Part 1: The Kick
The rubble shifted. It was a slow, tectonic grinding of stone against stone, a sound of heavy resistance being overcome by desperate strength.
A hand, stripped of its iron gauntlet and skin, gleaming with wet red muscle and black veins, clawed its way out of the stones. The fingers dug into the shattered floor tiles, scratching deep grooves into the marble as they sought purchase.
Alaric dragged himself free.
He was a ruin. The battle with the "Sun King" had been catastrophic, but the collapse of the wall had shattered what little cohesion he had left. His left arm dragged uselessly behind him, the humerus pulverized, the limb held onto his torso only by thick, ropy threads of black Sanguine moss that acted like wet, exposed tendons. His chest was a crater; the heavy iron breastplate had been concave, pressing the jagged metal ribs into the necrotic meat beneath. His legs were twisted, the greaves flattened against the bone, making every inch of movement a symphony of grinding friction.
The Sanguine moss inside the chassis of his body was working frantically. It was a biological engine pushed past its redline, pulsating with a feverish, sickly grey light. It cannibalized his non-essential organs—his stomach, his remaining lung tissue—converting them into raw binding material to stitch his spine back together. Tissue tore and re-knit in a cycle of rapid, squelching regeneration that sounded like footsteps in mud. He was leaking black blood onto the floor, a trail of corruption marking his slow, painful crawl.
But the rage... the rage was infinite.
It was a cold, expanding star in his chest that eclipsed the pain. It was the only thing keeping him moving. The physical devastation of his body was irrelevant compared to the absolute spiritual violation of what he was seeing.
In the back of his mind, the Blood Hag was screaming.
"Stop!" she hissed, her voice vibrating in his marrow. "Play dead! Regenerate! Do not draw its gaze!"
She knew what Ragnaur was. Even from the safety of the Copper Grove, peering through Alaric's eyes, she recognized the scent of something ancient and terrible on the man standing in the breach. It was a scent that predated her swamp, a scent of Old Earth and Titan blood. It was the smell of a predator that did not belong in the food chain of this age.
But Alaric was no longer listening to the parasite. The leash had frayed. He wasn't hearing her commands; he was listening to the echo of Elara's name bouncing off the ruined walls. He was seeing the back of the man who was stealing his justice.
He looked up.
He saw Ragnaur walking away toward the breach in the wall. The Wolf moved with a casual, lumbering grace, his massive black sword resting on his shoulder as if it were a twig. The dust swirled around him, afraid to touch his armor.
And in Ragnaur's arms, cradled like a sleeping child, was Leonus.
Leonus—his kill, his justice, his revenge—was alive.
Leonus was escaping. The man who had watched Elara die, the man who had checked his pocket watch while she choked on her own blood, the man who had sold Alaric's soul for a year of grain—he was going to live. He was being carried away to safety, perhaps to heal, perhaps to rule again. The ledger was not balanced. The debt was not paid.
Alaric's vision tunneled. The grey dust of the room turned a violent, monochromatic red.
A soundless roar built in his throat. It started as a vibration in his chest and tore through his ruined larynx, a silent scream of absolute denial. He forced his broken legs to work. He commanded the Sanguine energy to explode one last time, cannibalizing his own kidneys and liver to fuel the movement.
No, Alaric thought, the word a jagged shard of intent. He does not leave. He does not live.
He lunged.
It was a desperate, suicidal charge. He didn't run; he launched himself. He threw himself across the room, a missile of hate and rusted iron, aiming for Ragnaur's exposed back. He didn't care about strategy. He didn't care about survival. He would tear them both apart. He would die, yes, but he would take them with him. He would bite the throat of the Wolf and lock his jaw until the sun went black and the world ended.
Ragnaur, walking toward the night air, stopped.
He heard the scrape of metal on stone. He heard the wet slap of the Sanguine moss tightening. He heard the displacement of air as three hundred pounds of revenant launched into the air.
