The remnants of Kael's legion, leaderless and broken, were not shown mercy. The stone-boned army hunted them down through the forest, a grim and silent reaping. There were no survivors. The Blackwood had swallowed an army whole, and this time, it left not even bones to tell the tale.
Elias walked back towards the ruin of Sunstone, the site of his greatest failure. His new, cold purpose was a shard of ice in his chest. Malleus and Noctua emerged from the trees and fell into step behind him, their masked forms a silent honor guard. They said nothing. There were no words for this kind of grief, this kind of rage.
As they entered the clearing, the five hundred soldiers of the garrison scrambled into their defensive formations. They had heard the distant sounds of the slaughter and had seen the horrifying dimming of the sun. Now they saw their king emerge from the woods, flanked by his two monstrous lieutenants, his eyes still burning with the faint, terrifying light of distant, dying stars.
The garrison commander roared for them to fire the catapults.
Elias didn't even look at them. He raised a hand, and the earth before him answered. A great wall of black, solid stone, a hundred feet high, erupted from the ground, effortlessly swallowing the volley of flaming projectiles.
He lowered his hand. He looked at the garrison, at their pathetic blockhouses and their sharpened stakes. They were an infection. A footnote to his pain.
He pointed a finger at their fortified encampment. He did not use rust. He did not use golems. He spoke a single word, a word he had learned from the heart of the Celestial Shard. A word of unmaking. A word that described the concept of absolute, grinding pressure.
The air above the encampment thickened, shimmered, and then collapsed. Gravity, for a single, focused moment, became a hammer. The blockhouses, the watchtowers, the men, the very ground they stood on—it was all flattened into a smooth, compressed circle of fused earth and iron, as if a god had placed his thumb upon it and pressed. The screams were instantaneous and blessedly short.
There was no battle. There was only a judgment.
The field was silent. Elias walked through the ashes of Sunstone. The ghosts of the villagers were everywhere: a child's discarded toy, the scorched loom of a weaver, the broken haft of a hunter's axe. These were not his people by blood or law, but they were his by responsibility. He had been their canopy, and in his absence, the fire had swept through.
Malleus and Noctua stood guard at the perimeter of the flattened Hegemony camp, leaving their king to his solitude.
He found her near the steps of the ruined great hall. Elara. Her body was arranged with a soldier's rough dignity, left by men who had respected her final, defiant charge. The life was long gone. The warm, bright spark of the Soul Anchor was a cold, dead cinder.
Elias knelt beside her. The movement was slow, stiff, as if his joints were made of cracking stone. He looked at her face, peaceful in death, and the full weight of his choices crashed down upon him.
His persona. The 'Grave Warden'. The 'Ashen King'. The aloof, terrifying monster. It had been a shield, a tool to create fear and therefore safety. But it had also been a wall. A self-imposed prison of isolation.
He should have given them his knowledge. He thought of his forge, his mastery of metallurgy. He could have given them steel ploughs that would have made them prosperous, steel spearheads that would have made them formidable. They had fought with flint while he sat on a mountain of iron.
He should have taught them. He could have shown them how to build stronger homes of stone, how to irrigate their fields, how to understand the world beyond their small clearing. He had all the knowledge of his old life, the logic, the science, but he had kept it to himself, hoarding it like a dragon.
He should have ignored the persona. He should have walked into their village not as a god, but as a man. A strange, powerful man, yes, but a man nonetheless. He could have been their teacher, their ally, their neighbor. The fear he cultivated had kept them safe for a time, but it had also kept them weak, dependent, unable to stand when the canopy was finally, inevitably, torn away.
He had tried to protect them by keeping them separate, by treating them as a Primary Objective, a piece in his grand, lonely game. And in doing so, he had ensured their doom. He had cared for the balance of the forest but had neglected the strength of its people.
"Now... it is too late," he whispered, his voice cracking, the first true, unveiled emotion he had spoken aloud in decades. He reached out a trembling hand, his fingers hovering over her cold cheek, afraid to touch, afraid to desecrate her memory with the hand that had failed to save her.
But what of the children?
The thought was a lifeline in his sea of grief. Twenty-seven lives. The seed of Sunstone. They were in his Spire, safe. Alone. Orphans because of his failure.
His gaze lifted from Elara's form to the vast, unconquered lands of the Hegemony beyond his forest. A cold, hard certainty crystallized in the core of his being, forged in the fires of his rage and cooled by the tears he could not shed.
He would not fail them. Not again.
He would not be a distant, reactive canopy. He would teach them. He would arm them. He would build them a world where they would never have to be afraid again. A world where no Hegemony, no Theocracy, no ambitious lord could ever threaten them.
To do that, he could not simply defend his forest. He had to expand it.
He looked down at the earth, at the soil where Sunstone had stood, now mingled with the ash of its people. "The Blackwood is too small," he murmured. A new directive formed, a grand strategy born of this ultimate grief. "The Hegemony empire... all of it... will become part of the Blackwood."
He would not just conquer them. He would transform their entire nation into his domain. He would plant his Shadow-Thorns in their farmlands. He would make their rivers run with the life of his forest. He would let the deep woods swallow their iron cities, let vines pull down their stark towers, let the quiet, implacable magic of his balanced world overwrite their sterile order. He would give the children of Sunstone an inheritance not of a single village, but of a continent-spanning, magically potent wilderness where they could thrive forever.
He rose to his feet. He was no longer just a king defending a border. He was an empire-builder. An ecoterrorist on a divine scale.
He looked at Elara one last time. He reached down and gently took the spear from her grip, its simple, fire-hardened wooden shaft a stark contrast to his own arcane creations.
"The lesson is learned," he said to her memory.
Then he turned and walked away from the grave of Sunstone. His two masked vassals fell into step behind him. The rage was still there, a cold star burning in his soul, but it now had a purpose. It was the fuel for the forge of a new world. And he would use it to burn away the old one, right down to the bedrock.