learned.

It split sideways, regrew, and swallowed him whole. The sword clattered to the ground, still humming, still believing its master existed.

Mages fell back, chanting faster, stacking circles recklessly.

“Limiter collapse in five—”

The explosion erased them all.

Blood soaked into soil that refused to remember it.

This was not a battle to win. It was a delay. Every soldier here knew it. Every Bastion force did. You fought the Blight not to triumph—but to buy time. Time for civilians to retreat. Time for wards to be reinforced. Time for the world to pretend it was not already losing.

A cry cut through the chaos.

“Civilians trapped near the walls!”

Too late.

The Blight surged again, tendrils spearing forward, dragging screaming figures into its mass. Faces dissolved mid-expression. Limbs twisted into new beings. The air filled with the smell of iron and something far worse—Axiom being consumed raw.

Then—

A thunderclap.

Not magic.

A weapon barked, sharp and absolute, louder than any spell. A line of light tore through the fog, and the Blight creature at the ravine detonated, its core rupturing outward in a contained implosion of runic backlash and burning fragments.

Another shot.

Another monster vanished, blown apart from the inside by a bullet that carried a spell not cast, but embedded.

A man moved through the battlefield like an error the Blight could not resolve.

He wore a long coat reinforced with layered sigils, its edges scorched and torn. In his hands was a firearm unlike any known design—barrel runed, chamber glowing, every shot a negotiated violation of reality. Each bullet detonated after penetration, spells blooming outward from the impact point, tearing Blight-things apart faster than they could adapt.

He did not shout. He did not rally.

He simply advanced.

A creature lunged from the side, its maw unfolding too wide, too eager.

The man pivoted, fired once.

The monster ceased to exist.

Behind him, survivors stared in disbelief.

He reached a wounded soldier pinned beneath a collapsed ward-frame, a Blight tendril inching toward the man’s exposed throat. The gun barked again. The tendril disintegrated into smoking residue.

The stranger stepped forward, placing himself between the wounded and the advancing mass.

His voice was calm. Commanding. Familiar in a way that made the air feel heavier.

“Treat the wounded,” he said. “Then retreat. Now.”

The soldier blinked up at him, bloodied, shaking.

“Th-thank y—”

The words died.

The soldier’s eyes widened. Not in relief.

In horror.

The man’s face was visible now—scarred, older, harder, but unmistakable. red eyes that reflected spell light without warmth. A sigil burned faintly beneath his collar, half-scraped away, forcibly removed long ago.

Recognition spread like wildfire among the survivors.

A scream tore from the soldier’s throat.

“Y-you’re—!” His voice broke. “You’re the traitor of Therion! The Forsaken Heir!”

The battlefield seemed to hesitate.

Other soldiers turned. Mages faltered mid-cast. Someone dropped a staff.

Whispers erupted, panicked, furious, terrified...