He didn't turn around. He didn't drop the King. He didn't shout a warning to his troops outside.
He simply stopped walking. He shifted his weight to his left leg, planting his boot firmly on the flagstones. He waited for the sound of the rush to get close. He timed it not with his eyes, but with the instinct of a creature that had been killing since it learned to walk.
When Alaric was three feet away, airborne, claws extended for the kill, his shadow falling over the Wolf...
Ragnaur pivoted.
He moved with a speed that defied his size. It was a blur of dark iron and grey fur, a motion so efficient it barely registered as movement.
He raised his right leg and delivered a side kick.
It wasn't a martial arts technique. It wasn't a graceful move learned in a dojo or practiced in a training yard. It was a dismissal. It was the way a man kicks a stray dog that is biting at his heels. It was casual. It was contemptuous. It was an annoyance being dealt with.
But the force behind it was cataclysmic.
Ragnaur's iron boot connected with the center of Alaric's chest.
BOOM.
The sound was like a cannon firing in a library. It was a physical shockwave that rippled through the air, knocking the dust from the rafters and blowing the remaining tapestries off the walls.
The laws of physics seemed to bend around the impact point. Alaric didn't just fly backward; he was launched.
The Sanguine armor, which had withstood siege weapons, magical lightning, and holy fire, shattered instantly. The breastplate disintegrated into shrapnel. The moss beneath was vaporized by the sheer kinetic transfer, turning into a fine red mist.
Alaric smashed through the stone pillar he had just crawled out from. The granite exploded into dust.
He kept going.
He smashed through the inner wall of the Throne Room. The ancient masonry, laid five hundred years ago, offered no more resistance than wet paper.
He smashed through the outer wall of the corridor beyond.
He punched a hole through the side of the Palace.
Alaric was sent rocketing out into the night air, a comet of broken iron and blood. Time seemed to slow as he hung in the void, suspended over the city he had destroyed. He flew over the courtyard where he had once fetched a stick from the mud for a laughing Prince. He flew over the walls he had sworn an oath to defend.
He fell three hundred feet.
He crashed through the slate roof of the lower barracks.
CRASH.
Timber beams snapped like toothpicks. Heavy slate tiles shattered like glass. The roof disintegrated under his impact.
He punched through the second floor, taking the floorboards and the furniture with him.
CRASH.
He slammed into the stone floor of the Royal Armory below.
THUD.
The impact was so violent that it compromised the structural integrity of the entire southern wing. The walls groaned. Cracks raced up the masonry like lightning bolts. The foundations, weakened by age and the violence of the night, gave way.
With a roar of collapsing stone that woke the entire lower city, the southern wing of the Royal Palace collapsed inward.
Dust and stone rained down. A thousand tons of rubble buried the armory. It buried the history of the Gaanish military. It buried the monster.
High above, in the silent, wind-swept Throne Room, Ragnaur lowered his leg. He hadn't even lost his balance. He adjusted the unconscious King in his arms, ensuring Leonus's head was supported, treating the body with a rough, soldierly care.
He looked at the jagged hole in the wall. He looked at the massive cloud of dust rising from the ruins below.
"Down, boy," Ragnaur grunted.
He turned and walked out into the night, the only living thing left in the castle that wasn't afraid of the dark.
Part 2: The Discipline of the Leash
The darkness beneath the collapsed South Wing was absolute. It was a crushing weight of stone, timber, and history that pressed down on Alaric with the indifference of a mountain. He lay buried under tons of pulverized masonry, his body a broken mosaic of flattened iron and dead meat.
Ragnaur's kick had done more than shatter his armor; it had pulverized the dark magic holding him together. The structural integrity of his form was gone.
Alaric clawed at the stone. His left arm was a ruin, the bones shattered inside the sleeve of the mail, held together only by thick, ropy strands of Sanguine moss. His legs were twisted at sickening angles, the iron greaves bent inward, crushing the dead muscle beneath. The moss, usually a vibrant, pulsing red, was now a dull, flickering grey, frantically cannibalizing his own internal organs to stitch his severed spine back together for the third time that night. It wasn't a repair; it was a desperate, biological splice.
