The throne hall's ruins loomed like the ribs of a dead god. Dave stepped over petrified banners embroidered with moth-eaten sigils, their threads whispering tales of fallen dynasties. The air tasted of rust and forgotten prayers. At the chamber's heart lay a stone dais, its surface etched with a crest—a lion devouring its own tail.
His boot crossed the sigil.
Light shattered.
---
The Vision: Virelle
The world rebuilt itself stitch by stitch—cobblestones warm underfoot, the clang of hammers, the yeasty tang of fresh bread. Dave stood in a sunlit square, his calloused hands gripping a bucket of well water. A girl with wildfire hair bumped into him, spilling half his load.
"Sorry, smith's boy!" she laughed, her freckled nose crinkling. "Tell Thorne I'll fix his bellows tomorrow!"
Mara. The name surfaced from nowhere, sweet as summer wine.
Thorne's forge was a symphony of heat and grit. The blacksmith's massive frame bent over the anvil, hammering a glowing saber into shape. "Quit dawdling, boy!" he barked, though his eyes crinkled. "Blade won't quench itself."
Days blurred into months. Dave learned to read the iron's song—the way it screamed when overheated, sighed when tempered right. Thorne's lessons were bruises and gruff praise:
"Too slow. You're cooking it, not caressing it."
"There. Now that's steel."
Nights were Mara's. She dragged him to the tavern, where fiddle music dueled with drunken laughter. She taught him to dance on wobbly tables, her hands rough from mending sails, her voice hoarse from sea shanties.
"Why'd you stay?" she asked once, her head on his shoulder as dawn pinkened the sky. "You could've been a merchant. A bard. Anything but a soot-faced fool."
He kissed her temple. "Where else would I go?"
---
The Rot Beneath
The vision *twitched*.
At the market, Dave noticed a stall selling eels—their scales iridescent, their eyes too human. The vendor's smile stretched too wide. "Fresh from the Tide's belly," he hissed, pressing a squirming eel into Dave's hand. It burst into black worms.
No one else saw.
In the forge, Thorne's shadow sometimes loomed wrong—too many limbs, a crown of roots.
"You're quiet," Mara murmured one night, tracing the scar on his palm. "Like you're already gone."
---
The Fall
The knights came at harvest moon.
They wore blacksteel plate stamped with the Tide's serpent—the Water Dragon's sigil. Their captain, face hidden behind a visor shaped like a drowned man's scream, read from a scroll:
"By order of King Alaric, this town is condemned for heresy. Lay down arms and kneel, or be purged."
Virelle fought. Fishermen hurled gutting knives. Farmers swung scythes. Thorne died holding the forge door, his hammer caved into a knight's skull before three spears pinned him to the anvil.
Dave found Mara in the smoke, her red hair matted with blood, a broken flagpole clutched like a spear.
"Go," she rasped, shoving him toward the cellar. "Live. Remember—"
A crossbow bolt silenced her.
---
The rebels hid in sewers stinking of rat corpses and lost hope. Their leader, a one-eyed shipwright named Kestrel, tossed Dave a rusted cleaver.
"You wanna fight? Prove you're not just a smith's ghost."
Dave proved it.
He fought like the forge itself—relentless, brutal, practical. When a knight's blade shattered his hatchet, he jammed the splintered haft into the man's visor slit. When a squire begged for mercy, Dave broke his jaw with a brick. ("No witnesses," Kestrel nodded, approving.)
The rebellion named him Ashfang—for the burns on his arms, the teeth he left in dead men's throats.
But nights were Mara's ghost in the shadows, Thorne's voice in the clang of steel:
"You're better than this."
"Am I?"
Dave didn't need one thing now and that was lying ghosts.
---
They ambushed the king's caravan in a ravine. Rain turned the ground to slurry.
Alaric himself rode at the vanguard, his armor filigreed with silver serpents. Dave's heart stopped. The king's face was someone he knew but rot made a fog out of it — but his.
