Three weeks.
That was all it took for Wyrmsreach to slip through the Marines' fingers like smoke through broken stone.
It began not with blood, but with whispers. Muted curses exchanged in alleyways, secret handshakes under broken tables, symbols carved into cellar doors with chalk and ash. A movement had begun to smolder, now, it raged.
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Week One.
The first blow was struck in the Slaggut, a crumbling alleyway that twisted like a knife wound through the poorest corner of the slums. A Marine patrol heard crying echo down the narrow lane. Standard procedure. investigate. They rounded a corner with rifles raised and found nothing but shadows, until bricks and jagged tools rained down from rooftops. One Marine fled with a shattered arm and blood in his eyes. The rest were left behind.
The retaliation was immediate. Dozens of homes were burned in the dead of night. Mothers and children wept in the streets. But the flames didn't cower the people. They clarified the stakes.
He had warned them. And now, the name passed from mouth to mouth like a secret prayer.
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Week Two.
The docks grew quiet. Where once gulls screeched and sailors bellowed, only silence remained. Dockhands laid down their ropes. Cargo meant for the manor and the garrison rotted under canvas tarps. A Marine officer tried to strong arm a group of workers into compliance, he was beaten and rolled into the sea.
At night, bonfires lit the piers, and the rebels sang songs older than memory. Riven stood among them sometimes, silent, wings tucked close, listening. When asked why he fought, he said "Because I remember when I couldn't."
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Week Three.
The city became a mural of war. Smoke scrawled messages against the sky. Soot and flame painted Riven's image on stone and wood. The names came quickly,
Ashborne.
Flameborn.
The Son of the Sky.
The Reigniter.
His face, bare, chested, wings flared, gaze blazing, became a symbol. To the rebels, he was no longer just a boy.
And beyond Talon Island, the legend took root.
Merchant captains carried tales of a winged boy who melted stone and split Marines like fire through parchment. Drunken pirates claimed they'd seen him light up the sky like a god. In the back alleys of Ilusia, the name Riven Caelum was spoken with awe. Across Toroa, graffiti marked rooftops with burning wings.
The World Government, no longer able to ignore it.
A discreet bounty was issued. Marine Intelligence wanted to control the narrative before it slipped beyond them.
WANTED: RIVEN CAELUM
Alias: "Ashborne"
Crimes: Arson, Sedition, Assault on Government Officers, Incitement of Insurrection, Murder of Government Officers.
Lineage: Confirmed Lunarian
Bounty: 12,000,000 Berries
Considered Armed and Extremely Dangerous
It was a bounty not for deeds, but for destiny.
Posters flooded the Blues. And in every copy, every tacked parchment and scrawled name, his legend grew.
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The Marines expected riots. They got revolution.
They expected chaos. They got coordination.
Slade, the Iron Row's broken smith, began forging blades from scrap, binding chains into weapons. Former sailors formed strike teams. Market women used weaving shops to stitch bombs. Children became messengers and scouts.
A weaver named Luma, whose daughter was killed in a sweep, made her loom room into a munitions lab.
A fisherman named Cutter rallied dockhands into the Salt Chain, hijacked Marine barges, and set them ablaze at the harbor mouth.
The rebellion now moved like a creature. Eyes in every shadow. Fangs in every street.
The Marines responded with curfews and raids.
One night, they misidentified a rebel safehouse and burned a clinic to the ground. A healer named Mira, unarmed, was executed in front of a dozen children.
By morning, the garrison outpost nearest the clinic was nothing but ash. The commanding officer was left dangling by one leg from a tower scaffold, Guts dangling from his sliced stomach.
Each crackdown birthed a dozen new soldiers.
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At the end of the third week. The night was cruel with silence, broken only by the groaning wind that slid through the bones of the ruined clocktower.
Ashborne, or Riven, was prowling the upper rafters, scouting the shadows below. His bare chest was smeared with soot and blood, a jagged cut running down his ribs, barely closed by glowing embers from his Lunarian flesh. His wings remained tucked against his back, one still singed from a recent skirmish.
He was slipping. One step too loud on shattered glass. One breath too sharp.
That's when she struck.
A whisper of shadow peeled from the wall, and Marella Graves was on him.
No words. No smirk this time.
Just violence.
Twin daggers screamed through the air, slashing toward his throat. Ashborne barely brought up his cutlass in time, steel rang against steel, sparks showering the moonlight. The sheer weight behind her strike knocked him from the rafter. He hit the ground hard, rolled, came up coughing blood.
"Fuck," Riven muttered, staggering to his feet.
Marella didn't respond. Her eyes were colder than ever, and the dark mist around her boots writhed like a living thing.
She lunged.
