2026-01-04 21:43:06Liora rode beside him most days, silent for long stretches, then asking sharp questions about his fighting style or the wastes. She never thanked him again pride wouldn’t allow it but she shared her rations without being asked and took the night watch closest to his.
The other cadets thawed slower. Jax, the broad earth-mana user, grumbled about “waste rats” until Elias helped reinforce a broken wagon wheel with raw strength; after that, Jax offered a grunt that might have been approval. The twins, Kael and Kora wind siblings kept their distance but stopped whispering when Elias passed.
Thorne, invisible to all but Elias, never shut up.
“She’s measuring you, boy. Every move. Veyne Clan breeds schemers.”
“Or she’s just curious.”
“Curious gets people killed. Or bedded. Sometimes both.”
Elias ignored him.
On the fifth evening, Greyhaven appeared.
It wasn’t a city in the traditional sense. It was a fortress carved into the side of a mountain range, its walls seamless black stone veined with mana conduits that glowed faint blue at dusk. Above the main gates, floating platforms hovered training arenas, dormitories, forges suspended by massive chains and anti-gravity runes. Airships docked at towering spires. Banners of a hundred minor clans and mercenary companies snapped in the wind.
The gates stood open, guarded by veterans in gray armor unmarked by house crests. Neutral ground. Here, bloodline meant less than skill.
Liora’s group was waved through after showing academy badges. Elias dismounted with them, Reaper wrapped in cloth across his back to look like ordinary steel.
A grizzled sergeant at the inner checkpoint eyed him. “Name and purpose.”
“Elias Voss. Here to enroll.”
The sergeant snorted. “Fresh meat always smells the same. Trials start at dawn tomorrow in the lower arena. Fail, and you’re out by sunset. Pass…” He shrugged. “You might live long enough to regret it.”
Liora stepped forward. “He’s with us. Saved our squad.”
The sergeant raised an eyebrow but waved them on.
Inside, Greyhaven was chaos ordered by violence. Streets wound between training yards where cadets sparred with live blades. Smithies rang day and night. Taverns spilled laughter and blood in equal measure. Instructors scarred men and women with eyes like winter watched everything.
Liora led them to the second-year barracks, a squat stone building near the mid-level platforms.
“You can bunk in the common hall tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow, after trials, we’ll see.”
Elias nodded. “Thanks.”
She hesitated, violet eyes searching his face. “Why Greyhaven? You fight like you’ve been at war your whole life. You don’t need training.”
“I need time,” he said. “And a place where no one asks about my past.”
Something flickered in her expression understanding, maybe. “This place doesn’t care about pasts. Only what you do here.”
She turned to leave, then paused. “The trials are brutal. They pit new blood against each other until only half remain. No holding back. Deaths happen.”
“I’ll manage.”
Liora’s mouth twitched almost a smile. “Don’t die, waste rat. I still owe you.”
She walked away, braid swinging.
Thorne chuckled. “She likes you.”
“She barely tolerates me.”
“Same thing with proud ones.”
That night, Elias found a corner in the common hall, a vast room filled with snoring cadets on straw mats. He didn’t sleep. The bloodline thrummed under his skin, eager for tomorrow.
Dawn came gray and cold.
The lower arena was a sunken pit of packed earth, ringed by stone benches already filling with spectators cadets betting, instructors assessing, veterans drinking. A hundred new hopefuls gathered at the edges: farm boys with crude weapons, minor clan heirs with polished gear, ex-mercenaries, runaways. All hungry.
An instructor a tall woman with a mechanical arm and flame scars across her face stepped onto a raised platform.
“Rules are simple,” she barked, voice carrying without mana. “Last fifty standing advance. No killing if you can avoid it, but accidents happen. Yield or die trying. Begin!”
Chaos erupted.
Elias moved.
He kept the aura banked, Reaper still wrapped. No need to reveal everything yet.
A big recruit with earth mana charged him first, fists hardened like stone. Elias sidestepped, tripped him with a leg sweep, and drove an elbow into the back of his neck. The boy dropped, unconscious.
