Ash fell like snow across the dead.

  Charred soil, still warm with blood and fire, steamed beneath worn boots. The sky above bore a fresh scar—cracked violet streaks where Nyx had once bled through, a wound the world tried desperately to forget.

  Draven stood at the heart of it, unmoving, a pillar of shadow and light amid a graveyard of silence. His armor—fractured, scorched, and dented—glowed faintly with the fading light of Divine Eos. Blood dripped from his gauntlets, thick and black, not entirely his own. Around him, the air trembled with a silence that wasn’t peace, but exhaustion. A silence that tasted like ash and felt like failure.

  The remnants of his army murmured stories of survival like holy rites. Some sat with heads bowed, whispering names of the fallen. Others clutched relics—dog tags, scraps of cloth, blades no longer usable—clinging to memory with trembling hands. There was no laughter. No cheer. Only the hollow clink of flasks raised not in celebration, but in mourning.

  And then the songs began. Low, breathy, and broken. Wounded soldiers sang of distant homes—soft lullabies sung to children, hymns of rivers and sky. Songs not of victory, but of remembrance. Of peace now lost.

  General Vire approached, wiping soot and ichor from his blade. His face was drawn, aged more in a week than in a lifetime of war.

  "We’ve pushed them out, Commander," said Vire. "This side is ours again."

  Draven’s eyes did not leave the horizon. The sky churned above—violet clouds spiraling like a slow death, the edges frayed as if reality itself had been torn. Nyx never left without leaving something behind.

  "Not until the West is free," said Draven. "We move at first light."

  He turned without waiting for an answer. Behind him, Vire stood still, watching him vanish into the smoke like a shadow swallowed by fire.

  The war tent flickered with dim lamplight, shadows dancing across a blood-smeared map. Red sigils marked battalions lost to the void. Jagged ink lines cut across reclaimed territory like scars.

  Eastern Front: secured. Barely.

  It had taken four years of blood, ash, and attrition to reclaim it—four winters soaked in sacrifice.

  Western Front: corrupted, blackened—and breathing.

  The Advisor leaned over the map, fingers trembling.

  "We’ve lost four battalions trying to breach it," he said. "The terrain shifts. Ground turns to liquid. Void storms collapse steel. The creatures don’t die—they unravel."

  "Then we tear through the terrain," said Draven, voice iron, unyielding.

  Vire hesitated at his side. "And Laxa? They hover at the border, pretending neutrality. But they haven’t bled. Not once. If they align with Nyx—"

  "If Laxa moves," said Draven coldly, "they fall next."

  Silence claimed the tent like a shroud. No one spoke. No one questioned. Draven’s words bore weight—something older than war, older than kings.

  He stared at the Western Front, blackened ink on parchment, like a wound refusing to close.

  The map didn’t reflect the man he had become. Once black, Draven’s hair now fell in pale waves to his shoulders—bleached not by time, but by Divine Eos itself, as if even his body had begun to unravel under its weight.

  His eyes, once a stormy gray like the sea before thunder, now shimmered silver, pulsing with an uneasy light. A heartbeat not quite his own. Divine Eos no longer rested within him—it cracked, fractured, bled. And through those cracks, power seeped. Unstable. Hungering.

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  Those who dared to look him in the eye never held his gaze for long. Some said the silver light saw through lies. Others whispered it wasn’t light at all—but the echo of something trying to escape.

  Even Vire, loyal beyond doubt, avoided meeting his eyes in the quiet moments.

  He did not blame them.

  He wouldn’t meet his own reflection either.

  Among the soldiers, whispers clung to the campfires like smoke. They no longer called him just “Commander.” Some, with awe. Some, with fear.

  “The Walking Relic,” they said.

  A man no longer man—half-divine, half-curse, forged by the gods and fractured by war. A vessel that should’ve burned out long ago, yet still moved beneath the weight of too much power, too much memory.

  The march westward was solemn, an army of phantoms crossing a dying land. Each step met twisted geometry—trees spiraled unnaturally, rivers ran in reverse, and the wind whispered names that hadn’t been spoken in generations. The terrain felt alive, like something watching.

  Then the battle began.

  Without sound or warning, the Nyx erupted from the rifts—formless horrors spilling across the trenches like ink across parchment. They had no bodies, only shapes—shifting things with teeth where eyes should be, wings that were more bone than flesh, and obsidian suns for eyes.

  The first scream was swallowed before it ever reached the air.

  Fire ignited the field. Steel clashed. Magic cracked the sky.

  Draven became fury incarnate—Divine Eos howling through his veins, his blade a meteor of golden arcs splitting through void flesh. He moved like vengeance, a storm of burning light.

  Beside him, his soldiers fought with desperate valor. Some sang as they killed. Others wept. Blood soaked the ground faster than rain. The land writhed beneath their feet.

