Location: The Winding Arrow Rivers Valley | Year 7002 A.A.
The Winding Arrow Rivers Valley had once been a place of quiet beauty. The great bend of its twin streams carved a ribbon of silver through the land, watering tall grasses that whispered like a choir in the wind. In spring, one could stand at its heart and see miles of emerald meadows stretching outward until the horizon dissolved into soft hills. But now—now it was a graveyard.
The grass had been blackened by fire, the streams muddied with blood. The once-living earth had been churned into mud, a battlefield of broken shields and twisted spears. Where sunlight might once have shimmered on the rivers, it now glared upon charred armor, severed limbs, and faces frozen forever in masks of terror.
The stench was unbearable—burnt flesh, hot iron, and the heavy tang of mana residue clung to the air like a shroud. One might have mistaken the entire valley for the aftermath of some divine wrath, a punishment leveled by the heavens themselves.
And yet, amidst that silence of death and ruin, a single figure still stood.
Lord Jeth Fare.
He was not a man of elegance nor a figure shaped to inspire awe through refinement. His presence was the kind that weighed upon the chest, heavy as iron, and yes almost as frail as the wind. His body, light and slim, was drenched entirely in blood. Not his own—never his own—but the lifeblood of those who had thought themselves fierce enough to match him.
In his hands he carried his twin chakrams, circular blades whose edges gleamed faintly under the pale light of dawn. The weapons were slick with gore, and yet they sang faintly when he flexed his wrists, as if even they rejoiced at the slaughter wrought through them.
Jeth did not rejoice. He did not smile at his victory, nor cry out in triumph as lesser men might have. He simply stood there, a beast of burden released from its yoke at last, silent but for the steady rise and fall of his chest. His breath was measured, not ragged. His posture was upright, not weary. The only betrayal of strain was the subtle tightening of his shoulders, the clenching of a jaw that had borne the weight of prolonged battle.
"To think it took me this long to dispatch a few Özels," he muttered.
The words were not for the dead, nor for the living who might still cower in the valley's distant shadows. They were for himself—spoken in the deep, country-accented drawl that had carried him from the backfields of Hazël to the heights of lordship.
His voice cut through the valley's silence, low and rumbling, like the complaint of a storm cloud too heavy with rain.
"What a shame."
The admission carried no theatrics. It was plain, matter-of-fact, but it struck with the gravity of a verdict. Jeth Fare was not celebrating. He was scolding himself.
He rolled his massive shoulders, the blood caked on his skin cracking as he moved, and cast his eyes over the ruin. The Özels lay broken at his feet, their bodies bent at impossible angles, their once-shining armaments now nothing more than scrap. Some were burned by the resonance of mana, others cleaved clean through by the relentless bite of the chakrams.
And yet, despite the dozens who lay dead, Jeth found no satisfaction.
"Even though I wasn't expectin' that #5 to be amped by the Shadow," he said, speaking aloud as though the dead might still hear him, "this fight shouldn't have lasted more than a minute."
The words hung in the valley, absurd in their severity. Any ordinary man—any ordinary Lord even—would have spoken of relief at surviving such an ordeal. To face warriors empowered by the Shadow and emerge alive was already the mark of legend. But Jeth was not ordinary.
He had been forged under the harsh tutelage of discipline, his body broken and rebuilt time and again until even the impossible bent before him. He bore the name of Lord not as a title, but as a burden. And to him, every second wasted, every strike taken, every breath that dragged on longer than it should have, was a disgrace.
"A disgrace," he repeated, shaking his head slowly. "What a disgrace I am."
Jeth's brooding silence was broken by a familiar sound—not through ears, but within the mind itself.
'Lord Fare, can you hear me?'
The voice resonated like the deep note of a horn blown across a foggy valley, steady and certain. He recognized it instantly.
"Kopa," Jeth muttered under his breath, his heavy accent curling around the name like an anchor rope. His massive shoulders shifted as though bracing against a new kind of weight. "I hear you loud and clear, Kopa. What's the situation at the capital?"
There was the faintest pause, the quiet static of thought being carried across distance. And then Kopa spoke again, his voice calm, regal, yet edged with strain.
'Most citizens and soldiers have been evacuated, including the injured. They're being led your way by Lord Thrax. He'll return to the battle once they're secure.'
Jeth's jaw tightened. The thought of children, elders, and broken warriors stumbling toward him through fields already drenched in death was a bitter thing to picture. A Lord's burden was not only to fight but to shield those who could not. Even victory tasted like ash when it was won on ground already soaked with the blood of the defenseless.