Two more came together siblings by the look, wind blades whipping from their hands. Elias rolled under the slashes, came up inside their guard, and struck pressure points with precise, brutal efficiency. Both crumpled.
More came. He danced through them controlled, economical. No wasted motion. War God’s Instinct painted paths through the chaos.
Within minutes, a circle cleared around him. Hopefuls eyed him warily, deciding he wasn’t worth the risk yet.
Across the pit, another circle formed.
Liora.
She fought with storm precision sword a blur of lightning, movements sharp and lethal. Three opponents already lay at her feet, groaning. She caught his eye across the arena and nodded once acknowledgment, maybe challenge.
The fights thinned. Bodies littered the dirt. Yields were called. Instructors dragged the unconscious away.
Soon only sixty remained.
The flame-scarred woman raised her hand. “Close enough. Final ten pairs fight to submission. Winners advance.”
She pointed pairings at random.
Elias drew a wiry cadet with shadow mana fast, sneaky, daggers coated in poison.
The boy grinned. “Fresh meat.”
They circled.
The shadow user vanished, reappearing behind Elias with daggers thrusting for kidneys.
Elias let the aura flare just enough. Time slowed. He spun, caught both wrists, and headbutted the boy hard enough to crack bone. The cadet dropped, out cold.
The arena quieted.
Even the instructors leaned forward.
Liora’s fight ended seconds later her opponent yielding after a blade kissed his throat.
Fifty stood when the dust settled.
Elias was one.
The woman instructor approached him personally as the crowd dispersed.
“Name?”
“Elias Voss.”
She studied him gray eyes, torn clothes, wrapped greatsword. “You held back.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Don’t need to show everything day one.”
Her scarred mouth curved. “Smart. Dangerous combination. Dormitory assignment in the outer ring. Training starts tomorrow. Don’t be late.”
She walked away.
Liora waited at the arena exit, cleaning blood from her sword.
“You passed,” she said.
“So did you.”
She sheathed the blade. “Outer ring dorms are rough. Fights every night. You’ll fit right in.”
Elias smiled faintly. “Looking forward to it.”
For a moment, they stood in silence amid the groans of the defeated and the cheers of the victors.
Then Liora turned. “Come on. I’ll show you where to eat. Winners get first pick.”
As they walked, Thorne’s voice was thoughtful.
“Place is a forge, boy. It’ll temper you or break you.”
Elias glanced at the floating platforms above, the banners, the cadets already sparring again.
“Let it try.”
Greyhaven had its first taste of the War God’s return.
And it wouldn’t be the last.
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Latest Chapter
Whispers On The Wind
High above the borderlands, the floating manor of House Voss drifted through perpetual clouds, its golden spires catching the midday sun like a crown. Inside the grand strategy hall, Harlan Voss stood before a massive scrying mirror, its surface rippling with mana-fed images of the empire’s far reaches.He was twenty now, broader in the shoulders, flame mana coiling lazily around his fingers as he dismissed another report. The room’s other occupants his father’s advisors, a pair of clan elders, and Lord Voss himself waited in tense silence.The latest image faded: a grainy projection of Greyhaven’s lower arena, captured by a paid informant’s memory crystal. A lone figure in ragged clothes carving through raiders with terrifying efficiency. Black hair. Gray eyes. A greatsword that drank light.Harlan’s flame flickered, guttering for the first time in years.“It’s not him,” he said, voice flat. “Elias Voss is dead. I watched the airship drop him into the wastes myself.”One of the elder
Iron And Blood
The outer-ring dormitory was exactly what Liora had warned: a long stone hall packed with narrow bunks, the air thick with sweat, cheap ale, and the metallic tang of old blood. New cadets those who’d passed the trials were thrown in with the established outer-ringers: failed second-years, disciplinary cases, and kids from nowhere with nowhere else to go. Fights broke out nightly. Knives came out weekly. Instructors didn’t interfere unless someone died.Elias claimed a bottom bunk near the door, dropped his wrapped bundle, and sat. No one approached him yet. They were sizing him up the quiet one who’d walked through the trials like they were practice.Thorne materialized in the corner, invisible to everyone else, arms folded.“Smells like a barracks before a losing battle,” he said. “You’ll either make friends here or a lot of enemies. Probably both.”Elias grunted. He was unwrapping Crimson Reaper, checking the edge, when the door slammed open.A mountain walked in.The cadet was huge
