The air in the Glacial sanctum was thick, suffocating, and reeks of ancient, frozen malice. Rayn stood his ground, the jagged, frost-bitten shards of his Ice Age blade crackling with latent, murderous intent. His chest heaved, his adrenaline spike so high his vision bordered on a blood-red haze. Across the shattered ice floor, Vespera stood in a combat crouch, her dragon-hybrid muscles coiled, her eyes burning with a mixture of confusion and raw, unadulterated shock.
They weren't looking at a monster. They were looking at a man who, by every logical metric of the heavens and the earth, should have been rotting in the soil of Ashburg.
Dawinton sat perched atop a gargantuan blue bird, a nightmare of shifting, iridescent plumage and jagged arcs of high-voltage static. The beast's screech was a sonic drill, vibrating the very marrow in Rayn's bones.
"Is reincarnation actually a fucking possibility?" Vespera whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the electric bird. "I watched him die. I stood right next to that bastard Freddy while they laid him out. I saw his ribcage shattered like a dropped porcelain doll. I used my ocular Gnosis to scan his corpse. He was a hollow vessel, a piece of butchered meat without a spark of life left. The dead don't sit on electric birds. The dead don't fucking breathe."
Rayn didn't take his eyes off the figure. His grip on his sword tightened until the hilt groaned. "Hey, Vespera, are you in your right mind? How the fuck can a person who's been rotting in a grave for weeks suddenly manifest here like a vengeful specter and claim he's Dawinton? If this is a hallucination brought on by this shit-hole of a glacier, tell me now so I can start killing whatever is inside my head."
Vespera turned to him, her expression a mask of lethal frustration. "How the fuck should I know? I saw his face. I saw the damage. It was gore—total, irreversible, fucking gore. He was a corpse. If he's alive, it's not reincarnation, Rayn. It's something much darker. It's an insult to the laws of this world."
Rayn didn't respond. He shut his eyes, diving into the shadowed, labyrinthine corridors of his own soul-core.
Silas! You lazy, useless piece of shit, tell me what I'm looking at! Is this really the original leader of Ashburg, or is some parasite trying to manipulate me with a fucking parlor trick?
Silas's voice echoed in his consciousness, dripping with cynical, biting exhaustion. Rayn, you're an idiot. You're asking me, a fractured memory of your past life, instead of just confronting the guy sitting on that fucking beast? Why don't you ask the bastard himself?
Rayn gritted his teeth, his nerves frayed like old, rotting rope. He stepped forward, his boots crunching on the frozen detritus of the massacre Vespera had caused earlier.
"Hey!" Rayn bellowed, his voice echoing against the cavern walls. "Who the fuck are you? If you're really the original leader of Ashburg, Dawinton, then speak up. If you're some pathetic pretender trying to play mind games with me, I'll feed your skull to my dragon-partner and piss on your corpse."
The man atop the bird tilted his head. The electricity around him flared, turning the shadows into jagged, dancing daggers of blue light. He didn't look offended. He looked tired.
"I am the man they tried to bury," Dawinton answered, his voice a gravelly, hollow rasp. "I am Dawinton, the leader of Ashburg."
Rayn's stomach churned. He looked at the man's posture, the way he sat, the sheer, oppressive weight of his presence. There was no hesitation. No tremor of deceit. Rayn took a step forward, his hand still gripped tightly around his blade.
"Get the fuck down from that bird. Right fucking now. We have a lot to talk about, and you're going to explain how a dead man is still kicking, or I'm going to make sure you stay dead this time."
Dawinton's gaze flickered toward the massive, five-kilometer-wide crater Vespera had vaporized earlier. He paled, the audacity of his posture vanishing instantly. He didn't say a word; he simply hopped off the avian, his feet touching the ice with a heavy, deliberate thud. He stood before them, a weary, broken king of a shattered realm.
"I'm Rayn," Rayn announced, his voice steadying, trying to project the authority he had been forced to adopt. "I'm the new leader of Ashburg. The people elected me after you died—or rather, after you faked your pathetic, cowardly death."
Dawinton's eyes widened, a look of genuine, gut-wrenching horror crossing his face. "What? My son, Victus... he didn't become the leader? He was supposed to take the throne. He earned it."
"Victus didn't get shit," Rayn spat, his disgust palpable. "And I have no idea how you expected him to, considering I didn't even know you existed until today. I'm not even from this region. I came from Whispering Pines, the place where those Sterling bastards butchered my family just to prove a point to your shitty king."