But the physical ruin was nothing compared to the spiritual hollow in his chest.
He had failed.
The realization hit him harder than the Titan's boot. He had eaten the Council. He had slaughtered the Iron Lions. He had torn the capital apart stone by stone. He had Leonus in his grip—the man who watched Elara die, the man who sold Alaric's soul for a year of grain. He had him. He felt the snap of the King's bones. He smelled the fear.
And now, Leonus was gone. Carried away like a sleeping child in the arms of a Wolf. Safe. Alive.
A sound built in Alaric's throat. It started as a groan, a vibration in his crushed larynx that shook the dust from his faceplate. It grew, swelling with the pressure of a dam breaking. He tried to scream a name—Leonus—or perhaps Elara. He tried to give voice to the injustice of it all.
But his throat was too damaged, his humanity too eroded.
What came out was not a word. It was a howl.
It was a long, jagged, discordant shriek of pure, unadulterated devastation. It wasn't the roar of a predator claiming territory; it was the wail of a ghost realizing it is trapped. It echoed in the small pocket of air beneath the rubble, deafening him, vibrating in his marrow. It was the sound of a purpose being ripped away. The sound of a Dog realizing the car has driven away without him. It was a sound of absolute loss.
"Quiet," the Blood Hag whispered in his mind. Her voice was ice dragging across granite—cold, bored, and utterly devoid of sympathy. "You are making a scene."
Alaric ignored her. He thrashed in the dark, slamming his remaining fist against the stone lintel that pinned him. He wanted to break the world. He wanted to tear the sky down.
"He is alive..." Alaric's thought was a jagged shard of mental static. "He breathes... while she rots..."
"He breathes because you are clumsy," the Hag corrected, her tone sharp with disdain. "I gave you the strength to tear down a kingdom. I gave you the teeth to eat a King. And you threw it away because you wanted to play 'Hero' with a Titan. You looked at a Wolf and thought you could bark. Now, look at you. Broken in a hole."
Alaric growled—a low, wet rumble. No.
He shoved the slab of concrete aside. Moonlight, pale and dusty, filtered down through the cracks. He dragged himself upward, inch by agonizing inch, fueled by a hate that was stronger than his biology. He would not rot here. He would find them. He would crawl to Dolbey if he had to. He would chew through the walls of their fortress.
He breached the surface.
He pulled himself out of the crater of the armory and collapsed onto the cobblestones of the lower courtyard. The air was cold and smelled of smoke. The dawn was breaking, casting a grey, washed-out light over the ruins of the palace. Alaric lay there, a heap of battered plate and leaking ichor, wheezing red mist from the cracked faceplate of his helm.
He tried to stand. His legs screamed, the shattered femurs grinding together, but he forced the Sanguine moss to harden, turning his own blood into a splint. He rose, swaying, a nightmare refusing to wake up, his eyes scanning the horizon for the black armor of the Wolf.
"By the Light... look at it."
The voice came from ten paces away.
Alaric turned his head slowly. The tendons in his neck popped wetly.
Standing near the fountain—the same fountain where he had been humiliated as a child—was a group of five warriors.
They were not soldiers of Dolbey. They did not wear the grim iron of the invading legion. These were locals. They were Adventurers from the Gilded Company of Gaan.
They were the "heroes" of the capital—men and women who made their living hunting goblins for sport, posing for paintings, and drinking in the high-end taverns of the Noble District. They wore armor polished to a mirror sheen, inlaid with useless jewels and gold filigree. Their cloaks were silk, their swords were etched with runes that glowed for aesthetic rather than effect. They were the poster children of Gaan's decline—flashy, expensive, and utterly devoid of substance. While the city fell and the real soldiers died, these opportunists had hidden in the shadows, waiting for the dust to settle so they could loot the ruins.
