Year: 7002 A.A. | Location: Valoria, Eastern Gate
The world ceased its turning.
Time, that relentless river, seemed to coagulate into something thick and viscous around the Eastern Gate of Valoria. The smoke from a hundred fires hung motionless in the air, as if too afraid to drift. The distant, sporadic sounds of battle elsewhere in the capital faded into a dull, oppressive hum, a backdrop to the absolute silence at the heart of the storm.
Into this silence, Jarik's confession fell not like a bomb, but like a single, perfect snowflake into a still pond—its impact precise, its ripples destined to spread and shatter everything.
"Yes. It was I."
He spoke the words with a chilling, conversational ease, as if discussing the provenance of a fine wine. The simplicity of it was the greatest cruelty. He did not boast. He merely stated a fact of the universe, as undeniable as gravity.
Kon's response was not a choice, but a reflex. Crimson embers of mana, hot and angry, burst from his skin, swirling around him like a shroud of furious ghosts. The ground beneath his feet hissed, the very stone beginning to sweat and soften. His voice, when it tore from his throat, was the sound of mountains grinding against one another.
"What are you talking about?!"
Jarik did not so much as blink. If anything, his grin softened into something akin to pity—the most insulting expression of all. His long, pink ears gave a leisurely twitch.
"From the very beginning, Lord Kaplan," he clarified, his tone that of a patient tutor explaining a basic principle to a dull child.
Each syllable was a nail.
"When you pledged your sword to King Darius, when the broken Kaplan Clan found a new home in these white walls… we marked you. Not as a soldier, but as a mind. A rare, dangerous thing. It was only a matter of time before you and your band of idealists became a true threat." He tilted his head, eyes gleaming with a perverse admiration. "So I began to wonder… who among you was the architect? The patient one? The chess player who would see ten moves ahead while Razik was still swinging his club?"
His gaze, bright and unblinking, pinned Kon where he stood.
"It was you, Lord Kaplan. It was always you."
Kon felt the breath freeze in his lungs. A peculiar, vertiginous sensation washed over him—the horrifying feeling of being seen, truly seen, not as a warrior or a lord, but as a set of predictable patterns, a psychological equation that had been solved. His strategies, his gambits, the very shape of his ambition had been laid out on another's table and dissected.
"I studied you," Jarik continued, his voice a silken purr. "I learned the contours of your thoughts. Every feint, every consolidation, every moment of calculated restraint—oh, I savored them. It was like reading a thrilling novel where I already knew the ending, yet admired the prose. I knew that once you felt strong enough, you would try to seize the narrative of this war. You would gamble everything on one, grand, decisive moment."
Kon's claws were fully extended, trembling with the need to rend and tear. The air around him crackled with suppressed violence.
"So," Jarik announced, spreading his arms in a gesture of mock benediction, "when you launched your first coordinated strikes against Razik's outposts two years ago, I was elated. I saw the pattern crystallize. I recognized the signature of your ambition."
His smile became a razor-cut in the fabric of the world.
"You wanted to draw Razik's main force out. To force him into a field battle of your choosing, where your mobile tactics and the Lords' combined might could crush him. A brilliant trap, with the bait of your own aggression. Truly magnificent." Jarik chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. "But Lord Kaplan… that is precisely what I would have done."
Kon's growl was sub-audible, a vibration that started in the bedrock and traveled up through the bones of the city.
"So," Jarik sighed, as if the conclusion were inevitable, "I countered you."
The words landed with the physical force of a warhammer. Kon's mind recoiled. It was not a defeat he was being told of; it was a violation. His own intellect, his proudest weapon, had been turned against him. He felt a sudden, sickening lurch, as if the floor of his own identity had given way.
"We shared the same mind," Jarik whispered, and the intimacy of the statement was more horrifying than any threat.
"LIAR!" Kon's roar was raw, primal, shaking dust from the broken battlements. It was the cry of a creature denying its own reflection in a poisoned mirror.
