The rain had already begun.
Thick, warm sheets of it poured from a bloated sky, drumming down on the grounds of Havenwyck like the restless march of distant legions. Kael strode through it without flinching. The water hissed as it met his armor, steaming faintly where it touched the lingering heat of the forge. Every step he took left deep prints in the mud, each one filled almost instantly by the rain, as if the earth itself wanted to erase his presence.
But nothing could erase Kael now.
He moved through the grounds like a shadow cast in iron, the journal tucked beneath his cloak, the compass twitching at his hip. The moment he crossed Havenwyck's outer threshold—the old rusted gate with symbols long since worn into obscurity—the compass stopped spinning.
It pointed.
Southwest. Steady. Unwavering.
Through jungle. Through myth.
Through something ancient.
Days later, the jungle swallowed him whole.
It was not the kind of forest the maps remembered. It breathed. It watched. Trees thick as towers reached toward a sun they never saw, their roots gnarled like clenched fists. Vines hung like veins through the canopy, dripping with moisture that stank faintly of copper and soil. Insects buzzed like ancient machinery, and somewhere deeper, the cries of beasts echoed—a chorus too rhythmic to be natural.
Kael hacked his way forward with a machete of starlit metal, gifted to him in silence by the Warden before he departed. It cut cleanly, almost reverently, parting vines as if they feared the blade's hunger.
The deeper he went, the stranger things became.
Stones shaped like skulls lined the path. Some cracked, others bleeding faint trails of black ichor. One night, he woke to find a ring of ash surrounding his campfire—he hadn't drawn it. The air grew denser, heavier with memory. With warning.
The temple came into view on the seventh day.
It rose from the jungle like the bone of some buried titan. Moss-covered, obsidian-black, its steps were steep and endless, leading toward a flat summit lost in low cloud. Glyphs crawled along its flanks—Aztec in shape, but wrong in language. Kael couldn't read them, but the Shard at his chest pulsed with slow recognition.
This place had known him once. Or someone like him. Or the version of him before time.
He climbed.
Every step he took the stairs screamed. His armor dragged, heavier than usual—as if it were being judged. The higher he rose, the quieter the jungle became. No birds. No beasts. Only the whisper of wind dragging its fingers across stone.
Kael steadied his weapon at his side allowing for a quick draw if needed.
At the top of the temple, a altar waited.
It wasn't large. Just a smooth platform carved from the same stone as the rest of the temple, but blackened, scorched. As though something holy had died there—and refused to be buried.
Kael approached it slowly.
He laid the compass atop it, its once steady needles now franticly spinning as if to announce his arrival. Beside it he laid the journal its pages fluttered open to reveal the page with the coordinates as they hovered out of the page and unto the pedestal.
The items vibrated in unison.
Suddenly, the glyphs across the altar flared—not with flame, but with blood light. Crimson lines like veins pulsed outward, branching across the stone. The Shard at Kael's chest pulsed once—hard.
He dropped to a knee.
It wasn't reverence. It was pressure. Something massive was watching again—no, waking.
From the far end of the altar, a figure emerged.
At first, it was smoke.
Then form.
A silhouette coalescing out of the fire-warmed haze at the heart of the ruin, rising from the cracks in the altar like memory from ash.
A god.
Broad, golden-skinned, muscles taut as drawn bowstrings, every movement weightless but heavy with consequence. A jaguar headdress crowned his head, its teeth still glinting with fresh ichor, obsidian feathers rippling like a black sunflare in the wind. Bands of molten gold curled around his arms, and his eyes—twin eclipses—burned with judgment ancient enough to remember when the stars still wept fire.
His voice rumbled like stormclouds splitting open.
"You walk armed in stolen names," the god said, stepping forward, his bare feet leaving smoldering footprints in the stone. "Do you know what you carry?"
Kael stepped into the circle of broken glyphs, his blade lowered, but not at rest.
"I carry what the gods tried to bury," he answered.
The god tilted his head, a flicker of amusement crossing his face.
"Then you are either a fool… or something far more dangerous."
Kael's lips barely moved. "Both."
There was no warning.
No monologue. No battle chant. No ritual.
Just violence.
The god surged forward like a sunstrike, one hand sweeping out in a wide arc. Kael barely ducked in time. The blow missed—and still the wind pressure alone flattened the stone wall behind him, turning half the ancient mosaic into molten slag.
Kael pivoted, blade slicing upward.
The god caught it between two fingers.
Smiled.
Then flung Kael like a discarded doll.
He crashed against a crumbling pillar, stone buckling beneath the impact. His ribs sang with fire. Blood dripped down his teeth. Lightning tore across the sky above, illuminating the temple in stark flashes of ruin. The rain returned—slashing sideways, spiraling unnaturally as if even the storm had bent to the god's will.
