Peace, Kael Light discovered, was heavier than war.
War was simple. War was a line on a map, a target in a scope, a bone breaking in the chest to fuel a spell. War had momentum. But peace? Peace was a statue. It was the act of standing perfectly still while the world eroded around you, demanding that you hold up the sky without trembling.
Five years had passed since the Coronation of the Faceless.
Five years of the Iron Mask.
New Aethelgard had blossomed into the miracle of the continent. The "Radiant Grid," powered by the efficient venting of the Twins' excess mana and the passive collection of the dawn, had eliminated the need for coal. The skies were clear blue, no longer choked by the industrial smog of the Academy era. The streets were paved with a composite of white stone and recycled Soul-Steel, gleaming under the sun.
To the citizens, it was a Golden Age. The "Little Suns"—now adults in their thirties—ran the guilds and the schools. The "Army of the Broken" had transformed into the Peace-Keepers, a highly trained force that spent more time building bridges than blowing them up.
But the anchor of this paradise lay thirty miles to the south.
Fortress Agony.
The Great Engine, once the terrifying avatar of the Iron Sultanate, had become the ultimate symbol of Kael's dominion. It sat in the crater of Stormhaven, a black iron mountain fused to the bedrock. It was no longer a machine; it was a city within a fortress.
The Moon-Scarred had turned the undercarriage into a labyrinthine den, their howls echoing through the massive, dormant gears at night. The Iron-Guard manned the upper decks, where Radiant Cannons swiveled silently, tracking the southern horizon. It was the most heavily guarded site on the planet, a grim reminder to the neighboring empires that the Iron King did not sleep.
Kael stood in the Council Chamber of the Royal Spire, looking at the holographic projection of the Fortress.
"Sector 4 reports a minor mana-leak in the Void Drive," Ignis's synthesized voice reported.
The Artificer had changed in five years. His human half had withered significantly, his skin like parchment stretched over bone. To compensate, he had encased almost his entire torso in a life-support shell of brass and glass. He was now 80% machine, a brain floating in a jar of his own invention.
"Seal it," Kael's voice rumbled from behind the Iron Mask. The voice modulator built into the Soul-Steel made him sound like a god speaking from a deep well. "If the Void Fragment wakes up, we vent the sector."
"Understood," Ignis clicked. "And the Sultanate?"
"Quiet," Kaelen Thorne said. The grandson of the old commander was now the High General. He stood tall and proud in his black armor, a stark contrast to the shrinking figure of his grandfather, who sat wheezing in the corner. "They pay their tithes on time. The coal trains arrive every Tuesday. They are terrified of the Fortress, Your Majesty. Rumor has it they think you feed dissidents to the Engine."
"Let them think it," Kael said. "Fear travels faster than truth."
"Speaking of truth," Pip said. The Lord Keeper was seated at the far end of the table. His hair was completely white now, his hands shaking with a tremor he tried to hide beneath the velvet of his sleeves. "The delegation from the Frost Peaks arrives at noon. Princess Isolde is with them."
The room went silent.
The Alliance of Ice. It had been the talk of the court for months. The union of the Iron King and the Frost Princess. It was the political masterstroke that would secure the northern border for a century.
"Is everything prepared?" Kael asked, turning his masked face toward Pip.
"The guest quarters are ready," Pip said. "But Kael... she expects a husband. Not a monument. You have to talk to her. You have to... be present."
"I am always present," Kael said.
"You know what I mean," Pip sighed, rubbing his temples. "You haven't taken the mask off in five years, Saint. Not even for us. I'm starting to forget what you look like."
"You know what I look like, Pip," Kael said softly. "I look like the day you met me."
Pip looked away. That was the tragedy of the Long Peace. Everyone knew the secret, but no one wanted to say it. The King didn't age. And that fact, more than his magic, was what terrified his friends. It was a constant reminder of their own mortality.
"I will meet her," Kael said. "I will be charming. I will be the King she expects."
"Just don't be the Monster," Martha's voice came from the comms. She was bedridden now, managing the Healing Halls from her quarters. "She is a young woman, Kael. She is twenty-four. She is coming into a city of machines and wolves to marry a man with no face. She is terrified."
"I know," Kael said. "I can feel it."
The arrival of the Frost Peaks delegation was a spectacle of winter in the heart of summer.
Massive, shaggy mammoths—smaller cousins of the ancient beasts, bred for the mountains—lumbered through the gates of New Aethelgard. They carried litters draped in white furs and blue silk. The air around the procession dropped twenty degrees, a localized winter brought by the cryomancers of the North.
Kael stood on the steps of the Royal Spire, flanked by the Twins.
Castor and Pollux were twenty-two years old now.
And they were magnificent.
Castor stood six-foot-three, a golden giant with muscles carved from marble. He wore a sleeveless tunic that showed off the intricate sun-tattoos Ignis had designed to help channel his heat. Pollux was a vision of lethal grace, tall and slender, wearing a gown of woven frost-spider silk.
They stood perfectly still, their expressions unreadable. But Kael could feel the hum of their power. It was different now. Mature. The chaotic spikes of their teenage years had settled into a deep, oceanic rhythm. They didn't leak energy anymore; they held it with terrifying efficiency.
