The rain didn't cleanse the blood.
It smeared it—across shattered steel, splintered shields, and lifeless flesh. A battlefield that once roared with war now whispered only silence. The air was thick with the stench of death and ash, and the sky hung low, pregnant with storms and sorrow.
Kael Varin knelt amidst the wreckage.
His once-golden armor was shattered, bent inward where spears had pierced flesh and bone. His sword—a relic passed down from his late father—lay broken at his feet. His right eye no longer saw, torn open by the claws of the very beast he'd slain to protect the others.
But there were no others now.
He had failed them.
One by one, his comrades had fallen—betrayed by the very man who led them into this slaughter.
Kael spat blood and dirt. It dripped down his chin and mingled with the rain.
His vision blurred, not from the pain, but from the shame.
How had he not seen it? How had he trusted Varnes?
Footsteps echoed through the field of corpses—measured, confident, casual. The rhythm of a man who had nothing to fear. Kael forced himself to look up, the muscles in his neck screaming in defiance.
General Varnes.
Draped in regal crimson, untouched by battle, the old warlord looked more like a king than a soldier. His silver hair was dry. His boots—polished and unsoiled—stepped over corpses like they were puddles.
"So," Varnes said, stopping just short of Kael, "the hero lives... barely."
Kael tried to stand. His legs refused.
"You… betrayed us," he growled, voice hoarse, barely above a whisper.
Varnes raised a brow, amused. "Betrayal is such a heavy word. I call it correction. You were an anomaly, Kael. Rising too fast. Commanding loyalty too strong. You would have disrupted everything."
"You sent us to die," Kael whispered. "All of them… my men…"
"They served their purpose," Varnes said coldly. "As did you. A spark snuffed before it could become wildfire."
Kael laughed—wet and broken. "All this... for fear of a boy?"
"Not fear," Varnes said. "Control."
He drew a dagger from his cloak—a strange, black blade etched with runes that shimmered under the rain. The air around it bent, as if the weapon drank light.
"You should feel honored," Varnes said, crouching before him. "You'll be the first sacrifice. The key to the final seal."
Kael's eyes widened. The blade was no simple tool of murder. It was something darker.
Something ancient.
Varnes didn't wait. With a single motion, he drove the dagger deep into Kael's chest.
There was no scream. Just silence.
The cold rushed in. And everything… stopped.
♦
Death.
Kael had imagined it a thousand ways. A warm light. A peaceful drift. A reunion with his mother, his father, his fallen brothers-in-arms.
He received none of that.
He awoke in nothingness.
No ground. No sky. No body.
Only a void—eternal and screaming.
Shapes moved in the dark, not with motion, but with emotion: regret, hunger, hatred. Things that had no form. Things that watched.
Then, a whisper.
No, not a whisper—a thought that did not belong to him.
"You have been stolen from fate."
Kael tried to speak, but he had no voice. No lungs. No body.
"You were meant to rise. They tore your path away. But paths can be rewritten."
A shape emerged from the dark.
It did not walk. It unfolded, peeling itself from the void like smoke from flame. A towering figure robed in shadow and bones, its face hidden beneath a mask of ever-shifting skulls.
Its presence crushed reality.
Kael could feel it—this being was not a god.
It was what gods feared.
"I am the End. The Keeper of the Last Door. The Breath that silences all others."
"I am Death."
Kael would have trembled if he had a body.
"You have been wronged, Kael Varin," the voice continued. "And you have been chosen. If you so wish, I will give you my mark. My power. My will. You will not return as man, but as more."
"You will return… as my heir."
Kael's fragmented soul pulsed. He saw flashes—his squad's laughter around the fire, his younger sister waving goodbye, the moment Varnes plunged that cursed blade into his heart.
"Why?" Kael finally managed to ask. "Why me?"
"Because unlike most… you did not beg for life. You accepted death."
A skeletal hand, impossibly large and ancient, extended from the dark.
"Take my hand. And become what even gods dread."
Kael hesitated… for only a breath.
Then he reached forward.
The moment their hands touched, the void exploded with white flame. Pain lanced through his very essence—then power, raw and bottomless, poured into him. Screams echoed across eternity as the souls of the forgotten surged into his veins.
Kael opened his eyes—
♦
—and awoke in darkness.
He lay on stone. Cold. Damp.
The air was thick with the scent of rot and old magic.
He sat up, gasping, only to realize… he wasn't breathing.
His heart didn't beat. His chest didn't rise.
But he was alive—in a way far beyond flesh.
Pale blue light swirled around his fingertips. He moved them, and the light obeyed like smoke dancing to his will. A whispering chorus buzzed in his mind—dead voices, ancient and endless.
His eyes—now glowing faintly—adjusted to the room.
A tomb.
His tomb.
The stone lid was cracked from within. Dust had settled over his body, his old wounds still visible—but healed in ways no human could survive.
Then came the voice again, this time inside him.
"The living cast you aside. The dead raise you anew. Go forth, my Controller of Death."
Something stirred behind him.
Kael turned, instinctively raising his hand.
From the shadows, a figure rose—a corpse, half-rotted, its eyes alight with ghostly fire.
And it bowed.
To him.
Kael's breath caught—not from fear, but awe.
He stood. His steps echoed across the tomb. The broken blade of his father's sword now gleamed with obsidian edges, reforged by death itself.
He looked into the mirror of the tomb wall—and saw what he had become.
No longer a soldier.
No longer a man.
He had become something far worse. Far greater.
The first of many.
Kael raised his hand, and a dozen corpses stirred from stone.
He smiled for the first time in what felt like eternity.
"Your reign begins now, Varnes."
End of Chapter 1