Jarik's laughter was soft, almost tender, and it carried a cruelty so profound it silenced the echo of Kon's denial.
"Oh, but it is true," he murmured. "The counter was simple, elegant. All I had to do was ask myself one question: If I were Lord Kaplan, how would I defend against my own masterstroke?"
He began to recite Kon's strategy back to him, not as an enemy listing weaknesses, but as a composer humming a familiar, beloved tune.
"You stationed Lord Kushan here," he said, gesturing with a delicate paw toward the impassive eagle, "as the all-seeing eye in the sky, the early warning that could never be blinded. You positioned Lord Kurt as the unbreakable anvil, the reinforcement that could appear anywhere the hammer fell. You kept the other Lords in strategic reserve, a coiled spring of devastating power." Jarik shook his head in faux awe. "It was a symphony of force. Too beautiful. Too… symmetrical."
The rabbit's expression darkened, his eyes becoming pits of cold amusement.
"And so I pondered—if I were you, if I truly wished to break the spirit of this land forever… how would I destroy Valoria?"
The question was a dagger twisted in a fresh wound. Kon's brilliant mind, his greatest asset, was now his torturer, racing ahead against his will, seeing the flawless logic of his own plans used as a blueprint for his ruin.
His breath hitched. He could feel warm blood where his own claws were biting into the flesh of his palms.
"But Valoria," Jarik sighed, his tone shifting to one of theatrical regret, "was an impossible nut to crack. The Eternal Shell—" he offered a slight, mocking nod to Thrax, whose stony face was immobile, "—guarded the city. His Aegis was not a wall; it was a law of nature. The gates were concepts of 'closed,' the walls were ideas of 'impenetrable.' The heart of the capital was insulated from the world."
He tapped a single claw against his own chest, the sound absurdly loud.
"I, however, could only enter places that bore my mark. That was the limit, the rule of my Arcem."
Teleportation. The concept clicked into place in Kon's mind with the finality of a cell door slamming shut. The battlefield earlier—Razik's forces vanishing from his grasp, slipping through seams in reality. The inexplicable reinforcements behind lines. The elusive, ghostly quality of their campaigns. It hadn't been Razik's tactical genius. It had been this… this stage manager, moving pieces around a board Kon didn't even know he was playing on.
The ground seemed to liquefy beneath Kon's feet. His crimson aura flared erratically, the edges beginning to blur and smoke as his control frayed.
The humiliation was a poison, but worse was the chilling, intellectual violation. Jarik had not just outmaneuvered him; he had understood him. He had mapped the neural pathways of Kon's strategic mind and then walked them himself, laying traps in Kon's own footprints.
He thought like me. He planned like me. He used my own genius to gut me.
A bestial snarl ripped from Kon's throat. His body trembled with the need for visceral, immediate destruction.
But beneath the incandescent rage, something colder and more terrifying was taking root: a seed of dread.
"But then I remembered."
Jarik's eyes lit up with the glee of a child about to reveal the hidden prize in a game. The malice in his voice was now sweet, cloying.
"I had a hidden piece. A card I'd kept face-down on the table. The one piece that could bypass all your defenses, all your calculations." His grin stretched, becoming a gash of triumph. "And it was through that piece… that I gained entry into ArchenLand."
The atmosphere tightened like a garrote. Talonir's voice cut through, sharp and absolute as a honed blade.
"Who was it?!" The bowstring creaked, a hairsbreadth from release. "Name the traitor!"
Jarik's smile was a victory parade. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his right paw. On his palm, a complex crest of mana ignited, burning with a sickly violet-white light—Amythx, the power of alien will.
The air before him rippled, warping like heat-haze over a desert. Reality itself seemed to flinch, then part.
And a figure stepped through.
The world stopped.
She was there. In the flesh. The golden stripes of her fur seemed to drink the firelight, casting her in a tragic, beautiful glow. Tigrera Kaplan. Her eyes, once pools of molten amber that held promises of dawn, were now chips of cold topaz, reflecting nothing but the ruins around them.
