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"They dragged you out of the pit. But you smiled. Smiled like you'd seen the gods die and liked the view."
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The smell of blood was stronger here. Not fresh — old, seeping through the cracks in the ash-covered stones, like the keep itself remembered every scream, every plea, every betrayal. The ruins of Ashengar were silent save for the crows, and yet Kaelen Draeven could hear the past like it was happening now.
He crouched low beside the fractured altar, brushing dust off a small rusted chain. A child's necklace.
Dren had sent him here for a reason.
Kaelen's mind was a haunted cathedral of whispers. Not because he heard voices, but because he remembered too well. Faces. Fire. The smile of his twin brother just before the noose went taut.
He clenched the chain in his gloved fist. The ground beneath him trembled faintly — no more than the stirrings of something beneath. He didn't flinch. He hadn't flinched since the Inquisition burned his village to the ground and branded him with the mark of the Forsworn.
The same mark Dren Talovar had kissed with a blade before saying, "Live. And if you don't, haunt them for me."
Kaelen rose, long coat billowing behind him, his silhouette framed against the gothic ruins. He was no longer the boy who trembled when priests passed by. No longer the creature begging for salvation. He was something else now. Something leaner. Meaner. And completely at ease in the realm of monsters.
Far from the ruins, in a different part of Duskarra, Lysara Vale stood before a tribunal of fellow Inquisitors. Her armor was scorched from the raid on the Cindervale Monastery, her eyes sharper than any of the men seated before her.
"You hesitated," High Marshal Tenebren said, voice sharp with authority.
"I made a judgment call," she replied coldly.
"The heretic priest lived. The cultists escaped."
"He was a boy. And the others were bait."
"Still," Tenebren intoned, "your record is not what it once was. You've grown… selective."
Lysara's jaw tightened. You mean soft.
She thought of Dren again. Of the shadowed smiles he left behind in blood, of the way her name curled in his mouth like sin.
And then — Kaelen Draeven.
She had seen the name once in a report. He'd survived a purge that should have wiped out his bloodline. But not only did he survive — there were whispers that he now served the very darkness she was tasked to destroy.
And if Dren trusted him, then Kaelen wasn't just another revenant of war. He was a sword honed to strike back.
In Ashengar's lowest crypt, Kaelen moved deeper into the dark. The air turned wet, heavy with centuries of decay. He felt the ancient magic thickening — not holy, not profane, but broken.
Then he found it.
A mirror of blackened glass framed by carved bone. He stared into it, and a hundred versions of himself stared back — boy, ghost, traitor, survivor.
"I'm here," he said, and the glass rippled.
In the reflection, Dren appeared — not in flesh, but as a flickering echo of presence.
"You found it?" Dren's voice curled like velvet smoke.
Kaelen nodded once.
"It's not just a mirror. It's a gate. A path that was sealed by Lysara's people after the Sundering of Ashengar." Kaelen's lips twisted. "It can open again."
Dren smiled within the glass. "Good. Because soon, she'll come looking for you. And I want her to find what she fears most."
Kaelen's expression darkened. "What she fears… or what she regrets?"
There was silence. Then:
"Both."
Lysara stood at her window, overlooking the sprawl of Duskarra's capital. The city was dressed in fog, its cathedrals like teeth.
In her hand, a torn scroll — Kaelen Draeven's last known sighting. Ashengar.
She didn't want to go. But she had to.
Not because the High Marshal ordered it.
Because Dren was calling her again.
And this time, he was using ghosts.