The Revelant Crown

I awaken in a body I no longer recognize.

Ash veils the broken sky like an old shroud clinging to a forgotten corpse. My vision swims with pain and smoke. I taste blood—mine—and the searing residue of magic. The last thing I remember is the girl, Suriel, crying out as the Seventh Soul fractured, its light shattering into a thousand dying stars.

Now I kneel in the dust of what used to be certainty.

A deep tremor pulses through the Valley of Broken Sigils. The runes carved into the stone pillars flicker erratically, trying to stabilize the ancient seals, but they're breaking—just like I am. My gauntlet, once only a vessel of conquest, now pulses like a second heart. Inside it? The fractured remnants of the Seventh Soul. Not claimed. Not complete. Something new.

Something wrong.

I try to stand. My knees threaten collapse. My bones feel like splinters shoved into a skin too tight. My back burns where wings of shadow tore free in the last clash. I can still feel them, those monstrous appendages, folded beneath the weight of my will, coiled, waiting.

Waiting for what?

A whisper answers from deep within the gauntlet. Not a voice. A hunger.

Craving.

It isn't finished.

"Wraith." A cough, sharp and wet, breaks the silence. Suriel. The girl. She's alive. Curled against a cracked runestone, her face pale, lips black with dried blood. Her eyes—storm-gray, defiant—lock onto mine. She's clutching something to her chest.

The largest shard of the Seventh Soul.

I stagger to her. Each step is a negotiation between my will and my damage. She tries to rise, but I kneel and place a hand on her shoulder.

"I have it," she croaks, her voice shredded raw. "I couldn't let it fade."

I nod, unsure what to say. The shard hums softly in her arms, a single trembling note like a dying breath. Its light flickers between hues—violet, azure, silver—as if it's trying to decide what it wants to become.

Like me.

That's when I feel it—a ripple in the ash-choked air. Not wind. Not magic. Something worse.

Footsteps.

I rise and turn, Twilight's Blade already in my hand, its edge glowing with residual soulfire. Figures move through the smoke beyond the Gate. One, two… no, five. More behind them. Their armor is blackened bone, and their eyes burn with hollow light.

Not spawn.

Not demons.

Soulwalkers.

I've seen their kind before—deathless reapers once used by the ancient kings to harvest traitors. But these wear my crest.

My crown.

My dead men.

They march with silence that feels louder than war drums.

"Wraith," one says, stepping forward. Its voice is a guttural distortion, but the shape is familiar. "You left us in the dark."

My stomach lurches. Commander Rehn. The first man I knighted. The first man who died for me at the Wall of Glass. His face is a ruin of rot and molten gold.

"They wouldn't let us rest. Not even in death. You started this war. Now finish it."

The craving surges again. The souls I hold twist against the inside of my ribs, hungry to answer Rehn's challenge. I feel my fingers tighten on Twilight's hilt, not from anger—but from need.

Power. I could take them. Absorb what they've become. Forge them into fuel. No one would stop me. Not here.

But I hear her breath behind me. Suriel, struggling to rise. A sound too soft for the battlefield, too alive.

Compassion tugs at my blade arm.

I step forward.

"No," I whisper. "You don't belong to them. You belong to peace."

Rehn doesn't hesitate. He charges.

Steel meets phantom bone, sparks flying like the last stars of a dying realm. Each clash between us feels like defiance incarnate. He swings with all the pain I buried. I parry with all the grief I never processed.

We fight as if we both want to lose.

I drive Twilight's Blade through his chest, but he doesn't scream. He just looks at me.

"You could have saved us," he says. "You chose the throne."

His body dissolves into ash and light.

I stagger back. My chest cracks with every ragged breath. I can't keep doing this. I can't keep surviving myself.

The other Soulwalkers hesitate. They sense the flicker in me. Not weakness. Not fear.

Doubt.

But before they can strike, the ground splits beneath us.

The Gate howls.

A figure rises from the earth, born in fire and memory. Tall, armored in obsidian, with antlers of burning silver and a face I once saw in a mirror.

Him.

Me.

The Revenant King.

My reflection from the moment I died. The version of me who never questioned, never doubted, never broke for mercy. He walks toward me now, barefoot on molten ground, dragging a blade made of the Seventh Soul's broken light.

"You hesitated," he says, voice a furnace. "You broke the chain. You failed the purpose."

I raise my blade, but my arm feels slow. Heavy.

"You are not me," I growl.

He smiles. "No. I'm who you were meant to be."

He points at Suriel. "She makes you weak."

She screams as fire wraps around her feet. I dive, catching her before it consumes her. My cloak scorches. Her skin blisters.

"Give me the shard," I say.

She blinks through pain. "It'll change you."

"I'm already changing."

I press the shard into my gauntlet.

Light explodes.

My wings erupt from my back, not black—silver, edged in crimson. My flesh tears. My scream burns the sky. The souls inside me twist in agony, in joy, in revelation.

I rise, hovering above the shattered ground, and meet the Revenant King's eyes.

"You're not me," I say. "You're my shadow. I bury you now."

We clash.

Blade to blade. Soul to soul. The valley becomes a storm. Time unravels. He fights like certainty incarnate. I fight like a question that refuses to be answered.

He slices deep. My blood sings with fury. I drive Twilight into his chest, and for a moment—just one—he falters.

Then a second presence floods the battlefield.

Mor'Zul.

He steps from a fracture in the world itself, dragging Nyxiel behind him, half-dead, half-smiling. The chain around her throat pulses with binding runes.

He throws her at my feet.

"A gift," he says.

"What do you want?" I growl.

He grins. "You've done well, Wraith. But there's one soul left. The final soul is your own."

He plunges a dagger into his own chest—and vanishes.

And from the rift he leaves behind—

something ancient begins to crawl through.

To be continued…

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