Kael rose slowly.
Not with rage.
But with certainty.
He stepped forward, and this time, his feet left frost behind. The air crystallized around him. His breath misted not from the rain—but from the unnatural cold emanating from his chest. The Shard pulsed once. Then again. Not louder, but deeper.
Like thought made sound.
Kael moved.
Like water under pressure.
Controlled. Unstoppable.
His sword swept in wide arcs, dancing with flickers of pale blue energy. He parried obsidian spears conjured mid-air, redirected flame-wrapped claws meant to sever bone. Each time the god struck, the altar trembled. Statues wept fire. Ruins screamed.
But Kael was still standing.
Still learning.
The god narrowed his eyes. "You mimic well."
He swept both hands outward—conjuring a jaguar of fire and bone, teeth dripping with solar ichor. It lunged. Kael met it mid-leap, twisting mid-air, and slammed the blade down its spine. The beast exploded into sparks.
The god struck next—shoulder first, a charging star. He rammed into Kael, lifted him by the throat, slammed him into the floor hard enough to crater the stone.
"You bear the scent of the Denier," the god hissed. "You should not exist."
Kael coughed, blood and smoke rising from his lips. And then he grinned.
"Then unmake me."
The god smiled.
And then flung Kael like a broken thing.
As Kael rose
The Shard pulsed inside him—low, resonant, primordial. He didn't command it. He didn't need to.
It was awake now.
And it remembered.
Like a chasm splitting open in Kael's mind. His vision blurred. His veins froze. Time slowed.
The world around him dulled, flattened—until only motion remained.
Thought became reaction.
Frost laced Kael's breath. His footsteps smoked with ice. He moved—fluid, sharpened. No hesitation. No fear.
Only purpose.
The Shard didn't just give him frost. It turned that cold inward—cooling the brain beyond what any mortal could endure, slowing its heat until only calculation remained. Reflexes sharpened into razor decisions. He saw the god's posture, the shift of his ankle, the quiver in a wrist—
And mirrored it.
Perfectly.
His blade arced upward at an impossible angle, feinting with the right hand while the left twisted low—disrupting the center of gravity. The god staggered for the first time.
Shock flashed in the divine's eyes.
Kael spun behind him, slammed his elbow into the god's lower spine, then pivoted and kicked off the wall into a spiraling slash.
The Shard followed—sending a pulse of ice into the air, slamming into the god's shoulder and freezing the flame-cloak solid.
The god wheeled, furious, launching a pillar of plasma that Kael barely rolled beneath.
"You wear death like armor Boy," the god roared. "You desecrate Divine lands just like the ones before you!"
Kael didn't answer.
A sudden burst of Ice akin to a cryovolcanic eruption from Kael's chest. The altar split in fractal lines of molten ruin. The god screamed—not from pain, but from recognition.
He saw Kael.
Not as a man.
But as what he was becoming.
Not a weapon. A mirror.
And in seeing Kael—he saw the one he had once knelt to.
The Denier.
The god's fury redoubled. Pillars of plasma erupted from his palms. Kael rolled under one, spun into another strike, ice trailing from his limbs. Frost bloomed across scorched glyphs. Statues cracked. Flames dimmed. The god's jaguar cloak stiffened—frozen in place.
Then Kael did something that made the god hesitate.
He smiled.
The next clash was chaos. Divine roars. Crashing stone. Blood—Kael's and not. The Shard flared bright enough to rival the storm, memory-light peeling back reality. In the god's eyes, Kael wasn't just a man anymore.
He was something older than vengeance. A fragment of a forgotten truth.
The god lunged—
And Kael stepped through him.
Not physically—but with presence. A blur of frost, a whisper of denial. His blade passed not through flesh, but through the God's very being.
The god screamed—not in pain.
But in shock and defiance.
The altar split beneath their feet, veins of molten ruin webbing outward as the god began to unravel—not torn, but erased. Fire peeled from his body. Light fractured. Feathers scattered like ash.
"Denier…" he whispered, almost reverent—
Then he shattered.
No explosion. No body.
Just a collapse of form, of myth, of meaning.
And silence.
Kael stood in the center of it, steam curling from his shoulders. The Shard within him quieted, its glow fading into stillness. His breath came slow but Heavy.
Their battled had raged on for days up to this point. Neither had wanted to yield to the other but finally a victor was decided
From the cracked heart of the altar, something gleamed.
A fang.Obsidian. Still warm.
Kael stooped and took it. As his fingers closed around it, the compass at his belt pulsed—once—and stilled.
Its needle twitched and pulsed a hue of icy blue in tandem with the pulse of the shard.
Then turned.
Northwest.