The Warden opened its invisible mouth and screamed a single word. It was a word in the Old Tongue. It was a word that humans were never meant to hear. It was the sound of a dimension tearing open.EXPAND.The Warden unleashed a localized domain expansion. The dark god pushed its own reality out into the physical world. It forced the rules of the Ash Plane to overwrite the rules of the cavern.Caster watched in absolute terror as the solid black stone walls of the cavern began to crack. But they did not crack like normal stone. They cracked like a giant, clear glass mirror.CRRRR-SHATTER!The walls of the room exploded outward. The ceiling vanished. The floor beneath Caster’s boots dissolved into nothing.The physical world shattered into a billion tiny, floating pieces of glass.Caster fell. He tumbled through empty space. He waved his arms wildly, trying to find something to grab, but there was nothing. He looked around.The veil between the realms was torn completely open. Caster wa

"Jace," Caster whispered into the freezing void. "Mirella. Everyone I hurt. Hear me."Caster did not call them as ghosts to fight for him. He did not ask them for forgiveness. He asked them for their pain.He closed his eyes and reached deep into his own mind. He touched the carved letters of his True Name on his soul. And he opened the door to his guilt.He pulled all the sorrow, all the rage, all the betrayal, and all the crushing grief of his victims to the very surface of his heart.The pain was unimaginable. It was an emotional agony that felt like a knife twisting in his chest. He felt Jace’s burning skin. He felt Mirella’s lonely death. He felt the terror of the mothers choking on the ash in the streets.Caster channeled every single drop of that terrible, heavy sorrow straight down his right arm. He pushed the collective rage of a thousand ruined lives directly into his flickering white sword.The reaction was explosive.The sword of pure white light suddenly shrieked. It soun

Caster Spellbound dove straight down into the pitch-black abyss. He was falling through the Ash Void. This was a dead dimension. It was a place of endless emptiness, filled only with floating red embers that were once human souls. There was no sky here. There was no solid ground. There was only the dark.Caster held his heavy sword in his hands. The blade was made of pure white light mixed with dark, swirling shadows. It hummed with the sad, weeping sound of a thousand broken memories. He pointed the tip of the sword directly at the giant, thirty-foot monster waiting below him.The Ash Warden looked up at the tiny human.The dark god was furious. Caster had just cut off two of its six massive arms. Thick, boiling black tar leaked from the two severed stumps on the monster’s left side.But the Warden did not panic. The Warden was inside its own home now.You think you can hurt me in my own house? the Warden’s layered, grinding voice echoed through the endless empty space. The voice ca

“Your sacrifice is meaningless,” the Warden gloated. “You throw away your eternity for a brief pause. When I return, I will find your precious city. I will find your Archmage Lysane. I will find the children. And I will turn them all to dust.”Caster felt the burning star in his chest reach critical mass. It was ready.Five seconds until detonation. He looked into the pale gray fire of the monster’s eyes.Caster Spellbound was an old man. He had made terrible mistakes. He was tired, and his body was turning to dust. He was about to erase his own name from the book of the universe forever. But Caster did not cry. He did not beg. He smiled. It was a bloody, broken, fiercely defiant smile."You do not understand humans," Caster whispered back. His weak voice carried the absolute, unbreakable pride of a mortal man."You think a thousand years is a brief pause?" Caster asked, his smile growing wider. "A thousand years is thirty generations of humans. In a thousand years, my people built f

A flood of pure, warm, living mana rushed down the glowing chain.It poured from Lysane’s heart, traveled down the long line of light, and rushed straight into Caster’s dying veins.Caster’s eyes went wide. He looked down at his crumbling gray legs. The flaking stopped. The dry, cracked, dead ash stopped falling away.Slowly, beautifully, the gray color began to retreat. The color of healthy, pale human skin returned to his feet. The warmth traveled up his legs, past his knees, and into his stomach.He looked at his hands. His fingers had been turning to smoke. Now, the smoke reversed. Solid bone, muscle, and skin grew back instantly. His fingers became strong and steady.The chain was grounding his existence. It was reminding the universe that Caster Spellbound was a real, living, physical human being. It told the Ash Void that it was not allowed to eat him.The pure mana flooded his exhausted system. It felt like drinking a glass of cold, clean water after walking in the desert for a