"The King is engaged with a Child of Shadow," Kopa continued. "Darius used King's Benevolence, so I was worried for him. I sent Lord Maymum to assist, so they should be wrapping up soon."
"And Lord Kurt?" Jeth asked, his voice low, deliberate.
For the first time in their exchange, the stag hesitated. Silence stretched across the link, long enough for Jeth's grip on his chakrams to tighten until blood slicked fresh along his palms.
Finally, Kopa replied: "I'm trying to locate him now. His Arcem would have been a great help to us in this situation, but his absence means he's likely engaged in a battle of his own."
The words rang hollow in Jeth's ears. He could almost feel Kopa's careful control, as though the stag were holding cards close to his chest.
Jeth's gaze darkened, his breath heavy as smoke. "And the other thing…" He spoke slowly, each word falling like an anvil. "Viceroy, you ain't tellin' me everything. What are ya hidin'?"
Silence again. Thicker this time, deliberate.
Jeth snorted, the sound like the low growl of a beast. His instincts rarely failed him; the earth itself seemed to whisper when shadows stirred. "So, I wasn't mistaken then," he muttered, his voice pitched low enough that even the corpses would not overhear. His eyes lifted to the horizon, narrowing against the pale light creeping over the battlefield. "I thought it might've just been disorientation from the fight I just had… but if you felt the same mana signature as well…"
He left the sentence unfinished. Some truths were too heavy to speak into the air, even telepathically.
Kopa's voice returned, measured and cautious: "We are not sure yet. I'm arriving at the location now. I just wanted to check in and be sure you were okay."
It was a noble sentiment, spoken like the stag he was, ever dignified. Yet Jeth could feel the tremor beneath it. Not fear—no, Kopa was far too seasoned for fear. But unease. The kind of unease that came when one realized the board was shifting, and not even the lords themselves could see where the next move would fall.
Jeth tilted his head slightly, his neck creaking audibly as though his body were carved of old oak. His eyes, still sharp despite the haze of battle fatigue, fixed upon nothing in particular.
"Thank you, Kopa," he rumbled at last, his tone almost soft compared to the carnage around him. He turned his gaze downward to his blood-drenched hands, then toward the horizon. "And be careful."
There was no reply. The link faded.
Jeth was alone again—alone with corpses, silence, and the distant, unsettling echo of a mana signature that did not belong.
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Valleys of Mount Pire — Year: 7002 A.A.
A light wind stirred the broken valley. At first, it was a gentle thing, as though nature itself sought to comfort the earth after its recent torment. Yet within that breeze lay a design, a rhythm too purposeful to be mere chance. Green leaves, carried from the distant trees clinging stubbornly to the cliffs, began to swirl together in a slow, deliberate dance. They did not scatter but converged, forming a spiral that spun tighter and tighter until, in the midst of that gathering, a shape began to form.
The shape solidified, first vague and ethereal, then clear as day: the proud, antlered figure of Lord Kopa. The stag stepped forth from the storm of leaves, his hooves touching the scarred soil with reverence, as though he sought to honor the ground even in its ruin.
The valley stretched before him like a wounded beast. Deep fissures split the earth as if giants had torn at it with their bare hands. Charred soil smoked faintly, rising in small tendrils that whispered of fire long since spent. Stones that once crowned the ridges lay shattered, flung about as though by a god's careless anger. And woven into all of this, lingering like an invisible miasma, was the residue of mana—power unleashed recklessly, staining the very air.
Kopa's nostrils flared as he drew it in. It was acrid, bitter, a cocktail of forces clashing against one another. He recognized signatures, faint but undeniable—energy belonging to the soldiers of ArchenLand and darker still… the unmistakable tang of the Shadow.
His heart sank. The Shadow had indeed touched this place.
He stepped forward, each hoof pressing into the scorched soil, his cloak trailing behind him like a fading shadow. Every so often, he would pause, kneel slightly, and brush a hand across the fissures in the ground, as if reading the story they told.
Yes, there had been a battle here. The presence of the bodies archenland bodies shoes that they had walked into a trap. But there was something else—something deeper than mere battle. The mana signature pulsed faintly, like an echo repeating long after the sound had faded.
Kopa closed his eyes. For a moment, he thought he heard it: a whisper. No words, no form, just an impression, slippery as mist between the fingers. It lingered in his mind, stirring unease.
"This…" he whispered to himself, his voice nearly lost in the wind. "This does not belong."
The Shadow's touch was unmistakable. And yet, within it was another trace, faint and veiled, one that made his brow crease with concern. Something layered upon the Shadow itself… or perhaps beneath it.