They collided in the dead center of the ruined chamber. Her twin blades struck like fangs, slashes for tendons, jabs for arteries, ruthless and surgical. Ashborne blocked two, parried one, felt another open a deep gouge across his forearm. Blood sprayed.
He countered low, feinted right, then swung his cutlass in a brutal arc meant to take her head clean off.
She ducked, spun, elbowed him in the gut. His breath exploded from his lungs.
But then came the heat.
He exhaled, and the air rippled.
His body caught flame, not from rage, but from focus. His Lunarian blood boiled. Flames burst from his shoulders and arms, swirling into a controlled inferno. The gash on his forearm began to seal, skin knitting back together with molten glow.
Then he blitzed her, cutlass in one hand, flames in the other.
Marella's shadow powers surged. The ground warped, darkness forming spikes and hands. One tendril lashed for his ankle, but he leapt, wings flaring, cutlass slashing down in an arc that scorched the air itself.
Steel clashed with dagger.
He forced her back, step by step, driving her into a broken column. He ducked a swipe, elbowed her jaw, drove his knee into her stomach, and with a savage roar, he slashed across her side.
Her Marine coat split.
Blood spattered the wall.
She didn't scream.
Instead, she vanished.
A shadow blink, then she reappeared behind him and drove both daggers into his back.
He raged. Heat exploded from his body in a violent burst, incinerating the shadows around him. Flames erupted across the chamber. Stone cracked. Wooden beams ignited.
He staggered forward, two dagger hilts protruding from his back, then reached over his shoulder and yanked one out with a snarl.
"Okay," he coughed, "that was rude."
She was already closing in again, silent as smoke.
But this time, his body began to change.
The fire around him turned white, hot. His skin glowed with a pale, golden hue. His eyes became radiant orbs, no longer human. A luminous halo flared to life behind his head, spinning with raw, divine light.
His voice dropped. "You wanted the god, bitch?"
He half-transformed in a flash, just for a moment. His hair lifted as if underwater. His wings doubled in size and turned to glowing solar flame. Heat warped the floor beneath him.
He charged her.
Their blades met, cutlass and dagger, again and again. Sparks and blood. Cuts multiplied on both of them. Riven wasn't elegant, he was brutal, unrelenting. One, handed slashes that shattered stone. Wild kicks laced with fire. Elbow strikes that dented the walls.
Marella was faster. But now, he was burning.
She stabbed him in the thigh. He punched her in the mouth. Teeth flew.
She ducked a slash. He headbutted her.
She screamed.
He kicked her across the room, and she landed hard, spitting blood.
But the transformation burned too hot.
His vision blurred. The halo flickered.
His skin cracked, light spilling from the wounds.
He dropped to one knee, trembling.
Marella rose from the rubble, face bloodied, shadows crawling again.
"You don't know how to control it," she growled, limping forward. "You're just a brat playing god."
She hurled a shadow blade.
He blocked it.
Barely.
Another tendril lashed for his neck. He parried with flame, staggered. His knees buckled.
He was outmatched. Not because he lacked power, but because he couldn't wield it yet.
"Shit," Ashborne muttered. "Should've trained harder. Or not gotten stabbed. Again."
He managed a grin. Bloody. Cocky. Full of defiance. Pure Riven.
Then he turned and ran.
He didn't want to.
But he had to live.
He flung a Solar Flame Surge over his shoulder, an explosion of sunfire that detonated the far wall. Rubble rained. Dust filled the air.
And Ashborne dove through the wreckage, wings catching wind, bleeding and burned, but alive.
Behind him, Marella stood half-crushed under fallen stone, coughing blood, one eye swollen shut, her mouth torn.
But she didn't fall.
She watched the flames trail across the night sky, eyes like razors.
Next time, she'd finish it.
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Inside the Marine garrison, panic wore the face of formality.
Reports arrived hourly, weapon thefts, patrols vanishing, officers defecting. Captain Durn was found strangled with a note pinned to his chest, For Elma.
Vice Captain Renn, captured by rebels and returned voluntarily, locked himself in a cell without speaking a word.
Fear moved through the command like a virus.
And from above, Rear Admiral Titus Drake thundered over transponder snails,
"Control the narrative. Control the island. Kill the symbol."
But the symbol had already taken flight.
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Lord Silas Vortan stood at the manor's highest window, hands clasped, eyes reflecting distant flame. The rebellion had grown teeth.
Marella sat nearby, Injured but awake.
Slade's forge never cooled, and in its fire, he shaped something old. Something sacred.
And Riven, shirtless, bruised, radiant, stood at the center of it all, wings unfurled, as the city rose to meet him.
The people were no longer whispering.
They were singing.
And Captain Hina was only six days away.