The wind howled across the Serathian Plains, sharp and dry like the breath of the dead. It carried dust, whispers, and the rusted scent of old wars—blood baked into the soil across centuries.
Callan's army stood at its edge, gazing toward the east where the ancient walls of Varranis loomed in the far distance, shadowed by stormclouds that never moved.
But they would not march directly.
Not yet.
They needed the next shard. And it lay buried beneath the ruins of the Hollow Kings.
In the time of the first empire—long before Callan's name ever graced a battlefield—there had been a covenant of sovereigns. Seven kings, cursed by ambition, ruled lands of fire and ash. To conquer death, they had sacrificed their people to bind their souls to eternal thrones.
When the Empire rose, the Hollow Kings were betrayed by their own bloodlines and entombed beneath obsidian crypts. Their thrones shattered. Their souls scattered. But their shard—one of the Emperor's—was said to lie in the heart of their prison.
A place now called the Crypt of Silent Crowns.
They descended into the fissure at dawn.
Torches flickered against jagged walls. The deeper they went, the more distorted the air became. Voices whispered in reverse. Echoes didn't follow sound but preceded it.
Solenne walked ahead, her hand on the hilt of her twin daggers. "We're being watched."
"We're not," Lysander muttered. "This place is remembering us before we even entered it."
Callan didn't flinch. "The shard's near."
They reached the first throne room—empty, save for bones and an ancient crown laid on a stone slab.
Lysander bent down. "No sign of enchantment—"
The crown snapped shut like jaws, nearly biting off his hand.
A figure formed in the dust above it. Tall, armored, crowned—but its face was a void. No features. No eyes. Just a black emptiness that drank light.
"I am King Varrax," the figure rasped. "You come seeking what does not belong to you."
"We come to reclaim what he stole," Callan replied.
The wraith hissed. "Then face the trial of the Hollow."
The world turned black.
And when it reformed, they stood in a cathedral made of bone.
Callan looked down—he was armored, but not in his usual gear. This was darker, older.
He knew it.
It was what he wore the day he betrayed the Seven Houses. The armor of the Empire's blade. The day of the massacre.
The day he became the Demon General.
He turned—and saw the battlefield relived before him. His past self cutting down nobles. Innocents. Entire families under Imperial order.
Solenne stood beside him, and she saw herself among the corpses.
Lysander, too.
They had all been there.
They had all looked away.
"Do you regret it?" Varrax's voice echoed in the walls. "Do you deny it?"
Callan stepped forward. "I accept it."
He held out his hands. "But I'm not who I was then."
The throne cracked.
The scene crumbled.
They reawakened in the next hall.
Another throne. Another king.
Another trial.
King Elzen's chamber was flooded with water. A pale, suffocating tide that clawed at the walls and ceilings. The memory here was different.
Callan floated—not in armor now, but as a boy. Drowning.
His father held him under.
A lesson in survival.
The trial was not in battle this time. It was in stillness.
He had to endure.
He had to forgive.
Solenne screamed in the blackness, reliving her own drowning—betrayed by the assassin's guild she once served.
Lysander's hands bled as he tried to save his sister from a flood he couldn't stop.
But they did not drown.
Callan reached up, broke the surface.
Air flooded in.
Another shard glimmered in the depths—and floated to his palm.
One by one, they faced five more trials.
Each king more twisted than the last.
Each memory more invasive.
By the end, Callan bled from the nose. Solenne limped from a soul-wound she couldn't explain.
And Lysander couldn't stop whispering a name no one else remembered.
They reached the final hall.
No throne. No king.
Just a mirror.
And in it, not reflections—but their replacements.
Three figures stepped forward, identical in face but flawless. No scars. No doubts. No regrets.
"These are the versions you could have been," the chamber whispered. "Kill them, and you deny your pain. Let them live, and they take your place."
Solenne hesitated.
Her mirror self smiled, kind and clean and radiant.
Lysander's counterpart radiated peace and power.
Callan's… looked happy.
Free.
With family.
With love.
He stepped back.
Then forward.
"I don't want your peace," he told the reflection. "I want justice."
He struck.
The mirror shattered.
And in the shards—another fragment pulsed.
The third shard. Retrieved.
They emerged hours later, weary, changed, but not broken.
The army waited in silence.
And when Callan raised the shard to the sky, a wind swept the plains.
Three down.
Nine to go.
And the Emperor knew.