The stag straightened, his antlers catching the pale light of dawn. His breath came slow, steady, but his eyes were troubled. Whatever had transpired here, it was not merely the clash of soldiers and Lords.
"A battle of this magnitude… This is where I felt that mana... But I don't see anyone."
Kopa's voice was barely a murmur, more to himself than to any other. His hooves pressed softly into the broken earth as he advanced, each step deliberate, cautious. The air thickened as he rounded the bend, a creeping weight pressing against his chest. Then he saw it—and his world fell still.
The valley ahead bore wounds far greater than those he had passed. It was as though the land itself recoiled from the figure standing at its heart.
Adam.
The man stood with his back turned, utterly still, and yet his presence saturated the air like poison in the lungs. Mana bled from him—not as a river, nor even a flood, but as a suffocating ocean whose depths were beyond comprehension. It was heavy, primal, and foreign, resonating with something more ancient than even Kopa's long memory could fathom.
The air dropped sharply in temperature, frost whispering along the broken stones. Each breath Kopa drew burned with cold, as though winter itself had slithered into his chest. He swallowed, throat dry, but the chill did not leave him.
Before Adam, two colossal crystals jutted violently from the earth—shards of sapphire light grown like malignant trees from the valley floor. Their glow pulsed faintly, unnatural and menacing.
The first crystal pierced straight through a blood-stained kimono. Fabric, once white, was now dyed a deep crimson, pinned like a moth beneath glass. Whatever lay trapped beneath that shard was utterly obscured, but the silence around it spoke of death.
The second crystal was worse. It had driven itself through a Tracient, slamming them mercilessly into the cliff wall. Their form was mangled, body half-shattered, blood dripping steadily down the crystal's length. And yet, somehow, life remained. Kopa's trained senses could feel it: the faint, trembling spark of existence.
Recognition struck him like a blow. Hazël Rank #13. A warrior of formidable renown. A child of Shadow. Reduced now to a broken ornament hanging upon Adam's cruel display.
Kopa's breath caught in his chest. This was no battle—this was judgment.
But it was not the impaled Hazël that rooted Kopa to the earth. Nor the body beneath the kimono. Nor even the hideous blue crystals that pulsed with otherworldly menace.
It was Adam.
Not his actions. Not his cruelty. But his very being.
The mere presence of his mana clawed at Kopa's chest, a suffocating hand pressing down upon his heart. His body, normally so disciplined, betrayed him—tremors in his limbs, sweat slick upon his brow, his breath shortened into shallow gasps. His antlers, symbols of dignity and command, felt suddenly too heavy upon his head.
"I've never… felt like this before," he whispered, though no ear but his own heard the words. "Is this… what it is to be afraid?"
He had lived long enough to face countless enemies. He had seen death, he had stared into Shadow-touched horrors, he had walked the tightrope between despair and hope for his people. Yet never—not once—had he known fear like this.
This was not the fear of losing, nor of pain, nor of death. This was something older. A primal recognition. As though the marrow of his bones remembered some predator that the mind had long since forgotten.
It was not what Adam did. It was what Adam was.
Something beyond comprehension. Beyond the scales by which power was measured.
And then—Adam moved.
Only slightly. A tilt of the head, as if acknowledging the whisper of a breeze. Yet for Kopa, it was as though the entire valley turned with him.
The stag's heartbeat leapt into chaos, hammering so hard he thought his chest might split. His lungs constricted as if cords were tightening around them. The trickle of sweat down his brow became a flood, his vision blurring at the edges.
It was absurd. He, Kopa the Viceroy, felt more like prey in that moment than he had ever felt in his centuries of life. His knees threatened to buckle, and only sheer discipline kept him rooted upright.
For the first time, he understood what it meant to be utterly powerless—not in body, not in will, but in spirit.
But before Adam could fully turn—
His body swayed. The dreadful aura that had moments ago been suffocating enough to paralyze the valley flickered. For a heartbeat, Kopa thought it might intensify, crushing him entirely.
Instead, it vanished.
Adam's knees buckled, his form crumpling to the ground with a muted thud.
The silence that followed was deafening.
The oppressive pressure dissolved instantly, like fog burned away by the morning sun. The cold in the air lifted. The heaviness on Kopa's chest broke apart, and his lungs convulsed in desperate relief.
Kopa gasped, doubling over, breath ragged as if he had been drowning and now only just surfaced. His hands shook uncontrollably. He had not realized until that moment just how close he had been to collapse himself.
The stag steadied himself with visible effort. Then, driven by instinct rather than thought, he rushed forward.
Kneeling beside Adam, Kopa pressed two fingers lightly to the man's neck.
