HEAVEN'S FORSAKEN SON

Seventy-one hour war

Arin felt the Dragon Vein thrumming louder, not from defiance now but from recognition; the vein had found the tunnel’s old wards and answered them, and the resonance in his chest promised one more thing — a way through that was not wholly escape: a path to return.

He stepped forward and met the Elder’s gaze. “You think yourselves saviors,” he said. “But your hands are just the same as the ones that once broke our doors open to steal grain and name.”

The Elder laughed, a cold rasp. He gestured, and the courtyard filled with a shimmering lattice — not the Temple’s gold but the clan’s own binding marks, centuries-old magics reforged into instruments of control. “Then be bound as we see fit.”

Arin’s body turned into motion. He didn’t plan a fight — he made one. It was not for trophies but for breaths. He caught the first binding thread in his palm and let the resonance shiver through it, then folded that power and flung it outward. The thread burned like paper and snapped. The Elder’s eyes widened. Nobody had ever undone his mark so simply.

But victory was pyrrhic: farther down the ridge, the shape of a storm unfurled like an omen. Dark banners bunched into points; Stormfang riders — black-cloaked, teeth bright in their mouths — rode with full war-howl. Their leader, a woman with a jagged scar and a spear that dripped seawater though there was no sea in sight, spurred her mount and raised a hand. Arin saw the flash of recognition. This one had been wronged by the Darkveil before; her fury was personal.

The system whispered inside his skull again, clinical and cold:

System alert

Incoming Events: Stormfang Clan Retaliation — Active (within 72 hours). Time until full engagement: 71 hours, 58 minutes.

Secondary Objective: Forge an alliance or divide the enemy. Reward: Spirit Core Ignition.

Arin clenched his teeth. An alliance? With Stormfang? With the Temple? Or with the remnants of the clan who still remembered mercy? The system offered boxes; fate offered choices; his gut offered a knife.

He could taste rain on the wind — not of a single storm but of three colliding. The Heavenly Temple would not forget his insolence. The Second Elder would not forgive his humiliation. The Stormfang would not pass up an evening that promised the Darkveil fell.

Lyra returned, breath steaming, eyes burning, and with a hand she ripped a sigil from her sleeve and thrust it toward him. “If you won’t bow, at least don’t die alone,” she said, voice stripped of its usual teasing lilt. “The tunnels will take you to the old cache — weapons no one remembers how to use. Take them. I will draw the Elder’s eyes.”

He almost refused — the stubbornness was as much a limb as any — but the committee of faces behind him, the innocent and the frightened, had already decided. He took the sigil.

“And if you don’t come back?” she whispered.

“If I don’t,” Arin said, the edges of his mouth going hard, “then I make sure they live to remember me as the man who tried.”

She nodded, a single, terrible agreement, and then moved like winter closing over flame: unstoppable and necessary.

Arin turned, sprinted for the arch, and dove into the tunnel with Master Khor and the last of the fleeing. Hands grabbed at his cloak. A spear jabbed through the entrance and skittered off the stone, spraying sparks. He felt the Elder’s magic trying to crawl back along his spine, but the old wards in the arch — the ones the Dragon Vein hummed with — took him in like a mother’s arms.

The tunnel swallowed them, and behind them the night exploded in a chorus of grief and wrath. Torches bloomed. Horns screamed. The Heavenly envoy’s light carved the sky into a hundred slices. And on the ridge, the Stormfang leader’s spear caught the moon and seemed to hold it up as a threat.

In the cold dark under the clan, Arin’s heart thudded like the system’s own pulsing notification. He could feel new power waiting — raw, hungry — but he could also feel the weight of choices stacking like stones behind him.

He did not stop. The old tunnel twisted and spit them into a low, forgotten courtyard where rusted weapons lay like sleeping animals. Master Khor collapsed onto a stone bench and began muttering names of tunnels, maps, and seals in a language half lost to time. Arin knelt, pressed his palm to a flat stone, and felt the Dragon Vein speak.

A soft blue bloom spread under his hand and, for a second, he saw possibilities laid out like constellations: an alliance forged with a grudging Stormfang captain who would value honor over pillage; a way to strike at the Temple’s complacency by exposing the Elder’s corruption; an escape that was not running but repositioning to a place where they could gather others.

The system chimed one last, urgent prompt in his mind.

[Choice Path]

1.Seek an alliance with Stormfang — high risk, high reward.

2. Travel to the old border hamlets to gather sympathizers — slower, stealthy.

3.Strike directly at the Heavenly Temple’s envoy during their judgment — immediate danger; potential to force a political shift.

Arin closed his eyes. The tunnel smelled of wet stone and old promises. Outside, the night was a blade; inside, his options were a cauldron.

He opened his eyes and smiled — not because he was certain, but because uncertainty was the only slope he trusted. “We move,” he told Master Khor and the ragged band around him. “We will not die because they decree it. We will choose our battlefield.”

Lyra’s echo came like a promise from the mouth of the tunnel: “I’ll buy time.”

Arin tucked the frost-rimed sigil into his sleeve and felt the new trait settle in his bones — Clan Protector — heavy and honest. In the distant sky, lightning knifed the clouds again, and the system’s timer continued to tick down to the stormstorm the world barely knew awaited them.

They moved, then — through old tunnels, toward new reckonings. The war for the Darkveil’s soul had begun in the courtyard, but the true fight would be for the stories told afterward. Arin intended those stories to be about survival, about choice, and about a freedom that did not bow to gold or fear.

As they slipped into the deeper dark, a whisper ran along the stone like a promise and a threat in one: the Heavenly Temple would come. The Stormfang would come. And between them, Arin would have to light a core of spirit bright enough to ignite a path for everyone who refused to be bound.

Outside, the ridge bristled with riders. Inside, the tunnel swallowed their footsteps like a drum. The system’s timer ticked.

Seventy-one hours, fifty-nine minutes.