"She's pretty," Castor murmured, his eyes fixed on the lead mammoth.
"She's political," Pollux corrected, her voice cool. "Don't get distracted, brother. If she freezes the fountain, I have to fix it."
"Behave," Kael ordered, his iron voice low.
The lead mammoth knelt. A carpet of frost unrolled from the litter.
Princess Isolde stepped out.
She was not what Kael expected. He had anticipated a delicate flower of the court, or perhaps a warrior-woman like the Lich Queen.
Isolde was neither. She was small, pale, with hair the color of polished platinum braided tightly against her skull. She wore practical leather armor beneath a cloak of white bear fur. Her eyes were a piercing, icy blue, and they scanned the plaza not with fear, but with a calculator's precision.
She walked up the steps, ignoring the towering forms of the Twins, ignoring the growling Moon-Scarred honor guard. She walked straight up to Kael.
She stopped three steps below him, looking up at the Iron Mask.
She didn't curtsy. She didn't bow.
"King Kael," she said. Her voice was clear, crisp, like ice cracking on a lake. "My father says you are a god. My advisors say you are a demon. I see you are wearing a lot of metal for a summer day."
The court gasped. Pip winced.
Kael stared down at her through the slits of his mask. He felt the "Stable Agony" thrum in his chest—a rib fracturing and resetting in the silence.
Thud-Crack.
Isolde's eyes flickered. She heard it. Or felt it.
"I wear the metal so I do not burn the world, Princess," Kael rumbled. "It is a courtesy."
"A courtesy," Isolde repeated. She stepped up one more step, invading his personal space. "Or a cage? In the North, we do not hide our scars, King Kael. We wear them as warnings."
"In the South," Kael said, "we bury our dead. And sometimes, we have to bury ourselves to keep them company."
Isolde paused. She looked at the mask, really looked at it, trying to find the man behind the iron.
"I am here to secure an alliance," Isolde said, lowering her voice. "I am here because my people need your grain, and your people need my glaciers to temper your engines. I am willing to marry a mask, Your Majesty. But I will not share a bed with a suit of armor."
Kael felt a strange sensation. Respect.
"Then it is fortunate," Kael said, offering his arm, "that the armor comes off. Eventually."
He led her into the Spire.
The weeks leading up to the wedding were a blur of diplomatic maneuvering.
Kael spent his days in the Council Chamber, finalizing trade routes and defensive pacts with the Frost Peaks ambassadors. He spent his nights on the balcony, watching the city, letting the mask fuse to his psyche.
But he noticed something strange.
The Twins.
Castor and Pollux had been assigned as Isolde's personal detail—a show of force and hospitality. Kael expected them to be bored. Instead, they were fascinated.
He watched them from the upper gallery of the training courts. Isolde was down there, sparring with Kaelen Thorne. She moved with a fluid, cryomancy-infused style, creating shields of ice to deflect Kaelen's blunt practice sword.
Castor was leaning on the railing, watching her with an intensity that made the air shimmer with heat. Pollux was sketching in a notebook, but her eyes kept darting to the Princess.
"They like her," Ignis said, rolling up beside Kael. "It's efficient. The Queen will need the loyalty of the Source-Vessels if she is to survive you."
"Survive me?" Kael asked.
"You are planning to leave," Ignis stated. It wasn't a question. "I run the numbers, Saint. You are stabilizing the grid. You are fortifying the borders. You are securing a bloodline. These are not the actions of a King planning a long reign. These are the actions of a man packing his bags."
Kael looked at the Artificer. The man was half-dead, sustained only by the machinery he had invented, yet he saw more clearly than anyone.
"The God is waking up, Ignis," Kael whispered. "The peace... it's feeding him. The conflict kept him distracted. But now? Now he's bored. And a bored Dark God is a dangerous roommate. I have to take him somewhere where he can eat something other than my sanity."
"The Forbidden Continent," Ignis guessed.
"Yes."
"And the Twins?" Ignis asked. "Have you noticed? Their cellular degeneration has halted."
Kael frowned behind the mask. "What do you mean?"
"I ran their annual physical yesterday," Ignis said, pulling up a holographic chart. "Castor and Pollux. They are twenty-two. But their telomeres... they stopped shortening. Their mana-density is acting as a preservative. They are hitting their biological prime, Saint. And they are staying there."
Kael froze. "Like me?"
"Not exactly," Ignis said. "You are frozen in trauma. You break and heal. They are... perfecting. They are becoming immutable. They will age to about thirty, I predict, and then... they will stop. They are becoming Living Weapons in the truest sense. Eternal batteries."
Kael looked down at the twins. Castor was laughing as Isolde tripped Kaelen with an ice-slick.
"They are cursed," Kael whispered. "Just like me."
"Or blessed," Ignis countered. "They will outlive everyone, Kael. Everyone except you. You are building a dynasty, but they are the only family you will ever really have."
The incident happened three days before the wedding.
It was a routine inspection of Fortress Agony. Kael had taken Isolde to see the border defenses, wanting to impress upon her the military might she was marrying into. They stood on the command deck of the Great Engine, the wind whipping Isolde's white cloak.