A pulse. Steady, but faint. Breath came in shallow draws. His body trembled slightly, not from fear, but from sheer exhaustion.
"Unconscious," Kopa muttered aloud, almost as though speaking the word would ground him in reality. "He pushed himself too far."
It was a strange sight. The man who only moments ago had reduced him—the Viceroy of ArchenLand, Lord of the Verdant Valleys—to little more than trembling prey, now lay helpless as a child at his hooves. The contradiction twisted in Kopa's chest.
He did not know whether to be grateful or unsettled. Perhaps both.
With gentle precision, vines uncoiled from his body, slithering across Adam's frame like green ribbons. They wound carefully, binding without constricting, supporting his limp form. Kopa rose slowly, lifting the man as though he were little more than a broken branch in need of carrying home.
He turned to leave—but something stirred in the corner of his vision.
A faint movement. The flutter of breath where he had expected silence.
Kopa's eyes narrowed, and he followed it, stepping carefully over shattered rock and ash-strewn soil. A figure lay among the wreckage—a Goat Tracient, body collapsed in fatigue rather than ruin. Their chest rose and fell, faint but steady. Unlike the others, they were not mangled, not burned, not pierced by sapphire shards.
"They survived…" Kopa whispered, almost in disbelief. He bent low, his vines brushing gently across the figure's frame. "No wounds… merely drained."
It was an odd mercy in a place that knew none.
The vines wrapped around the Goat, lifting them with the same careful grace as Adam. Kopa bore their weight with no complaint, though his mind stirred uneasily. Why had they been spared, when others had been reduced to fragments of flesh and ash? Was it chance? Or was it… deliberate?
As he turned back, his gaze fell again upon the second blue crystal. The impaled Tracient still hung there, body riddled with lacerations, skin pale with blood loss. Hazël Rank #13. Once a warrior of formidable standing, now reduced to a pitiful figure skewered against the valley wall.
Kopa's jaw tightened. He could still sense the faint spark of life clinging to them—fragile, stubborn. But his trained eye saw the truth. The body was too far gone. If left unaided, they would die within hours. If he attempted to extract them now, the act itself might kill them.
His vines twitched uncertainly. For a brief moment, compassion warred with calculation.
Then, with a deep exhale, he forced the vines back to his side.
"No point lingering," he said at last, voice heavy.
He turned, bearing his burdens, and began the slow walk from the battlefield. Each step carried him farther from the shattered crystals, from the fractured valley, from the suffocating dread that still clung faintly to the edges of his soul.
He did not notice the faintest stir of movement behind him.
The battered, broken body pinned against sapphire light twitched. A breath rattled through bloodied lungs. Slowly, painfully, eyelids fluttered open.
Arajhan's eyes had begun to open.
_________________________________
Forj Mountain Ranges — Year: 7002 A.A.
The mountain winds carried the clangor of war. Clashes of steel rang out like bells struck by angry gods, reverberating through the jagged cliffs and echoing from peak to peak.
There, amidst the high crags and broken ledges, two figures wove their struggle into the very bones of the mountains themselves.
Lord Talonir Kushan — the 7th Lord of Narn, his blade a glimmering arc of honed golden light — stood against Thagros Fil, the towering Tracient whose skull scythe was more like a moving fragment of night. Sparks showered as weapon struck weapon, their mana colliding in bursts that shook loose avalanches from the snow-tipped cliffs.
The ground beneath them bore scars of their duel. Craters. Splintered stone. Carved trenches where blades had missed their mark but carved the world instead. Each movement was precise and terrible, not merely violence but the collision of philosophies — a Kushan's disciplined might against a Fils brutal, unyielding force.
And yet, as Talonir parried another scythe swing, his mind was elsewhere.
He felt it.
Not through eyes or ears, but in the marrow of his being, the veins of mana that connected all Narn Lords. A pulse had ripped through ArchenLand — no, through the whole of creation, like lightning racing across a web.
The first surge: the signature of King Darius . It was like standing in sunlight, stern and immovable. His Benevolence, poured over the land in a sacrifice that even from miles away left Talonir's skin tingling.
The second: Trevor Maymum. That irrepressible amber current, wild and flickering as flame and storm.
But then came the third.
And it made Talonir's heart clench.
A peculiar energy. Neither sunlight nor flame. Neither storm nor stone. It was like a shadow breathing, a paradox that whispered familiarity yet screamed foreignness.
The aura of the Shadow, but… distorted. Fused with something older. Something deeper.
Talonir's sword pressed harder against the scythe before him, his eyes narrowing with sudden ferocity.