The Gates Of Greyhaven
The journey to Greyhaven took another five days. The land healed as they traveled ash giving way to scrub, then rolling hills dotted with farms, until the road widened into a proper trade route. The survivors now a tight, wary group spoke little at first. Elias’s slaughter of the raiders hung over them like a shadow. Respect, fear, curiosity; he felt all of it in their glances.Liora rode beside him most days, silent for long stretches, then asking sharp questions about his fighting style or the wastes. She never thanked him again pride wouldn’t allow it but she shared her rations without being asked and took the night watch closest to his.The other cadets thawed slower. Jax, the broad earth-mana user, grumbled about “waste rats” until Elias helped reinforce a broken wagon wheel with raw strength; after that, Jax offered a grunt that might have been approval. The twins, Kael and Kora wind siblings kept their distance but stopped whispering when Elias passed.Thorne, invisible to all
Strom On The Horizon
The Ashen Wastes didn’t end cleanly. One mile the ground was cracked ash and bone; the next, stubborn grass pushed through, then scattered trees, until the barren scar gave way to ragged hills and the faint green of true wilderness. Elias walked for three days, sleeping little, eating what he could hunt with bare hands or Reaper’s edge. The bloodline kept him going wounds closed fast, hunger dulled to a manageable ache.Thorne kept up a steady stream of commentary: battle critiques, ancient war stories, and the occasional barb about Elias’s “soft modern upbringing.” It was irritating. It was also the only company he had.On the fourth dawn, smoke rose on the horizon thin, black, deliberate. Not a wildfire.Elias crested a ridge and stopped.Below, in a shallow valley, a small caravan had been ambushed. Six wagons circled defensively, canvas torn and burning. Bodies lay scattered merchants, guards, a few in uniform. Ash wolves prowled the edges, but they weren’t the main threat.A doze
Reaper's Baptism
The guardian hit the ground like an earthquake.It was a nightmare stitched together from the chamber’s dead bones of ancient warriors fused with ash-wolf skeletons, armored plates grown over like tumors, mana twisting the whole mass into something that had forgotten what it once was. Ten feet tall at the shoulder, four mismatched arms ending in claws and broken blades, a skull split open to reveal a pulsing crimson core where a heart should be.It roared, and the sound was every death in the room crying out at once.Elias tightened his grip on Crimson Reaper. The greatsword hummed in his hand, eager, almost pulling him forward. His new aura flared instinctively a veil of red mist coiling around his body, sharpening the world to a razor’s edge. Sounds became clearer, movements slower. War God’s Instinct sang in his blood.Thorne floated to his flank, expression grim but alive with something dangerous. “Guardian’s bound to the trial. Kill the core, it dies. Everything else just slows i
Trial Of The Crimson Heart
The steps spiraled down into the earth, each one carved from stone that drank the faint crimson light bleeding from Elias’s veins. The air grew thick and warm, heavy with the scent of old iron and something deeper spilled blood long dried, battles long ended. Elias’s boots scraped against grit as he descended, Thorne’s translucent form gliding silently beside him.“Smell that?” Thorne said, voice low. “That’s history. Thousands of years of it. Your ancestors didn’t build pretty temples, boy. They built slaughterhouses disguised as sanctuaries.”Elias didn’t answer. His pulse thrummed in his ears, matching the low heartbeat rising from below. Every step fed the heat in his blood, stirring memories that weren’t his: the clash of armies, the wet crunch of bone under boot, the roar of a war god laughing in the face of divine thunder.They reached the bottom.The chamber was vast, circular, walls rising into shadow. In the center stood a raised dais of black stone veined with crimson, and
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