Chapter Seventy-Nine: The Cost of Peace
Part I: Ashes and Aftermath
The battle in the southern plains ended not with a shout of triumph, but with a long, aching silence. Smoke curled from the ruins of outposts, drifting like ghostly veils over the broken remains of siege engines and shattered walls. The once-loyal banners of the south, proud and defiant, now lay torn and smoldering beneath the bloodied standards of Caedren's forces. Where once there had been oaths and proclamations, there were now only the echoes of screams carried on the wind.
Galen had fallen—not to the blade of an enemy, but by his own hand. When his captains were overrun and the last of the gates breached, he had withdrawn to the highest tower, away from the dying and the desperate. There, surrounded by relics of a lost order, he drew a dagger and ended his life with the same precision with which he had lived it. He refused to be paraded as a traitor, to have his name bound in chains before the eyes of a world he had once sworn to protect.
Caedren stood at the edge of the ruined fortress, the wind tugging at his cloak as ash swirled around him. His boots pressed into scorched earth, his fingers clenched around the hilt of a blade that had seen too many battles. He had won—but the weight of that victory bent his shoulders low, pressing the breath from his lungs like an unseen hand.
His men were silent, some still tending wounds, others simply sitting in the mud with vacant eyes. There were no cheers, no songs of glory. Only the bitter taste of necessity and the grim silence that came when enemies looked too much like brothers.
"You've united them," Lysa said, stepping beside him. Her armor was streaked with soot and blood, her face gaunt from sleepless nights and the burden of command. She looked not at the smoldering battlefield, but at him. "But at what cost?"
He didn't answer immediately. His eyes traced the horizon, where distant villages had shuttered their doors, hiding from both conquerors and saviors. The silence between them was deep, stretching like a wound that could not be stitched.
"I did what I had to," he finally said. His voice was low, hoarse. "I couldn't let the realm splinter—not now. Not after everything."
"But you broke it to hold it together," she whispered. "And you may have broken yourself with it."
Part II: The Council Fractures Further
Word of the victory spread quickly, borne on swift riders and murmuring winds. Yet the response in the Capitol was not the celebration Caedren had hoped for. Instead of unity, the battle stirred deeper tensions. Some lauded him as a hero who crushed rebellion before it could consume the realm. Others whispered of ambition cloaked in righteousness, of a man who used the sword when the pen might have sufficed.
Within the Council, fractures deepened like cracks in frost-bitten stone. Mairin, cold-eyed and precise, led a quiet charge against him. Her voice, once measured and moderate, now dripped with restrained venom.
"What is he now, if not a tyrant with a crown unearned?" she asked in shadowed halls, her words picked up by ears loyal to neither side. "He moves like a king. Commands like a king. But the oath he swore was not to a throne."
In backrooms and taverns, in the whispered corners of libraries and gardens, debates flared into arguments, and arguments into schemes. The young radicals who once saw Caedren as the heir to a new world now began to waver, uncertain if he had merely carved out a new tyranny beneath a different name.
Caedren's throne, though never formally declared, grew lonelier with each day. His allies—those who had bled beside him, who had forged hope in the fires of Highrest—began to drift. Some went back to their provinces to tend to the broken land. Others grew quiet, unsure if the dream they had fought for was slipping into shadow.
Even among the Ashen Oath, there were murmurs. Was this the future they had sworn to build? A future of conquest and compliance?
He still held the loyalty of many, but loyalty did not ease the ache in his chest, nor silence the creeping doubt that he had become what he once vowed to oppose.
Part III: A Shard of the Old World
In the midst of this storm, when silence grew louder than battle cries, an old friend arrived in secret. The archivist Erius, once a scholar of the northern holdfasts, came cloaked and hooded through back alleys and hidden gates. His presence was like a gust of old wind, carrying the scent of long-forgotten dust and memory.
He brought with him a relic unearthed during the collapse of the cult's last sanctum. A scroll, weathered by time and soot, sealed in wax bearing the insignia of Ivan himself—the ancient king, the first to forge a pact with the Serpent, and perhaps the first to regret it.
The scroll, upon translation, spoke in riddled lines of a hidden vault beneath the mountains, far from the paths of men. It was there, the scroll claimed, that Ivan had sent his most trusted student—Caedren's ancestor—with knowledge forbidden and dangerous. Knowledge that had not been meant for any age of kings, but for the world that would rise after the storm of Kael passed through and burned away the lies.
"There are truths yet buried," Erius said softly, his voice barely rising over the crackling of the fire in Caedren's chamber. "Truths that could reshape the kingdom. If you have the courage to dig deeper."
Caedren stared at the flame, his reflection flickering in the polished steel of his sword. The firelight painted shadows on the stone walls, shadows that looked like kings long dead.
His hands, once steady, now trembled faintly as they held the scroll. His heart, long dulled by battle, burned again—not with ambition, but with purpose.
The world was not finished. The dream was not dead. Not yet.
"Then we go to the mountains," he said.
And outside, the snow began to fall.