Chapter 2

Carrying the battleaxe, now stripped of its dead rust, I took one step into the black sandstorm.

The raging gales were shredded into nothingness by my chaotic aura a mere three feet from my body. After walking forward for about two miles, I stopped.

Two people were sprawled inside a rocky trench. The young caravan master was gasping like a dehydrated fish, and half-kneeling beside him was a girl, around seventeen or eighteen.

Seeing me appear, the merchant instinctively panicked, his hand fiercely gripping his broken abacus at his waist. Once he recognized my old face, he slumped straight down into the muddy water, exhaling a breath thick with a sobbing relief. "Ancestors above... you actually are alive..."

The girl didn't relax. Like a starving wolf cub guarding its food, she violently yanked the merchant behind her. In her hand, a chipped iron sword pointed perfectly steady at my throat.

Her wrist was trembling, clearly pushed past the point of exhaustion, but her cold, vicious eyes looked as if she were waiting for the perfect chance to bite a chunk of flesh right off me.

That was the bone-deep nature of House Carroll. A thousand years, and that sheer, stubborn grit hadn't changed one bit.

The black dog slowly trotted over to the girl's feet. It didn't bark; it merely sniffed the back of her sword-bearing hand with its wet nose. She tensed up completely, lowering the blade's tip slightly, but didn't dare to make a sudden move.

"What happened?" I asked, glancing at the merchant.

The young man scrambled up, shivering. "Soldiers slaughtering people! We were passing through the Carroll territory and ran into the Order of the Silver Shield laying down a lockdown and purge. They butchered everyone. They even burned the hay in the stables! I ran for my goddamn life, bumped into her halfway, and dragged her along with me... If it wasn't for this black sandstorm masking us, we'd have been hacked to pieces already."

The pursuers were probably still over ten miles out. I was in no rush. I turned my eyes to the girl.

She pursed her cracked lips. Her voice was hoarse and rigid, permeated by a deathly stillness that seemed to crush all her grief into dust. "It's me they want to kill. House Carroll."

I didn't speak. In five hundred years, this was the first time I had heard that name spoken by a living person.

"They were flying the regional banners of the Silver Shield Knights. The one leading the charge is Lord Margrave," she stated, enunciating every word with extreme clarity. "The excuse was: 'Encroaching upon the Alliance's Forbidden Grounds.'"

Encroaching upon forbidden grounds? Other than the Ashen Plains directly beneath my feet, what other piece of land in this world even counts as forbidden ground?

"Three days," the girl continued. "From the main estate to the rural manors, one hundred and thirty-seven souls. They didn't leave a single breathing thing. They dug three feet deep into the foundations of the manor. They smashed the family crests on the walls inch by inch. I am the sole survivor. Evelyn Carroll."

The storm hissed over the trench. I looked at her straight spine and took a step forward.

Evelyn's broken sword reflexively thrust toward me.

With maddening indifference, I raised my left hand, pinching the cold steel blade between two fingers and giving it a slight twist. Ping. The tip of the sword was deflected. Immediately after, my fingers hooked onto a black hemp cord hidden deep beneath her collar and pulled it out.

An iron crest, no bigger than a thumbnail, hung over her chest. The edges were entirely rusted; it looked like a piece of scrap metal.

Evelyn's face changed drastically as she tried to retreat, but my two fingers flipped the crest over. There, I saw the intricate, dark engraving shaped like snapped thorns on the back. A thousand years ago, I had personally hammered the Power of Chaos into this piece of iron. Aside from me, no one in the world knew about this hidden mark.

I let go. The iron piece fell back against her chest.

"This piece of scrap was left to you by your ancestor," I said, looking into her eyes. The dry, monotone cadence of my own voice felt almost numbing to myself. "His name was Oswald."

Evelyn looked as if she had been struck by lightning.

Oswald was the name of the very first Patriarch of House Carroll, from a thousand years ago.

The outside world had long purged it completely from the annals of history.

She finally lowered her broken sword, staring at the old man in a ragged surcoat standing before her. For the first time, genuine awe and terror seeped into her eyes.

She likely guessed who I was.

I didn't wait for her to speak. "When your father died... did he say anything?"

Evelyn's breath hitched. She didn't cry out loud. She just closed her eyes and turned her face into the abrasive sandstorm.

"'Chaos as the bedrock, heed not the origin,'" she recited, word by halting word. Her voice shook, but it carried a terrifyingly devout reverence. "'A century’s cycle, forget not the ashes.'"

Twelve words. Nowhere were they recorded in any tome or scripture. They survived solely through this systematically erased family, passed down purely through whispers from the lips of dying Patriarchs generation after generation.

Those were the twelve words I had personally taught Oswald on the night I walked into the Sealing Pillar.

When the final word 'ashes' fell from her lips, my fingers slowly, involuntarily curled tighter in the dark. The knuckles ground against each other, emitting a sharp, displaced cracking sound.

A thousand years. The blue-bloods in power treated their solemn vows like absolute trash. Yet the tiny sliver of bloodline I had left behind treated these twelve unverified words as a lifeline they refused to let go of until death.

Evelyn opened her eyes and fished a second object out from the blood-soaked clothes at her waist.

It was a second, identical iron crest. Except, the edges of this one were deformed from heavy crushing, and it was caked in hardened, blackened blood.

"My father was gripping this with everything he had when he was pinned to the fireplace with a lance," Evelyn said, looking at me. "He made me memorize those words and gave this to me. Then he drew his sword and blocked the entrance to the hidden passage."

I stared at the bloodied crest for several seconds. I let go of the battleaxe’s hilt, reached into my coarse inner pocket, and pulled something out.

The third piece.

I had carried this piece for a thousand years. Every night, sitting beneath the Sealing Pillar, I would rub my calloused thumb over it.

I walked over to a flat rock nearby and placed the third piece down. Then, I took the second piece from Evelyn's hand, and the first piece from her neck.

Clack. Clack.

The three jagged pieces of scrap iron bit perfectly into one another on the rock's surface, slotting together seamlessly to form a complete, roughly textured circular shield.

A thousand years later, they had finally been reunited.

No useless words could bear the sheer weight of these three broken pieces of iron. A crushing, deathly silence blanketed the rocky trench; even the black sandstorm sweeping around us seemed to lower its screaming. I kept my head down, staring dead at the dark engravings on the shield's surface.

Just then, the black dog walked over from the side.

It stood by the rock, lowered its head, and sniffed the bloodstained second crest with its wet nose.

Under the pitch-black sky, a sharp, incredibly unnerving gleam of amber light flashed within those eyes—eyes that hadn't shown a single trace of emotion outside of eating and drinking for a thousand years. From its throat came an impossibly brief, almost subconscious low whine, laced with a certain frenzied anticipation.

I was drowning in my own fury and the bitter chasm of a thousand years, entirely failing to notice the beast's anomaly.

But the merchant standing behind me saw it clearly. As a businessman used to licking blood off a blade in the black markets, his instinct for danger was razor-sharp.

He stared into the dog's eyes, an uncontrollable shudder wracking his body. He saw it with absolute clarity—the look in the dog’s eyes as it smelled the blood wasn't that of a beast. It was the look of a predator that had just recognized something immensely lethal... something it had been lying in wait for, for a very, very long time.