The battle dissolved into slaughter. Kestrel fell, gutted by a halberd. Dave fought his way to the king, his makeshift axe dripping gore.
"Your reign ends here," Dave snarled.
Alaric——smiled. "You misunderstand. This is not my reign it's yours too boy."
The king's sword moved like liquid night. It pierced Dave's lung, cold as the Tide's depths.
"You'll make a fine weapon," the king whispered.
---
Dave woke choking on phantom seawater, back in the rotted hall. King Alaric's ghost loomed, his form flickering between the king's face and the foggy image of the person he knew.
"Why cling to this pain?" Alaric moaned, spectral tears carving charred trails down his cheeks. "Stay. Rule this memory. Be the king she deserved."
Mara's laugh echoed. The forge's heat kissed Dave's skin.
He raised his axe—a weapon that hadn't existed moments ago, its edge serrated with grief.
"I'll carry them," Dave said. "But I won't bury myself with them."
Alaric moved like a requiem—every step a stanza, every strike a dirge. His spectral blade carved geometric arcs through the air, each cut humming with the grief of a kingdom's fall. Dave fought like a wildfire, all smoke and teeth, his movements jagged echoes of Mara's laughter and Thorne's hammerfalls.
The ghost king lunged, blade aimed for Dave's heart. Dave twisted, not away but into the strike, letting the sword graze his ribs as he swung a chunk of fallen pillar like a blacksmith's sledge. Alaric phased through the stone, but Dave was already pivoting, hurling a dagger forged from memory—Mara's dagger, its edge honed on Virelle's last sunrise. It bit into Alaric's shoulder, spectral blood blooming like ink in water.
"You fight like a cornered rat," Alaric hissed, his form rippling as he riposted with a flurry of thrusts. Dave rolled through them, cobblestones shredding his knees, and came up swinging a length of chain torn from the hall's rusted chandelier. The links cracked across the king's jaw, snapping his head sideways.
"You fight like a man who's never starved," Dave spat.(as if our prince here ever starved)
Alaric's blade erupted into a storm of weeping faces—soldiers, peasants, Mara—their screams harmonizing into a single, paralyzing note. Dave staggered, ears bleeding, but his hands moved on memory: Thorne's lesson. When the steel sings wrong, you silence it. He drove his forehead into the king's nose, feeling spectral cartilage crunch, and wrenched the sword aside with a screech of soulfire on iron.
The ghost reeled, regal composure fracturing. "You cannot win! This hall is my tomb, my eternity—"
"Your eternity's a fucking lie!" Dave roared, surging forward. He fought not with technique but Virelle's desperation—elbowing Alaric's wrist to disarm him, kneeing his gut, biting into his ethereal throat until the king's screams turned wet. They crashed into the throne, bones splintering, Dave's fists rising and falling in a rhythm older than crowns: *hammer on iron, hammer on iron.*
Alaric's form flickered, his blows growing wild. He summoned a shield of drowned men's faces, but Dave tore through it with Kestrel's cleaver, its edge rusted but relentless. The ghost king stumbled, his crown clattering to the floor as Dave pinned him with Mara's dagger—still warm, still real.
"You lose," Dave growled, his voice raw as forge-smoke. "Even kings drown."
Alaric's eyes widened, not in fear but recognition. For a heartbeat, his face shifted—■■■ smirk. A Water Dragon's serpentine gaze—before dissolving into ash. The throne room collapsed into rot and shadow. Dave stood panting, his knuckles dripping with spectral ichor and his own blood. The Scion crawled from his collar, feasting on the ashes, her voice a giddy rasp:
"More. We need more. Bonus point you fight like a child, she laughed as she went back into his tunic."
He stared at the crumbling crest underfoot—the lion devouring its tail now stained with Tide-serpent glyphs. Somewhere, a dragonlike figure laughed hysterically.
Dave spat a tooth and walked on.