The iron chains rattled against the frozen ground, making a sound like the teeth of a dying man.Lucien was dragged face-first through the dirt. His skin was torn. His clothes were nothing more than blood-soaked rags. Every time he tried to dig his fingers into the earth to stop himself, a heavy leather boot slammed into his ribs, forcing a gasp of agony from his lungs."Stop struggling, you waste of blood," a cold, mocking voice rang out.Lucien looked up through the matted hair falling over his eyes. Standing above him was Julian Saint-Aurelius. Julian was everything Lucien was not: tall, handsome, and radiating a golden light from his skin. That light was the sign of the Golden Lion bloodline—the pride of their family.Behind Julian stood twenty armored guards, their capes snapping in the biting wind. They were at the edge of the world, standing before the Great Iron Gates. Beyond those gates lay the Eternal Ossuary.It was a place where the sun never shone. It was a graveyard that

Lucien saw a man standing in the rain, holding a wooden stick. He saw the same man years later, standing on a battlefield, holding a broken blade against a thousand enemies. He felt the man’s grip, the way he breathed, the way he calculated the wind, the way he understood that a sword was not just a tool, but an extension of the soul.Lucien’s hands twitched. He felt like he had practiced the sword for a hundred years. He knew how to cut through silk without tearing it. He knew how to cut through stone like it was water. The "Intent" was a spiritual weight that settled into his mind, making him feel sharp, like a blade hidden in a sheath."Sword Intent..." Lucien muttered. "I don't even have a sword."He looked around the shrine. Near the base of the stone tablet, buried halfway in the dirt and ash, was a piece of metal. He reached down and pulled it out.It was a sword, or what was left of one. It was a straight-edged longsword, but it was covered in thick, orange rust. The crossguar

Time is a strange thing in the Eternal Ossuary. There is no sun to mark the passing of the days. There is only the shifting thickness of the grey fog and the occasional blood-red glow of the moon that appears once a month. For Lucien, the first few weeks were a blur of survival and pain. But as the months rolled by, the boy who had been thrown away like trash began to change.Lucien lived in a small, narrow cave tucked into the side of a cliff made of compressed bone. It wasn't a comfortable home, but it was safe. The walls of the cave were lined with glowing moss that he had found by signing in at a place called the Cave of Whispers. The moss gave off a soft, blue light and, more importantly, it acted as a natural alarm. If anything entered the cave, the moss would turn a deep, angry red.Lucien sat in the center of the cave, his legs crossed. He looked nothing like the broken, bloody boy from the iron gates. His hair had grown long, tied back with a strip of leather. His body was l

The deeper Lucien walked into the Eternal Ossuary, the more the world began to bleed.The grey, dull mist of the outer rim was gone. Here, in the "Red Zone," the air was stained with a faint, rust-colored haze. It smelled of old blood and ozone. The ground beneath his boots was no longer soft ash; it was hard, cracked stone that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic heat, as if he were walking on the skin of a sleeping giant.Lucien stopped. His God-Devouring Veins were screaming. They weren't screaming in fear, but in excitement. The energy in this place was so dense it was almost liquid.He looked up and saw it.The Grave of the Fallen Seraph.In the center of a massive, mile-wide crater lay the skeleton of a six-winged being. Even in death, the Seraph was magnificent. Its bones were not white, but a shimmering, translucent gold. It was massive—each of its six wings was the size of a city block, spread out across the crater as if it had been struck down from the heavens mid-flight.But it w