After the bombardment, the silence that followed was heavier than death.
The army began its descent. One by one, warships hovered low and deployed parties across the scorched terrain of Kareth-Thorne. The once-proud northern kingdom was now nothing more than a graveyard, a shadow of what it had been.
When Rin stepped off the ship, the stench hit him first.
Burnt stone. Blood. Soul-ash.
Then he saw them.
Bodies. Everywhere.
Men. Women. Children. Laid across ruins and broken earth. Some were huddled together, others clutched weapons, as if death had found them in mid-fight. But most… most had been caught in the blast with nothing but terror in their frozen expressions.
Their blood ran cold blue,the blood of the snake-blooded, the lineage of the North. sometimes when the soul is destroyed the body collapse as well.
Rin stood in silence.
He had seen war. He had fought. He had killed.
But this wasn't war.
This was annihilation.
And still… he said nothing.
What could he say?
Orders came directly from Master Arkan, and no one dared challenge them.
The next command was even more disturbing: gather the bodies.
All of them.
No burning. No burial.
Just gather.
No one understood the reason, not even Rin. But they obeyed.
A few days passed. The soldiers worked like silent ants.
Mountains of corpses were stacked in dozens of sectors across the shattered kingdom. Men with 30% purity turned pale from the sight. Even veterans who'd fought for decades avoided the gaze of the dead. Some vomited. Others broke.
But not Rin.
He simply watched. Cold. Detached. Distant.
His mind, however, wasn't calm.
He could feel it,the eyes of his guards.
They never left him, and they never interfered.
"They're waiting," he thought.
"Waiting for the right moment. The perfect accident. They won't kill me here,too suspicious. But a stray shot , a resistance ambush in the kingdom? That could work."
It was Kaelion's style.
Precise. Clean. Blameless.
He didn't want the Master switching allegiance to Veyrion, the middle brother.
So he sent Rin to die quietly, with deniability.
But Rin wouldn't play his game.
On the third day, a command echoed through the skies.
"All soldiers, return to the ships."
Master Arkan's voice rang through communication glyphs and echoed across every camp.
Without hesitation, everyone moved.
Ships roared as they rose into the air. They hovered now, high above the wreckage of Kareth-Thorne, slowly drifting toward the next target: Droscalin, the last kingdom of the northern resistance.
Rin stood by a window in the warship, gazing at the field below.
That's when it happened.
A blinding silver glow burst across the clouds.
He looked up ,and saw him.
Master Arkan, in his true form.
A colossal white dragon soared through the heavens, his wings spanning entire valleys, horns piercing the clouds, his presence alone bending the light around him. His silver eyes gleamed with ruthless calculation.
He hovered above the mountains of corpses. And then ,his eyes flashed.
Rin's breath caught in his throat.
The piles of bodies rose. Slowly. All of them.
As if strung by invisible threads, they lifted into the air.
Then—split.
Tens of thousands of corpses tore apart in unison ,head, torso, legs,separating mid-air in grotesque synchronization.
The sky wept with limbs.
Rin watched in stunned silence as Master Arkan flew forward, leading this parade of dismembered dead across the sky, their parts trailing behind him like a banner.
> A banner of warning. A banner of fear.
Rin understood now.
This wasn't about the dead. It was about the living.
Arkan wasn't just cleansing one kingdom.
He was sending a message to the next.
Submit or suffer. Obey or be erased.
It wasn't war.
It wasn't even strategy.
It was boredom. Cold, cosmic boredom… from a monster who saw no point in playing the long game.
"Master Arkan the Pale Flame," Rin whispered under his breath.
No one spoke the title anymore.
Not aloud.
But the name lived like a curse in the silence:
The Pale Flame of the East. The Soul Shatterer. The Dragon of Final Judgment.
Rin turned from the window.
A strange feeling settled in his chest. Not fear. Not anger.
Something colder.
Resolve.