Dawinton flinched as if Rayn had slapped him. "I know of that incident. I was the leader when that went down. I explicitly commanded those bastards to leave the Four Kingdoms alone, but they're arrogant, power-drunk cunts. They felt invincible because they had a Phase 4 powerhouse sitting in their pocket."
Rayn's blood turned to ice. "What the fuck did you just say? A Phase 4? In Sterling?"
"Yes," Dawinton hissed, his face hardening. "A Clockmaker. He controls time properties like he's playing with a pocket watch. You can't fight him, you can't outrun him, and you can't kill him. He is the true shadow leader of Sterling right now."
Vespera turned to Rayn, her face ashen, her dragon-scales shimmering in the dim light. "Rayn, is he telling the truth? We've fought elemental users, we've fought monsters that can rip holes in reality, but a person who can control time? That's not a fighter; that's a fucking god. You can't defend against time. It's absolute."
Rayn didn't answer. He turned to Vespera, his eyes cold and ancient. "Use your Gnosis. Scan him. Tell me if he's lying."
Vespera shook her head, her breath hitching. "I can't. I used too much power on those thousands of beasts. I'm running on empty, Rayn. I need time."
Rayn sighed, a dark, dangerous smile spreading across his face. "I don't need your help. I can tell. If someone lies in front of me, I can smell it. It's like the stench of burnt ink, resonating in the air, clinging to their fucking tongue."
Vespera blinked, her jaw dropping. "How the fuck can you precisely say that? You're a Void Scribe. That power is supposed to be worthless. It's for the weak-willed, for the bottom-feeders who don't have the stomach to actually cultivate."
Rayn laughed, a sharp, violent sound that cut through the silence of the glacier. "If I'm so weak-willed, how did I get here? How did I survive your fucking Glacier while his 'precious' son Victus couldn't even keep the crown on his head? I don't give a shit about the 'weakness' of my power. It tells me the truth, and right now, the truth is that Dawinton here is telling me every miserable detail of his fucking tragedy."
Dawinton looked at Rayn with a mixture of awe and resentment. "Void Scribe... you awaken that, and you call yourself a leader? It's a power for the frail. A power for the pathetic."
"Call it what you want," Rayn retorted, stepping into Dawinton's personal space. "Now, tell me. The nightmist. The night you 'died.' Why? How? And what the fuck happened to you?"
Dawinton's shoulders slumped, the weight of the past crushing him. "It was the night of the Nightmist—the one night every two years when the moon vanishes and the world is swallowed by absolute, suffocating darkness. I was drinking coffee, reading a book in my study. My son Victus entered. He sat on the floor, took my hand, and wept. I thought his tears were for his father—I didn't realize they were the tears of a parasite. He begged me to make him the leader. I refused. I told him his brother was next in line. He argued for an hour. I finally lost my temper and slapped him... the first time I ever struck him in his entire life."
Dawinton's voice cracked, sounding like breaking glass. "That was my mistake. I felt guilty. I reached out to comfort him, and that's when he shoved a Sacred Nullification Knife into my back. A weapon that strips a man of his power and leaves him a hollow, defenseless husk."
Suddenly, a swarm of enemies descended upon us out of nowhere. I tried to lash out, but my power felt gutted—nearly half of it drained by that cursed, fear-inducing sword. Even so, I fought as hard as I could against the sheer number of them, but I was overwhelmed.
I lost control of my inner defenses, and the toll was catastrophic.
Dawinton gestured to his own body, revealing jagged, partially broken ribs and the ruined, mangled state of his torso. It was a harrowing sight. "I was on the brink of death," he continued, his voice heavy with the memory. "I had essentially reached the end. That was when my eldest son finally arrived to rescue me."
Rayn stopped in his tracks, his voice sharp with disbelief. "What the hell are you talking about? If you're not dead, how the fuck did your body end up at your own funeral?"
Dawinton didn't hesitate. "My eldest son possesses a Phase 4, Initial Level Actor power. He can reshape anyone to perfectly mimic my likeness, deceiving everyone. He simply used a substitute—a body he chose for the deception."
Vespera stepped in, her brow furrowed. "That doesn't explain the injuries. If he just changed someone's appearance, how did that body end up with your specific wounds in a split second?"
"That is the nature of his Actor power," Dawinton replied. "By touching me, he copies my state of being. When he converts the other person, he imprints my exact physical condition at that moment onto them. The body you saw at the funeral belonged to someone who died by my son's hand—a perfect replica of me."
Rayn felt the pieces finally snap together. He realized that Ashburg, and perhaps the entire country, was built on a foundation of rot and deceit. He alone stood in possession of the truth, burdened by the lies of everyone around him. A cold realization settled in his chest: What am I supposed to do with him now?