The world was not prepared for their return.
The Broken — that's what the world had named them, though once they had gone by countless other titles: Disciples of the Crown, the Veiled Flame, the Sovereigns Below. To the victors, they were zealots. To the fallen, they were demons. But to Raizen, they were something far more dangerous: believers. Fanatics forged not from fear or hunger, but from purpose. The kind of purpose that survives empires, buries gods, and endures even in annihilation.
When the Crown shattered and its influence burned out of the sky like a falling star, the world assumed the Broken had perished with it. Their strongholds collapsed, their scriptures silenced, their leaders obliterated in the crucible of Raizen's final stand. For years, there was nothing but echoes. The world moved on. It rebuilt. But not deep enough. Not far enough. Because in the black roots of the world — where light had never reached — they endured.
They did more than endure. They prepared.
It began with whispers in the ruined regions: symbols etched into the walls of collapsed temples, prayers spoken in reverse echoing through the wind, and dreams — gods, the dreams. Children waking with visions of fire beneath the sea. Entire villages reporting the same nightmare on the same night. The scholars called it mass hysteria. The priests called it divine warning. Raizen called it something else entirely — a summoning.
He was among the first to feel it. Not as pain, but as absence — like something had been torn from the fabric of the world that should not have returned. He sensed it in the movement of the wind, in the shifting weight of the Crown's remnants, in the way people flinched without knowing why. Something was crawling back into the world.
And then they showed themselves.
They came cloaked in tattered remnants of their once-majestic robes, draped in relics of an era the world had tried to forget. Their leader, a woman known only as Serath, emerged from the Deadlands with a voice like ice and fire. Her eyes burned not with madness, but clarity — terrifying, unforgiving clarity. She declared that Raizen was a false prophet, a usurper who had dared to desecrate the divine artifact forged by the First Ones. She claimed that the Crown was not meant to be destroyed — it was meant to ascend. That Raizen's destruction of it had not saved the world, but shattered its only hope of becoming eternal.
The Broken did not come with armies — not at first. They came with messages. Statues reassembled overnight in forgotten ruins. Tomes once lost now placed in temples that had no priests. Artifacts stolen from vaults buried in dimensions too dangerous to name. Their reappearance was not a war cry — it was a sermon.
And people listened.
Not many, not at first. But the world was raw. The cost of peace had left many with empty hands and restless hearts. Raizen had won the war, but peace did not feed the hungry or bury the dead. Slowly, silently, the Broken's message took root: the Crown was not a curse — it had been hope. And Raizen had stolen it.
The fractures spread.
A former ally, a trusted friend from the old wars, turned against Raizen in a remote province, claiming he'd seen a vision of the Crown reborn. Another region that had declared independence under the new order was found burned, its people vanished. At the center of it all, a single symbol: the Eye of the Broken, etched in blood.
Raizen knew what was coming. He had felt it before — the stirrings of belief twisted into vengeance. He remembered the look in the eyes of zealots who bled for power they would never wield, who died for voices in their heads promising immortality. He had buried too many to forget.
He convened the remnants of his inner circle, now scattered and changed by the years. Some were weary, others bitter. A few had sworn never to lift a weapon again. But Raizen spoke to them not as a warrior, nor as a king — but as a man who knew the cycle was returning.
The Broken were not seeking conquest. They were seeking correction. To them, Raizen had not defeated evil — he had interrupted prophecy. They believed themselves the chosen vessels of the true design, and in the cracks left behind by peace, they would pour their gospel like poison.
As the fires began to burn again in distant lands, Raizen stood atop a cliff overlooking the sea, watching storm clouds roll in from the east. The same sea where once, long ago, he had taken his first steps into the unknown, Crownless and uncertain.
Now, the tide was shifting once more.
The world thought the story had ended.
But stories — real stories — don't end.
They resurge.
And the Broken had returned not to reclaim the past… but to rewrite it.
END OF CHAPTER 2