To a commoner, they looked like saviors. To Alaric, they looked like proxies.
They were alive. They were whole. They were Gaanish heroes, the same breed of vain, useless peacocks that Leonus loved. They represented everything he hated. If he couldn't kill the King, he would kill the King's reflection.
The leader, a man with flowing blond hair and a breastplate sculpted to show perfect abs, stepped forward. He held a sword that hummed with a low-level holy enchantment—expensive, but weak.
"It's the Beast," the leader announced, his voice trembling slightly but masking it with bravado. He glanced back at his companions—a mage in velvet robes, a ranger with a bow made of ivory, and two heavy infantrymen with shields that looked like art pieces. "The bounty is fifty thousand gold crowns. Dead or alive."
"It looks dead already," the mage sneered, wrinkling his nose at the smell of Alaric's rot. "Look at it. It's falling apart. The Wolf of Dolbey must have broken its back."
"Easy pickings," the ranger laughed, nocking an arrow. "Let's put it down and claim the reward before the Dolbey legionnaires secure the area."
Alaric stared at them. The audacity of it. These scavengers thought they could harvest him? He was the calamity that had eaten the Council. He was the end of the line.
The rage surged again, hot and blinding. He needed to tear something apart. He needed to feel warm blood on his hands to replace the cold failure in his heart.
"Come," the Hag commanded, her voice dropping an octave, vibrating in his marrow. "Leave the insects. You are damaged. To the sewers. We regroup."
Alaric took a step toward the adventurers. He dragged his ruined leg, the iron boot scraping sparks on the stone.
"I said HEEL!" the Hag commanded.
Alaric roared. It was the same howl from the pit, directed now at the blond man. He didn't heel. He lunged.
Despite his broken legs, despite the missing arm, he moved with terrifying, feral speed. He wanted to tear the throat out of the blond leader. He wanted to paint the fountain with their "heroic" blood. He wanted to take his failure out on their flesh.
He was three feet away. The leader flinched, raising his shield in panic, bracing for death.
Then, the world stopped.
It wasn't a spell from the mage. It wasn't an arrow.
It was the Leash.
Inside Alaric's body, the Sanguine moss suddenly seized. It didn't just stiffen; it locked. The fluid magic that allowed Alaric to move his dead limbs solidified instantly into a rigid, internal cage. It was like rigor mortis striking in a millisecond. The Hag had simply turned off his ability to move.
Alaric stopped in mid-air.
He crashed to the ground, frozen in the posture of a lunge. His arm was outstretched, his claws inches from the leader's boot. He couldn't move a finger. He couldn't blink. He couldn't twitch. He was a statue of hate, trapped in his own rotting meat.
"You wish to bite?" the Hag's voice purred in his mind. It was a sickening, arrogant sound. "You wish to play instead of listen? You lost, Alaric. You lost the King. And losers do not get to choose their next meal. You sit."
The adventurers froze, waiting for the attack. When Alaric didn't move, they exchanged confused glances.
"Is it... dead?" the mage asked.
The leader poked Alaric's outstretched hand with the tip of his sword. Alaric didn't react. He couldn't. He was screaming internally, slamming his will against the Hag's control, but she held his blood hostage.
"It's paralyzed," the leader realized, a cruel grin spreading across his face. "Whatever magic holds this corpse together... it stalled."
He looked at his friends. The fear evaporated, replaced by the sadistic opportunism of bullies who realize their victim is tied down.
"Well," the leader said, drawing a flask of consecrated oil from his belt. "Let's make sure it stays down."
He poured the oil onto Alaric's exposed neck muscles, where the armor had been torn away.
SSSZZZTT.
The pain was blinding. The holy oil reacted with the necrotic Sanguine tissue like acid on raw nerves. Smoke rose from Alaric's flesh, smelling of burning hair and rot. It felt like being branded with a white-hot iron.
Alaric tried to scream. He couldn't. His jaw was locked shut by his own blood. He had to take it.