Kon's body locked. All sound, all sensation, drained away. His heart did not beat; it simply ceased to function, a frozen lump of muscle in his chest. The universe narrowed to the space between him and her.
'No.'
The denial was not a thought, but a fundamental reordering of reality. This was impossible. A cruel dream. A mirage born of smoke and grief.
'It could not be.'
But she was solid. She breathed. She stood beside the grinning rabbit, her posture not of a prisoner, but of a pillar. His vision tunneled, the edges going dark, leaving only her face in perfect, horrifying clarity.
"You?" The word was a breathless exhalation, scraped raw from the ruins of his soul. He took a step forward, his body moving without his command, a marionette pulled by a string of shattered hope.
Tigrera's gaze met his. There was no warmth there. No memory of shared laughter in sun-dappled glades, of whispered vows under a canopy of stars. No echo of the future they had painted together. There was only a vacant, polished coldness, more devastating than any hatred.
"Tigrera…" His voice broke on her name, a ceramic thing hitting stone. "Why?"
The silence that answered was a living entity, thick and suffocating. Even the distant cries of the dying city seemed to hush in reverence for this profound act of desecration.
Jarik's paw—a gesture of vile ownership—came to rest on her shoulder. His claws, though not digging in, seemed to sink into the very idea of her.
"Go ahead, daughter," he prompted, his voice dripping with paternal poison. "Tell him."
Daughter.
The word detonated in the silent space.
Blood.
Kin.
The foundations of Kon's world, already cracked, dissolved into ash. The ground was no longer beneath him; he was falling through an infinite, lightless shaft.
Tigrera's expression hardened, not with emotion, but with the act of will it took to don a mask of absolute indifference.
"It's just as Lord Jarik said."
Her voice was steady, clean, devoid of all resonance. It was the voice of a stranger reading a decree.
"He is my father. I am obligated to listen to my father now, am I not?"
Kon staggered. It was not a stumble, but the collapse of an internal structure. His claws sank into the earth, anchoring him to a world that was no longer real. His heart was a wild, wounded thing, thrashing against the cage of his ribs, screaming for this to be illusion, for his eyes to be lying.
"But…" The word was a plea, torn from a place deeper than thought. "But he is a Fare. And you—you are a Kaplan! Our blood… our clan… How could you betray your own blood?!"
She offered no answer. Her silence was an abyss into which his understanding fell, forever.
Kon's voice shattered completely. The proud Tiger Lord, the strategist, the unyielding general, was gone. In his place was a raw, exposed nerve of a man, his every secret hope laid bare and bleeding.
"I was going to marry you." The words trembled, carried on a current of pure, undiluted grief. "We were going to rebuild the Kaplan Clan from the ashes. You and I… we were the last thread. The only hope for our people to be whole again."
The visions flooded him, unbidden and merciless: her smile by the river where they'd pledged themselves, her hand in his, calloused from training yet infinitely gentle. The dream of a hearth, of little ones with golden stripes, of a name restored to honor. A life he had not just wanted, but had built his entire fractured being around—a North Star in his personal darkness.
"Our love…" His voice was a ghost of itself now, thin and cracking. "Tell me… did it mean nothing? Did you ever… love me?"
For a fragment of a second—a heartbeat within a heartbeat—her mask slipped.
Her lips parted, not to speak, but in a minute, involuntary gasp. Her eyes, those windows he had once believed he could see forever through, flickered. A storm of something—pain, conflict, a memory screaming to be heard—churned in their depths before being violently suppressed.
Kon saw it. That tiny fracture in the ice.
A desperate, stupid, impossible hope flared in the wasteland of his soul.
But Jarik's grip on her shoulder tightened imperceptibly. It was not a physical pressure, but a psychic command, a reminder of chains unseen.
The light in her eyes died. The mask slammed back into place, harder, colder than before.
"It was all a sham."
The sentence was delivered with flat, final efficiency.