"Just now," he growled, his voice like the grinding of granite. "What did you do, Child of Shadow? What did your master unleash upon the land?"
Thagros Fil did not flinch beneath the weight of his enemy's suspicion. His stance shifted, his massive scythe sliding back into readiness with the calm inevitability of a farmer's tool returning to the soil. His enormous frame was carved from endurance, his face carved from patience.
"Forgive me, Lord Kushan," he said, his tone deep and unhurried, almost pastoral as he flipped his trunk, "But it seems our respective peoples are engaged in battle." His words carried no mockery, only fact, spoken with unnerving composure as if the chaos of war were little more than a distant thunderstorm.
He lifted his scythe again, its blackened edge catching the faint gleam of mana in the thin mountain air. "I can hardly tell who the victors are… or who the victims shall be. It won't matter," he said, his voice stripped of all ornament. There was no bravado in it, no anger — only the implacable certainty of a mountain that had endured a thousand storms and would endure a thousand more.
The wind whistled through the mountain range, weaving between peaks and valleys, carrying with it the lingering echo of clashing blades. Talonir's wings trembled faintly at his back, his chest still heaving from the intensity of the duel. His sword gleamed, faint streaks of mana still running across its length like rivulets of light.
He studied his opponent carefully. Thagros stood as tall and immovable as the cliffs themselves, yet there was no eagerness in his stance, no lust for battle. He had parried, defended, tested — but not truly pressed.
And so Talonir finally asked the question that had been gnawing at him.
"Why are you doing this? You come from a respectable line of the Fil Clan. You had the element of surprise against me, and yet you didn't immediately attack. Why is someone like you serving the Shadow?"
Thagros' eyes shifted, not to Talonir, but to the distant horizon — to where ArchenLand simmered with surges of mana that even now shook the world. His face was not cruel, not mocking, but somber, as though he were bearing a weight Talonir could not see.
"...Well," he said at last, his voice quiet but steady, "there's no need to hide it."
The words settled like stones dropping into water.
"I am indebted to the Master. A debt that I can only repay with absolute servitude. A servitude I cannot deny… because I am bound by a Mana Vow."
Talonir's feathers stiffened, the grip on his sword tightening instinctively. His eyes narrowed, but not in anger — in realization.
A Mana Vow.
No ordinary oath. Not a soldier's promise, nor a clan's tradition. A binding etched into the very threads of mana itself. A contract that shackles the soul, unbreakable without unleashing destruction upon the one who bore it.
It was slavery dressed as loyalty. Chains hidden behind the word "duty."
"Is what's at stake that precious to you?" Talonir asked, his voice low, almost pitying. "Is it worth becoming a pawn?"
Thagros closed his eyes, his breath leaving him in a long, weary sigh.
"Like I said," he murmured, his tone carrying neither defiance nor regret, "it doesn't matter."
And then he did something that startled Talonir more than any blow of his scythe could have.
He sat down.
Lowering his massive frame to the broken stone, he crossed his legs in a meditative pose, his scythe resting across his lap like a farmer laying aside his tool at dusk. His eyes closed, his shoulders relaxed, his tusks gleaming on the light.
The air grew strangely calm.
"My job here is done," Thagros said quietly, almost like a teacher dismissing a student. "You are free to go, Lord Kushan. Though…" His eyes flickered open, heavy with an unreadable depth. "…you should hurry."
Talonir stood motionless, his blade still raised, watching, calculating. Suspicion prickled at him like the cold wind on his feathers.
This was no trick.
No feigned weakness.
This was resignation — the kind of resignation only one shackled by an unyielding vow could wear.
'What could it be?' Talonir thought, his sharp gaze studying the man before him. 'What is binding this man to the Shadow? What debt could drive him to kneel in servitude?'
He would not have his answers here. Not now.
So, with a final glance, Talonir let the tension drain from his stance. His sword lowered, though it did not leave his grip. His wings unfurled, vast and black and brown against the pale morning light, feathers rippling in the mountain winds.
With a single thrust of power, he launched into the air.
The world fell away beneath him as he soared, the peaks shrinking, the battlefield behind him swallowed by distance. His eyes locked on the horizon — on ArchenLand, where storms of mana brewed and fate's threads tangled into a knot that would not easily be undone.
Thagros remained seated, still as carved stone, his scythe lying dormant across his lap. His gaze followed the dark figure of Talonir vanishing into the sky.
For a long while, he said nothing. His expression was unreadable, but in the stillness of his posture there was something both resolute and sorrowful, as though the weight of his vow pressed heavier than even the mountains around him.
At last, in a whisper nearly stolen by the wind, he spoke.
"...Be careful, Lord Kushan."