"Does it burn?" the Hag whispered, her voice silky with malice. "Good. This is what happens when a bad dog tries to run the pack. You stand there and you take it. This is your discipline."
"Hit the gaps!" the leader ordered. "Use the Blessed Steel! Cut the tendons!"
The adventurers swarmed him.
The ranger fired arrows point-blank into the joints of Alaric's armor. The silver tips burned deep into the meat, severing the mossy ligaments holding his limbs together.
The heavy infantrymen brought their hammers down on Alaric's already broken legs. CRUNCH. CRUNCH. They smashed the fused metal into splinters, grinding the bone to dust.
The mage cast bolts of fire into the open wound where Alaric's arm used to be, cauterizing and re-burning the stump over and over.
They laughed as they worked. They treated him like a carcass on a butcher's block.
"Look at the big bad monster now!" the mage cackled, kicking Alaric in the faceplate. "Not so tough without your dark magic, are you?"
Alaric felt every cut. He felt every burn. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the humiliation. He was supposed to be the predator. He had challenged a Wolf, only to be beaten by a pack of rats because his master wanted to teach him a lesson.
The Hag laughed. It wasn't a sympathetic laugh. It was the laugh of a master watching a disobedient animal get beaten by children.
"This is your reward for failure, Alaric," she taunted. "You let the King live. So now you die a thousand little deaths. Enjoy the holy water. Let it remind you of who owns you."
The leader of the adventurers placed the tip of his sword against the slit of Alaric's visor, right over his glowing red eye.
"Smile for the portrait," the leader mocked, leaning in. "I'm going to take this head to the—"
"Enough," the Hag decided abruptly. "You have learned."
The lock released. Not fully—just enough to allow movement, but not enough to fight. She granted him the mercy of escape, but denied him the satisfaction of the kill.
Alaric didn't attack. He couldn't. He was too broken, too ravaged by the beating. The rage had been replaced by a cold, hollow shame.
He didn't lunge at the leader. He rolled.
He rolled away from the sword thrust, tumbling awkwardly into the decorative canal that fed the fountain. The water was waist-deep and filthy.
"It's moving!" the ranger shouted. "Finish it!"
Alaric didn't fight. He forced the vents of his armor open. He didn't release a combat steam; he released a thick, oily smokescreen of black blood-fog. It filled the courtyard instantly, smelling of rotten eggs and sulfur.
Under the cover of the darkness, the battered Dog crawled on his belly. He dragged himself through the mud, slithering like a worm toward the grate of the main sewer line.
He squeezed his massive frame through the rusted iron bars, breaking them with a final, pathetic shove of his shoulder. He fell into the darkness of the city's waste, vanishing into the filth.
Above, the adventurers cheered. They high-fived. They congratulated themselves on driving off the beast.
Down in the dark, floating in the sewage, Alaric drifted away. He was broken. He was humiliated. He was alone.
And in the silence of his mind, the Hag purred.
"Good dog."
Part 3: The Maw of the Sun
The journey from Gaan to Dolbey was a funeral procession for a man who was already mourning himself.
The armored transport wagon of the Dolbey Legion rattled over the ancient cobblestones of the Bridge of the Twins, the massive stone span that connected the two kingdoms over the churning grey waters of the Serpent River. Inside the reinforced iron box of the carriage, the air was suffocatingly hot, stagnant, and smelled of something sweet and terrible—the scent of charred meat mixed with expensive incense.
King Leonus lay strapped to a metal gurney in the center of the wagon.
He was conscious. He wished to the Gods he wasn't.
The pain was a universe unto itself, a blinding, white-hot absolute that erased all other senses. The Holy Essence he had consumed in the Throne Room had not just burned him; it had hollowed him out. His legendary gold armor, the Lion's Heart, was no longer a suit of protection he wore. It was his skin. The catastrophic heat of the battle had melted the gold and mithril plating, fusing it inextricably to his epidermis. Where the metal ended, the flesh began, but there was no clear line of demarcation. It was a landscape of weeping blisters, blackened char, and raw nerves encased in a tomb of precious metal.