  A creature burst from the rift, ten stories tall, shaped like a cathedral of flesh and teeth. Draven met it mid-charge, leaping skyward, and drove his blade through its skull in a torrent of golden fury.

  And then—

  Silence.

  The Nyx paused. Twitched. One by one, they turned—not to flee, but to vanish. Dissolving into ash, retreating into the rifts that birthed them.

  And as suddenly as it had opened, the tear in the sky began to close.

  Confusion swept the battlefield like disease. Soldiers stood frozen, blades dripping. No cheer. No shouts of triumph. Just the absence of noise—too still, too sudden.

  Draven stared upward. The violet wound in the sky mended itself, threads of light sewing shut the crack.

  And then—

  a shadow passed overhead.

  A massive eagle—its feathers metal, its eyes burning with something older than fire—descended through the ash. It circled once, twice, then dove. With a screech, it dropped a scroll wrapped in black thread at Draven’s feet.

  He bent, unraveling it slowly.

  The ink shimmered.

  By order of the High Council and the Kingdom of Laxa, the conflict on the Western Front has ended in peace.

  Nyx has withdrawn. No further action is required. All forces are to stand down and return.

  The parchment crumbled to dust in his hands.

  General Vire staggered forward. "Peace? They made a deal… with Nyx?"

  Draven stood frozen, his gaze fixed on the ash drifting in the air. His heart pounded, but there was no release in the rhythm. His thoughts churned, but the pieces didn’t fit.

  Laxa. Laxa—the kingdom that had stayed on the sidelines, pretending neutrality. But this... this was no neutrality. This was betrayal. The Western Front, the war they had fought and bled for, was being sacrificed.

  He balled his fist around the dust, his knuckles white, as the anger began to rise. The letter was gone, but its words burned into his mind.

  "Peace," he murmured, the word foreign in his mouth. "Is this what it has come to? A world that sells its soul just to stop the bleeding?"

  Vire’s voice was cautious, but it only fueled the storm inside him. "What now, Commander? What do we do?"

  Draven clenched his jaw, his silver eyes glinting with something darker than fury. He could feel the presence of Divine Eos in his chest, throbbing with power that seemed to grow more uncontrollable by the day. It was a gift and a curse—one that had saved him, but now threatened to destroy everything he had fought for.

  "This isn’t peace," Draven said coldly, his voice carrying the weight of something older, more ancient. "It’s submission. A leash wrapped in silk."

  The soldiers behind him began to murmur, eyes flickering uneasily toward him. But Draven was already beyond them, already stepping into a space where no one could follow.

  His hands were shaking—not from fear, but from the overwhelming pull of something far greater than him. The pull of Divine Eos, burning bright and fierce within him.

  He stared into the distance, where the sun had long since disappeared. The war was over, but for him, it was just beginning.

  There was no cheer in camp that night. Only whispering. Suspicion. Eyes that scanned the sky for answers that wouldn’t come.

  Draven stood alone on the cliffside, overlooking the camp below. The firelight flickered like dying stars in the distance, casting long shadows over the tents. The air was cold, but the warmth of battle had long since faded, replaced by an empty silence that stretched too long.

  Ash drifted down from the sky, swirling in slow, delicate spirals like snow. His hair, now streaked with strands of white, caught the light of the fading flames. His eyes—once dark—were silver now, burning with a faint pulse of Divine Eos, cracked and restless within him.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the pulse, the constant hum of power that surged through him. It was a power he had never asked for. A power that burned, that threatened to consume him.

  But it was more than just power. It was a chain. It was his curse.

  And now, the war was over. The East had paid its price. The West, too. And what had they gained? A fragile peace? A bargain with Nyx, woven in lies and broken promises.

  He clenched his fists, but the tremor in his hands was no longer from anger alone. It was the strain of something larger than him—Divine Eos, something still growing inside him, something that had chosen him without his consent. He had become a weapon, but now he was starting to feel the weight of it.

  He was walking a thin line—tethered to a power that had saved him, but also twisted him in ways he didn’t yet understand.

  The weight of the sky pressed down on him. The peace, fragile as it was, would not last long. He knew it. The people would begin to wonder. They had seen him wield Divine Eos as a weapon, and now, they would wonder if the power was too much, too dangerous. The question was no longer whether he could control it, but whether anyone could.

  He stared into the distance, where the sun had long since disappeared. The war was over, but for him, it was just beginning.

  The whisper came again, soft and insistent. It was a pull he couldn’t ignore.

  Fall.

  It had been there since the moment he first touched

  Divine Eos, and now it was louder, clearer. He didn’t know what it meant, but the pull was undeniable.

  He didn’t answer.

  But he didn’t turn away either.