Trust, Raizen had learned, was more fragile than glass and twice as dangerous when broken. In the wake of the Veilborn's rise, when the world once again teetered on the edge of a chaos born not from gods or celestial crowns, but from human conviction and ideological zealotry, he found himself standing across from faces he had once vowed never to look upon again without drawing a blade. Former enemies. Fallen kings. Warlords of broken realms. Scars shaped like crowns.
The summit was held in neutral territory — the ruins of Kal Thorran, a city once thriving, now reduced to silent spires and overgrown cobblestone streets. It was a city without allegiance, a corpse of civilization where no banner dared fly. The perfect ground for a meeting that no one wanted to admit was necessary. Each representative arrived with entourages, suspicion, and hidden daggers. And yet, they came. Because they all felt the tremors. Because the Veilborn did not discriminate between former heroes or villains. They consumed everything in the dark.
Raizen stood in the center, not as a king, not even as a warrior, but as the reluctant axis around which the world had begun to turn again. The others had once called him conqueror, heretic, traitor — depending on the day. Now they stared at him with a mixture of contempt and necessity. He hated the weight of their eyes more than he ever hated their armies.
Among them was Caereth of the Hollow Flame — a pyromancer queen whose armies had once burned his villages during the War of the Silent Crown. Her red eyes held the same hunger for dominance they always had, but now tempered with the caution of one who had tasted defeat and survived it. Beside her, General Vokhan of the Iron Pact — a man whose war machines had once nearly leveled the sanctums of Raizen's allies. Vokhan didn't speak much, but when he did, the room chilled. And at the edge of the gathering, cloaked in blue robes, was Silenra the Mirror — the illusionist empress whose people had thrived on manipulation and broken treaties. She smiled like a knife.
Raizen opened the meeting with the truth. Not a plea, not diplomacy — just the unvarnished truth. The Veilborn were amassing relics, recruiting from the ruins, seeding instability in every region still fractured by the aftermath of the Crown's destruction. Whole populations had gone silent. Cities were reporting false skies and impossible dreams shared by entire districts. A cult was coalescing, and it was no longer underground.
He laid out maps, ancient tomes, sigils drawn in blood and shadow. And then he did something no one expected.
He asked for help.
The silence that followed was thick with disbelief. Raizen — the one who had fought all of them, the one who had toppled monarchies and shattered a god-artifact — was asking for aid. Not because he was weak, but because he knew the next war would not be won with power. It would be won with unity, or not at all.
The discussions that followed were not alliances. They were barbed negotiations, full of unspoken threats and guarded promises. Every concession made came with strings wrapped in poison. But slowly, lines were drawn. Ceasefires agreed. Troops reallocated. Messages sent to rogue factions and broken armies.
And yet, under it all, Raizen could feel the hollowness of the pact. These were not friends. They were coiled serpents sharing warmth only to survive the winter. Betrayal was inevitable — he knew it the moment Caereth offered her firemages "for strategic support," or when Vokhan agreed to share schematics of his warforged units but withheld their activation codes.
Silenra was the most dangerous. She never disagreed, never argued — she simply watched. Her questions were always harmless on the surface: "Where will the Crown fragment be held for safekeeping?" "Who guards your dreamwalker mages at night?" "What precautions have you taken to ensure no one tampers with the relic decoding?"
She never asked for anything. Which meant she was already taking something.
Raizen convened with his closest allies behind closed walls. Not all of them trusted this alliance. Neither did he. But the battlefield had changed. The Veilborn were not an enemy to face with a singular sword — they were a cancer, feeding on instability, and to fight them required more than brute force. It required coordination. Sacrifice. And the ability to look former enemies in the eyes and pretend they shared the same dream of peace.
He didn't sleep that night. Not out of fear, but because he was watching the flames. The same flames that once devoured cities now served as their light. And he knew, deep down, that if the Veilborn didn't destroy this alliance… someone within it would.
The pact was forged, not in trust, but in necessity.
It would hold.
Until it didn't.
END OF CHAPTER 4