The figure on the ridge didn't vanish.
It stood beneath the silvered sky, bone-plate armor glinting with a dull shimmer, unmoving as the world bent to wind and dust around it. Its antlers twisted high, jagged and cracked, like branches of a dead world tree. And its blue eyes—twin flames inside a hollow helm—watched Duncan with the patience of eternity.
Duncan gripped the Emberblade.
The ancient weapon pulsed beneath his fingers, responding not with fire, but with warning.
He had faced Hollowed, wild beasts, even Imperial pressure.
But whatever this was, it was something else.
It was remembrance, carved in flesh and hate.
Pursuit in the Wastes
The figure descended the ridge in silence.
No howl, no roar, no footfall—only a slow, inevitable motion, like time itself had grown legs and begun its walk toward Duncan.
Duncan turned and ran.
Not out of fear, but strategy. He needed ground. Distance. Somewhere to fight that wasn't surrounded by memories of slaughter and Dominion lies.
He vaulted over a collapsed Sanctum gate, crossed an overgrown quarry, and sprinted through a dried riverbed filled with the bones of beasts too large to name.
Behind him, the ash shimmered.
And the crowned specter walked through it.
The Broken Shrine
He found shelter in a place that hadn't existed on any of the frontier maps—a low stone ruin buried beneath brambles and beast vine. The structure was small, circular, once a shrine of some kind.
At its center: a cracked statue of a man with no face, holding both a sword and a scroll.
Old words etched into the stone read:
"Judge not flame by heat, but by memory."
Duncan crouched behind the shattered altar, chest heaving. He placed his palm on the ground, feeling the vibrations.
Still coming. Still walking.
The crowned wraith was in no hurry.
He would arrive.
He always did.
The Battle Begins
The wind died as the bone-armored figure stepped into the shrine.
It moved with unnatural grace, neither heavy nor light, as if gravity was optional. Its helm turned toward Duncan, slowly, reverently.
Then it drew a blade.
It was not metal.
It was bone—long, curved, barbed with ancient runes that flared a sickly red.
And it sang, a keening dirge, as it was lifted.
Duncan rose, Emberblade igniting with a flash of blue fire.
The ruin erupted.
Stone cracked. Sparks flew. Blade met bone, flame met silence.
Duncan fought like a man possessed, driven by instinct and pain and everything the Empire had failed to prepare him for.
The wraith fought like it remembered how to kill a thousand men in a thousand ways.
And had time for each.
Truth in the Clashing Blades
Every strike carried knowledge.
Every parry whispered a name.
Duncan saw flashes—visions—in each clash of steel and bone.
An ancient battlefield under a red sky.
Beasts kneeling to men clad in flame-wrought armor.
A circle of kings, crowned in ash, arguing over a gate that should never open.
And at the center of it all—
The First Bearer.
Wielding the Emberblade.
Bleeding from the eyes.
Screaming as he sealed something behind a wall of burning stars.
The truth slammed into Duncan like a hammer:
The Dominion hadn't created the Flame.
They had stolen it.
And the Emberblade was the receipt.
A Blow That Broke History
The crowned specter roared for the first time—a sound like history being torn.
It brought down its bone blade in a crescent arc.
Duncan blocked.
The impact shattered the altar behind him and drove him to his knees.
His mind screamed for breath. His heart thundered.
He reached deep, pulling from the blade, from himself, from the flame within that wasn't born, but remembered.
The Emberblade flared white-hot.
He twisted, drove forward, and struck the wraith's helm clean through.
It didn't scream.
It nodded.
And crumbled to dust.
Ash and Revelation
Duncan fell to his knees, breathing smoke and fire.
All around him, the shrine shook, dust falling like snow. The statue cracked further, and from within its core, something fell out.
A metal disc. Old, smooth, inscribed with concentric rings and a familiar symbol:
A spiral flame, half-shattered, identical to the one found in the Bonepath.
He picked it up.
Behind him, a voice whispered again—not from the blade, not from the ruins, but from within:
"One bearer ends the cycle. One mistake rekindles it."
The disc pulsed once.
Then stilled.
Toward the Edge
He left the shrine as the sun dipped behind the scorched mountains, the horizon now flickering with stormlight and strange colors—green, red, violet. No longer natural.
The East was no longer land.
It was a wound.
And something was seeping from it.
He mounted his horse, wrapped the metal disc in cloth, and turned toward the outer frontier.
But as he rode, he didn't notice the black-winged shape following him through the sky—too high to see, too silent to hear.
A watcher.
One of them.