Part 1: The Baptism of Ichor
The silence in the Copper Grove was absolute. The Angel had departed, its crystalline wings having carried the "Feast of Despair" back to the silent Heavens. What remained in the black mud was not a man, but a husk. Alaric's heart had stopped the moment the light hit his soul; his lungs had collapsed under the weight of the realization that his life was a currency spent by a friend.
Alaric was dead.
His eyes were glazed, staring sightlessly at the bruised purple sky. The enchanted chains still bound his cold limbs, the silver of his armor already beginning to tarnish in the stagnant air.
The Blood Hag stood over him, her shadow stretching long and jagged across the clearing. She did not mourn. She reached into the air, her obsidian nails weaving a pattern of violet and red. She didn't pray to the Gods; she reached into the Void, the grey space where souls wander before they are claimed or extinguished.
With a violent, jerking motion, she closed her fist and pulled.
A scream that had no sound echoed through the Grove. She had snatched Alaric's soul back from the precipice. It was a violation of the natural order—a sacrilege that made the trees themselves weep blood. She slammed the soul back into the cooling meat of his corpse.
Alaric's eyes snapped wide.
They were no longer the sapphire blue of the Gaan knights. They were a fractured, burning crimson. He was a paradox: a corpse with a living soul. His heart did not beat, his blood did not flow, yet he was agonizingly, violently awake.
The pain was not physical. Having no life meant he could not feel the sting of the cold or the bite of the iron chains. Instead, the pain was spiritual. It felt as though his very essence was being flayed by a thousand invisible hooks, digging deeper and deeper into the core of his being, fueled by the vacuum of his own despair.
He tried to scream, but his vocal cords were silent strings in a dead throat. What came out was a series of guttural, senseless growls—the sound of a beast trying to remember how to be a man. He thrashed in the mud, the chains rattling against his rusted plate.
"Hush, little revenant," the Hag whispered, her voice a melodic rasp. "The void is a cold place to return from, isn't it? The pain you feel... that is the friction of a soul trying to live in a house that has already been foreclosed."
Slowly, the ground beneath the weeping willow began to churn. Long, thick roots—not made of wood, but of a pulsating, translucent crimson membrane—slithered out from the base of the tree.
Alaric lay in the churned earth, a corpse reanimated by a spiteful miracle. He was a sacrilege in iron—a dead vessel inhabited by a living soul. Inside the cage of his rusted breastplate, there was no heartbeat, only the hollow, echoing scream of his own spirit trying to claw its way out of the cold meat of his body.
The pain was not of the flesh; it was a spiritual flaying. It felt as though his soul was being stretched across a rack made of jagged glass. He couldn't speak. His jaw clicked uselessly against his gorget, producing only the wet, guttural growls of an animal.
The Blood Hag leaned over him, her eyes twin pits of violet rot.
"Do you want to end the pain, Alaric?" she whispered. "The void is a thirsty place. I have prepared a special morsel fit for my new pet."
From the roots of the weeping willow, crimson, pulsating veins—thick as a man's wrist—slithered through the mud. They dragged three bodies toward the center of the clearing. Alaric's fractured red gaze landed on them, and for a moment, the "Iron Pillar" flickered back to life.
He knew these men. They were his brothers-in-arms. He had shared bread with them, marched through the freezing rain with them, and trusted them with his back. These were the men who, at the King's signal, had not hesitated to pin him down. They were the hands that held him while his soul was offered up as a feast.
The Hag's voice crawled into his mind. "Your King walked away, but he left his 'witnesses' to ensure you stayed buried. I brought them for you. A welcome treat for a faithful friend."
At first, a wave of ancient, knightly disgust washed over him. The very idea of the act she suggested made his etheric blood turn to ice. He was a protector. He was a husband. He saw —
Elara.
The memory hit him like a physical blow. He saw her face—not the laughing woman of his wedding day, but the cold, unmoving shell she had become. Leonus's words echoed in the hollows of his skull: "She died three days ago. I kept her body cold just to keep you moving."
She had died alone. She had died while he was miles away, struggling and sweating to "save" her on a journey that was nothing but a path to his own slaughter. The guards at his feet hadn't just held him down; they had held him away from her. They had participated in the lie that robbed him of his final goodbye.
The disgust evaporated. In its place, a white-hot, ethereal rage erupted from the center of his soul. His etheric blood didn't just warm; it boiled.
Alaric lunged.