Kon's knees gave out. They struck the hard, blood-soaked earth with a dull, final sound. His sword, the extension of his will, the symbol of his oath, slipped from his numb fingers and lay in the dirt beside him, just so much scrap metal.
The Tiger Lord who had faced down armies, who had harnessed the power of annihilation, who had stood unbowed before the might of Narn, now knelt broken in the dirt, crushed not by force, but by truth.
"You fell for it," Tigrera stated, her voice the winter wind that scours the last leaf from a dead tree.
"The loss of ArchenLand… is your fault."
His mind went white. A silent, screaming static filled the chambers of his consciousness. Strategy, duty, rage—all were washed away in a tsunami of pure, unmediated agony. The carefully constructed dam holding back a lifetime of loss—his clan, his home, his parents—shattered under this new, ultimate betrayal.
How could she?
The question was a worm, burrowing into the core of him, eating away all that was left. Memories swirled—her laughter like bells, the feel of her fur against his, the future they had whispered into being. All of it, now revealed as a beautiful, elaborate lie. A stage set for his destruction.
He had lost her. He had failed his clan. He had doomed ArchenLand.
He had lost everything.
And in that void, that perfect, absolute zero of the soul, something began to stir. Something that had been waiting in the dark.
Talonir's voice rang out, clean and sharp as a scalpel, severing the emotional paralysis.
"I have heard enough. You both die here. Now."
The bow of the Eagle Lord was not merely drawn; it was a geometric assertion of death, the arrowhead a point of focused inevitability.
Beside him, Lord Thrax did not speak. He simply expanded. His Aegis Tide, which had moments ago been a healing wave, now rose around him like the walls of a submerged fortress, blue-green mana solidifying into layers of impenetrable, crushing pressure. His silence was his verdict.
The judgment of the Narn Lords was rendered.
Jarik merely smiled wider, his ears perking up with delight, as if they had just announced the commencement of a particularly entertaining play.
And in that exact, punctuated moment—
—the sky intervened.
No thunder preceded it. No light heralded its arrival. It was simply there: a single, tear-shaped shard of crystalline ice, glowing with a soft, internal Amythx violet. It drifted down through the smoky air with the serene, indifferent grace of a falling leaf.
It was small. Delicate. Insignificant.
It descended until it kissed the surface of the Crimson Ring on Kon's finger—the Arya of Destruction.
And it melted into it.
The ring convulsed.
Kon's entire body jolted as if struck by lightning. A seizure of pure sensation locked his muscles. His heart stuttered, skipped, then began to beat a frantic, alien rhythm.
A voice blossomed in the center of his mind. It was not his own. It was not Jarik's mocking sneer, nor Talonir's stern command. It was soft. Velvety. Impossibly kind.
'You feel troubled, Lord Kaplan.'
It spoke not to his ears, but to the raw, weeping wounds of his spirit.
'I sense distress. Despair. Sadness. Regret.'
Each word was a balm and a probe, naming the nameless horrors within him, giving shape to the formless pain.
Kon gasped, a ragged, wet sound. He clutched at his chest, fingers clawing as if to tear out the aching hollow where his heart used to be.
'And most of all… Rage.'
The word resonated through the hollows of his being, a bell tolling in a cathedral of ruin.
'A rage so profound it is devouring you from the inside. You despise it. You fear it. But it will not be silenced.'
Kon's body trembled violently now, a leaf in a hurricane of his own making. Spittle flecked his lips. His eyes, wide and unseeing, stared at nothing. The war within him was visible—the last shreds of his will battling the tidal wave of anguish.
And finally, his voice emerged. Not a roar, but a whimper. The sound of a child lost in a terrible dark.
"Take it away from me."
The plea was the purest surrender.
The voice answered, wrapping around his broken mind like a mother's embrace, like the solace of the grave.
'As you wish, my dear. Let it all go. Find peace in this quiet corner I have made for you. Just rest. And let your body…'
A pause, pregnant with cosmic dread.
'…express the rage for you.'