He was blind. His eyes had been boiled away by the pure light he had summoned to fight Alaric. In their place were two empty, crusted sockets that wept a clear, golden fluid that sizzled when it touched the metal of the gurney.
"Hold him down," the medic grunted. He was a veteran field surgeon of the Dolbey Legion, a man who had amputated limbs in mud trenches and stitched bowels back into bellies, but even he looked pale in the dim light of the lantern. "I need to debride the chest wound. The metal is poisoning the blood. If the sepsis reaches the heart, he's dead."
Two heavy infantrymen held Leonus's arms. They wore thick leather gloves reinforced with asbestos lining because the King's skin was still radiating a fever heat that could blister bare hands.
The medic unstoppered a flask of Greater Healing. It was a potent, expensive brew, glowing with positive energy.
"Hold steady," the medic murmured, pouring the liquid onto the fused ruin of Leonus's chest.
HISSSSSS.
The potion didn't heal. It didn't soothe. It reacted violently, sizzling and evaporating instantly upon contact with the King's flesh.
Leonus arched his back, straining against the leather straps. He screamed. It was a dry, rasping sound, like sandpaper dragging across bone. His throat had been crushed by Alaric's grip, his larynx a ruin of cartilage and scar tissue. He sounded less like a man and more like a dying insect.
"It's not working," the medic cursed, wiping sweat from his brow with a bloody rag. "He's rejecting positive energy. It's like pouring water into a furnace. His soul... it's too damaged."
Leonus lay there, trembling. The echo of the medic's words rattled in his mind.
But in the dark of his blindness, beneath the crushing weight of the pain, he felt something he hadn't expected.
Silence.
For twenty years, his mind had been a cacophony of voices. The Pope whispering about debts and sin. The Council demanding tax hikes and trade deals. His father's ghost telling him he wasn't strong enough. And Alaric... Alaric telling him he was a brother, Alaric telling him he was the Shield.
The voices were gone.
The Crown was gone. The Throne was destroyed. The Kingdom was occupied.
He had failed. He had lost everything. The "Sun" had set.
And in that total, absolute loss, in that complete void of responsibility, he found the one thing he had never possessed in his life: Peace.
It was a strange, grey peace, like the quiet of a house after a party has ended and all the guests have left. The math of kings was over. He didn't have to calculate sacrifices anymore. He didn't have to balance the lives of peasants against the wrath of gods. He didn't have to worry about heirs or lineages or the integrity of the border.
He was just a man. Dying in a cart.
It was liberating.
"He's crashing!" the medic shouted, his voice rising in panic. "The heart rate is plummeting. Get the defibrillation crystal!"
Leonus wanted to speak. He wanted to tell them to stop. He wanted to tell them that for the first time, he was okay. He felt the cold creeping in from his extremities, numbing the agony of the burns. It felt like a soft blanket being pulled over him.
Alaric, Leonus thought, the name drifting through his mind not with hate, but with a profound, tragic sadness. We were just boys, weren't we? Just two scared boys playing in the mud. I'm sorry I dropped the toy soldier. I'm sorry I made you fetch it.
He felt his heart stutter. The pain began to recede, replaced by a cold, numbing grey fog. It was welcoming. It was soft.
"Clear!" the medic yelled.
A jolt of lightning hit his chest.
Leonus's body seized, but his spirit didn't return. It kept drifting. It slipped the knot.
His heart gave one final, violent thud against his ribs.
And then it stopped.
King Leonus died in the transport wagon, halfway between the kingdom he ruined and the kingdom that pitied him. He died with a slack jaw and a face that, for the first time, looked young again.
The wagon arrived at the Dolbey military encampment an hour later.
King Valdemar of Dolbey stood by the open doors, looking down at the body. The medic was drenched in sweat, his hands shaking, holding the useless defibrillation crystal.
