Kael had always lived in ruins. Not like the shattered towers of Veyrath's Fall, but the quieter kind—villages that looked alive until you paid attention.
He was born in the borderlands, where the soil gave little and the sky gave less. His earliest memories were not of family, but of smoke curling above rooftops after raiders passed through. His father had been a blacksmith, his mother a healer, and both were gone before Kael was old enough to understand the word orphan. By the time he was twelve, the village elders had stopped bothering to learn children's names. Too many graves, not enough food.
So Kael learned on his own.
He learned that strength wasn't about the size of your blade, but how quiet your step was when stealing bread. He learned that mercy was rare, and often fatal. And he learned that the world beyond the village cared nothing for his survival—except for one man.
The man called himself Tarren. A wanderer, scarred from throat to jaw, voice hoarse as gravel. He had found Kael one night dragging firewood through the snow and simply said, "If you want to keep breathing, follow me."
Kael did.
Tarren taught him to move unseen, to track prey, to listen to the wind as though it spoke in words. More importantly, he taught him how to fight—not like the knights of storybooks, but like wolves. Quick. Precise. Never more effort than the kill required.
Yet Tarren's lessons were not only of steel. He made Kael memorize old glyphs carved into stones, taught him how to bind them with blood, how to use light where fire failed. Kael never asked how Tarren knew such things. Some nights, the man would stare into the dark, whispering in a tongue that made Kael's teeth ache.
One winter, Tarren vanished. No footprints in the snow, no body, no trail. Only his cloak remained, draped over Kael's shoulders as though left on purpose.
From that day, Kael walked alone.
Years passed. He survived where others withered, his body lean and scarred, his eyes hardened to iron. He earned coin as a sellsword, never staying long in one place, never trusting the smiles of those who offered it. But through every town, every battlefield, every night spent beneath a broken roof, one story lingered: Veyrath's Fall.
The kingdom that had reached too far. The city swallowed by silence. And beneath it, the Ashen Gate.
Most dismissed it as a fireside tale. But when Kael once traded steel for an old book pulled from a crumbling monastery, he found sketches of the Gate that matched the whispers. Not fiction. Not rumor. Real.
And in its margins, written in a hand he almost recognized, were words:
"The wound is not closed. Someone must see."
The script was jagged, uneven. But Kael knew the shape of those letters.
It was Tarren's hand.
So he came here, guided not by gold or glory, but by a promise to the one man who had taught him how to live.
And now, he stood before the Gate itself
The cavern hummed with a pressure that made his skin prickle. The lantern in his hand flared brighter with each pulse of the Gate, its shard trembling as though caught between terror and reverence.
The chains groaned, one already broken, another straining. The surface of the Gate rippled like liquid shadow. Behind it, something vast pressed closer.
Kael's grip tightened on his sword. For the first time in years, he felt the old weight of being a child again—small, powerless, staring at a world too large to fight.
The whispers swelled, countless voices layered into one:
Open.
Kael stepped forward instead.
The lantern's glow flared, clashing with the Gate's darkness, blue fire against endless night. Runes along his blade screamed awake, their light so bright it hurt his eyes.
He raised the weapon. The cavern shook as the second chain snapped.
And in the silence that followed, Kael whispered the name of the man who had brought him this far.
"Tarren… if you're watching… I'll finish what you started."
Then he drove his sword into the stone.