The earth screamed.
Not a sound, but a fundamental vibration of agony. From Kon's kneeling form erupted a pulse of energy so raw, so utterly unformed, that it had no color, only a distortion that made the eyes water and the stomach lurch. Then it resolved—a maelstrom of his familiar crimson mana, now drowned, corrupted, married to seething, serpentine streams of violet Amythx. The two powers did not mix; they fought, they writhed, they fed on each other, creating something new and monstrous.
His body began to change.
The noble crimson suit of the Grand Kaplan form blackened as if burned from within, streaked with violent, glowing cracks of purple. It seemed less like armor and more like a shell straining to contain the pressure.
His eyes—the fierce, intelligent amber—bleached to a perfect, pupil-less white. Blank. Empty. Windows to a room where no one lived.
His muscles swelled with grotesque, unnatural power, veins surfacing like purple rivers under his skin, pulsing with the corrupted light.
And within his mind… there was silence.
A perfect, blissful, terrible silence.
Kon Kaplan—the thinker, the lover, the leader—was gone.
Scoured away.
All that remained in the driver's seat was a vacancy.
A vacancy waiting to be filled by rage.
Talonir's bowstring trembled. Not from uncertainty, but from a primal, atavistic shudder that traveled up the flawless wood and into his very soul. His eagle eyes, which could spot a field mouse from a thousand feet, could not comprehend the wrongness of what stood before him.
Thrax took an unconscious half-step back, his immense shell of mana glowing brighter, thickening instinctively. His ancient spirit, which had weathered millennia, felt a chill older than time.
They had seen Kon's wrath. They had felt the heat of his fury, the terrifying edge of his power.
This was not that.
This was not Kon Kaplan, enraged.
This was Rage, wearing Kon Kaplan's skin.
His chest rose and fell in slow, deep breaths that sounded like bellows in a forge of nightmares. His claws flexed, dripping not blood, but sizzling motes of crimson and violet energy that ate tiny pits into the stone where they fell. His shadow on the ground did not follow his movements; it slithered independently, a pool of living darkness with a mind of its own.
And his face… his face was a placid mask. No snarl. No grimace. No grief. Just empty, white-eyed calm.
The rage was no longer his to bear.
It was his body's only tenant.
Kon Kaplan had relinquished control.
The Mad Tiger had awakened.
The Aura of Dread
The pressure hit them before the sight fully registered. Talonir and Thrax whirled as one, their combat-honed instincts shrieking a warning that bypassed thought entirely.
The aura.
It was no longer the blistering, proud heat of Kaplan's crimson power. It was not even the chilling void of his Grand Form's erasure.
This was a stench. A metaphysical reek of corruption, of willful malignancy, of a beautiful thing turned inside-out to show the rot within. The air within twenty yards of Kon grew thin and toxic, not from heat, but from a leeching effect. Light dimmed. Sound muffled. The very laws of physics seemed to grow queasy and uncertain at the edges.
Even Tigrera—architect of this ruin, mistress of betrayal—took an involuntary step backwards. Her cold composure cracked, revealing the pale terror beneath. Her golden eyes were wide, her pupils shrunken to pinpricks. This… thing… was not the man she had deceived. It was not the proud warrior whose heart she had held. This was a calamity wearing his face, and the sight struck a chord of primal fear deeper than any strategy, any loyalty, any hatred.
Her lips moved, forming a silent word that might have been his name. But no sound emerged. The aura stole it.
Jarik, however, was transfixed. Not with fear, but with rapture. His earlier amusement was gone, replaced by a feverish, almost religious ecstasy. His grin was a rictus of delight, his eyes shining with the reflected glow of the unfolding atrocity.
"Oh, magnificent…" he breathed, the words a prayer to chaos itself. Then he clapped his hands together, the sharp report absurd and jarring. "And now…"
He turned his gleaming eyes to the horrified Lords, to the trembling traitor, to the empty vessel of fury that had been his enemy.
"…the true fun begins."