"It's hideous," Isolde said, looking at the black iron landscape. "And magnificent."
"It keeps the Sultanate honest," Kael said.
Suddenly, the ground shook.
It wasn't an earthquake. It was a resonance.
Deep within the bowels of the Fortress, in the sealed Core Chamber where the dormant Void Fragment lay, something thumped.
The Radiant Cannons mounted on the deck flickered and died. The lights in the Iron-Guard watchtowers blew out. A wave of nausea swept over the garrison.
"What was that?" Isolde gasped, grabbing the railing as the massive Engine groaned beneath them.
"Ignis!" Kael shouted into his comms. "Status!"
"Energy spike in the Core!" Ignis screamed. "The Fragment! It's vibrating! It's... it's answering a signal!"
"What signal?"
"From the East!"
Kael felt it then. The "Stable Agony" spiked so hard he fell to one knee.
CRUNCH.
His femur snapped. He groaned, the sound distorted by the mask.
IT CALLS, the God in his mind roared, waking from its slumber with a terrifying hunger. THE MAIN BODY. IT KNOWS WE ARE HERE. IT IS RINGING THE DINNER BELL, KAEL.
Below them, in the undercarriage, the Moon-Scarred began to howl—not in anger, but in pain. The Void resonance was driving them mad.
And then, the Void-Spawn appeared.
They erupted from the earth around the Fortress. Black, oily amorphous shapes that looked like shadows given teeth. They were manifestations of the Fragment's leaking dreams. Hundreds of them, swarming up the treads of the Engine.
"Defend the Queen!" Kael roared, forcing himself to stand on his broken leg.
The Iron-Guard opened fire, but their bullets passed through the shadows.
"Magic doesn't work!" Kaelen Thorne shouted, slashing at a spawn with his Soul-Steel sword. "They aren't solid!"
Isolde stepped forward. She didn't hide. She raised her hands, and the air temperature dropped to absolute zero.
"Cryo-Art: The Flash Freeze!"
She blasted the nearest spawn. The shadow slowed, turning sluggish, but it didn't stop. It reached for her with a tendril of darkness.
"No!" Kael shouted.
He prepared to unleash the "Living Sun," but he was too far away.
Then, the sky tore open.
Castor and Pollux dropped from the Solar-Vessel hovering above.
They landed on the deck with a synchronized thud that shook the Fortress.
"Castor, light it up!" Pollux commanded.
Castor grinned. He didn't use a beam. He simply released his containment field.
"Solar Flare."
A sphere of blinding, golden light expanded from his body. It wasn't just heat; it was pure, concentrated existence.
The Void-Spawn shrieked. The light didn't burn them; it filled them. It overloaded their emptiness with too much reality. They popped like soap bubbles, vanishing into wisps of harmless smoke.
Pollux moved in tandem, weaving shields of diamond-hard ice to protect the soldiers from the shockwave.
In seconds, the deck was clear.
The Twins stood amidst the steam, glowing like minor deities. Castor's hair was floating in an updraft of mana. Pollux's skin was crystalline.
They looked at Kael. They didn't look tired. They looked... energized.
Isolde stared at them. She looked at the King in the Iron Mask, nursing a broken leg that was already knitting itself back together. She looked at the monsters defending her.
"What are you people?" Isolde whispered.
Kael limped forward. He placed a hand on Castor's shoulder to dampen the boy's aura.
"We are the things that hold the line," Kael said.
He looked East. The signal had stopped, but the message was clear. The Dark God was done waiting.
"The wedding proceeds," Kael declared to the stunned garrison. "We get married in three days."
"Kael," Isolde said, her voice trembling but firm. "You are hurt."
"I am healing," Kael said. "I am always healing."
Three days later, the Great Hall was filled with flowers of white frost and golden sun.
Kael stood at the altar. He wore the Iron Mask. He would wear it when he said his vows. He would wear it when he kissed the bride.
Isolde walked down the aisle. She looked radiant, but her eyes were steel. She knew now. She knew she wasn't marrying a man. She was marrying a fortress.
As the priest recited the ancient words of the Goddess Aura, Kael looked at the crowd.
He saw Pip, weeping openly. He saw Ignis, his mechanical eye recording history. He saw Thorne, asleep in his wheelchair.
And he saw the Twins, standing as the honor guard. They were watching him with a strange, knowing expression. They had felt the signal from the East too. They knew the clock had started ticking.
"I do," Kael said, his iron voice echoing in the hall.
"I do," Isolde said.
She reached up. For a moment, the court held its breath, thinking she would remove the mask.
She didn't. She simply laid her hand on the cold black metal of his cheek. She kissed the iron forehead.
"Long live the King," she whispered.
"Long live the Queen," Kael replied.
The crowd cheered. The Golden Age was secured. The Alliance of Ice and Sun was forged.
But deep inside the Iron Mask, Kael Light closed his eyes. The "Stable Agony" was quiet for once, drowned out by the roar of the celebration. But he could still hear the whisper from the East, calling him home to the slaughter.
The Long Peace was over. The Long Goodbye had begun.