"We lost him, Sire," the medic reported, defeated. "The damage was catastrophic. His body just... gave up. We tried everything. Potions, crystals, direct mana infusion. nothing worked. It was like he... just left."
Valdemar looked at the corpse. He saw the peaceful expression on the ruined face. He saw the tension gone from the jaw.
"A dead King is a dangerous thing," Valdemar muttered. "Martyrs inspire rebellions. We cannot bury him in Gaan. And we cannot keep him here. The people will want a shrine, or they will want a scapegoat."
He turned to his captain.
"Take him to the Iron Crematorium," Valdemar ordered. "Burn him. Tonight. Scatter the ashes in the winds of the Parches. Let him finally disappear."
The soldiers nodded. They covered the body with a sheet.
Leonus was carried away. He was dead. He was free.
The Dolbey Iron Crematorium was a temple of finality. A massive, windowless brick structure where the dead were turned to smoke. The furnaces roared with a constant, hungry sound, vibrating the floor.
The workers shoved the gurney into the main chamber. They left it in the center of the room, beneath the high, soot-stained ceiling. They retreated quickly, locking the heavy iron doors behind them.
Leonus lay in the silence. His body was cold. His soul had departed, drifting into the ether, seeking the rest it had earned through suffering.
But the universe of Gaan was not built on rest. It was built on debt. And the Dark Gods who watched the board were not done playing.
The shadows in the corners of the room began to move.
They detached themselves from the walls, sliding across the floor like oil. They didn't flicker; they consumed. The light from the furnace grates seemed to bend away from them.
A figure stepped out of the darkness.
It was a silhouette wrapped in a cloak of absolute, light-absorbing vantablack. There was no face, only a hood filled with the abyss. It moved without sound, a walking void in the fabric of existence.
It was the Envoy.
The figure approached the gurney. It looked down at the peaceful corpse of the Sun King.
The Envoy did not speak. It did not offer a bargain. The Void does not negotiate; it takes.
The peace on Leonus's face was an insult to the Dark Gods. The game wasn't over. The piece was not allowed to leave the table.
The Envoy reached out a pale, grey hand. The fingers were long, adorned with rings of unpolished iron.
It touched Leonus's forehead.
It was a violation of the highest order. It was a theft of death itself.
The shadows on the floor surged. They rushed up the legs of the gurney. They swarmed over the body, pouring into the nose, the ears, the slack mouth. They seeped into the cracks of the fused gold armor.
The soul of Leonus, which had been drifting toward the light, was snagged. It was hooked by a chain of cold darkness and dragged violently back down.
Inside the corpse, the peace shattered.
Leonus screamed in the spirit realm. No! I am done! Let me go! I paid the price!
The Void ignored him. It stuffed his screaming soul back into the rotting meat. It filled his veins not with blood, but with necrotic magic. It rewired his dead brain with a single command: SUFFER.
The body on the gurney convulsed.
The fused gold cracked with a sound like a gunshot. Black veins shot through the metal, pulsing with a deep, sickly violet light. The skin turned from pale death to the grey of a storm cloud.
Leonus's chest heaved. He took a breath—a ragged, sucking sound that pulled the very warmth out of the room.
His eyes snapped open.
They were no longer empty sockets. They were spheres of total darkness, rimmed with a violent, electric purple.
The peace was gone. The clarity was replaced by a cold, agonizing hunger. He was back. He was trapped in a cage of gold and rot, bound to a new master he did not choose.
He sat up. The leather straps snapped.
He stood. He towered in the room, a monster of fused metal and darkness.
He didn't want this. He hated this.
He opened his mouth. His jaw unhinged, revealing a throat that was a portal to the abyss.
He screamed.
It wasn't a battle cry. It wasn't a threat. It was a sound of pure, guttural horror. It was the sound of a man realizing he is in hell.
"ALARIC!"
The name tore through the crematorium, a blood-curdling shriek of a Lich who cursed the very existence that bound them together.
The Sun King was dead. The Black Sun had risen.