The enchanted chains snapped like dry twigs under the force of his Sanguine fury. He did not use a blade. He threw himself upon the first body—the youngest guard—and tore into the throat with the jagged edge of his broken gauntlet.
The taste was not foul. To a dead man, it was the only thing that felt like life.
He "devoured" them. He didn't just drink; he hunted the very essence of their vitality. He drained every drop of the warm, metallic life-force from their veins, feeling the Sanguine Depravity catch fire within him. As he consumed the third man, the spiritual agony that had been flaying his soul began to dull, replaced by a cold, heavy power that settled in his marrow.
He stood up in the center of the grove, his armor drenched in a fresh, glistening red that refused to dry. The silence of the grove returned, but Alaric was no longer growling.
He was breathing.
"Good dog," the Hag purred, stepping out of the shadows. "Now you are ready to learn how to bite."
Part 2: The Puppeteer's Strings
For three days and three nights, the Copper Grove heard nothing but the wet sound of bones knitting together and iron groaning under pressure.
Alaric did not sleep. He burned.
The blood of the three guards did not sit idly in his stomach; it acted as a catalyst, boiling his own stagnant fluids. He lay curled in the roots of the willow, twitching as the Sanguine Depravity rewrote his anatomy. The silver armor of the "Iron Pillar," once a pristine symbol of station, began to soften. It didn't melt; it fused. The rivets sank through his skin, anchoring the metal to his collarbone. The greaves merged with his shins. The gauntlets became his hands.
When he finally stood up on the fourth morning, he was no longer a man wearing a suit of war. He was a golem of rusted steel and necrotic flesh. He towered a head taller than before, his posture hunched, his visor permanently fused shut, leaving only a dark, vertical slit from which a faint crimson mist leaked.
He was a monster. But inside, the mind was still a shattered mosaic of the man he used to be.
"Look at it," a voice scratched against his ear. "The puppy finally learned to stand on its hind legs."
The Blood Hag was sitting on a low branch, swinging her legs like a bored child. She looked down at him with a sneer that was equal parts amusement and disgust.
"You look hideous, Alaric. Like a scrap heap someone forgot to burn. It suits you."
Alaric tried to speak, but his voice was a metallic grinding sound. "What... am... I?"
"You are a vessel," she mocked, hopping down to circle him. She poked his chest plate with a sharp fingernail; the metal rippled like disturbed water. "A leaky, clumsy vessel full of stolen god-blood. You devoured three men, yet you stand there shaking like a newborn calf. Pathetic."
She walked to the center of the clearing and kicked a stone at him. It bounced harmlessly off his shin.
"Defend yourself, Lap Dog!" she barked. "Or do you need your King to hold your hand for this part too?"
Instinctively, the muscle memory of twenty years took over. Alaric raised his left arm. He didn't think about magic; he thought about duty. He thought about the Wall. He tried to summon the mana to create a barrier, a shield to protect the weak, just as he had done a thousand times for Leonus.
Protect.
The blood inside him surged, but it didn't form a wall. It sputtered. Red sparks popped and fizzled on his gauntlet, dissolving into useless steam.
The Hag cackled. It was a harsh, grating sound. "Oh, precious. Look at you trying to be noble. You're trying to build a shield? With that fuel?"
She slapped him across the face—not with her hand, but with a whip of coagulated shadow. The force sent the heavy, armored monstrosity stumbling back into the mud.
"Shields are for those who have something to keep, you idiot!" she screamed, her mockery turning vicious. "Shields are for men who have homes. Who have wives waiting in warm beds. Who have a King worth dying for."
Alaric froze. The mud oozed around his iron boots.
"What are you protecting, corpse?" she whispered, leaning into his ear. "Your wife is a bag of bones. Your house is empty. Your King sold you for a quiet afternoon. There is nothing behind you. The 'Shield of Gaan' is dead."
The truth of it dug into his mind sharper than any blade. The moral compass that had guided him—the urge to preserve, to save, to defend—was the very thing blocking the power. The Sanguine Depravity was a curse of destruction. It could not build; it could only break.
Alaric's trembling stopped.
He looked at the empty air where he had tried to conjure a shield. He realized he didn't want to stop the pain. He wanted to share it. He wanted the world to feel the coldness of the grave he had been thrown into.
He didn't want to be a wall. He wanted to be the wrecking ball.
"No shield," Alaric rasped. The crimson mist leaking from his visor darkened.
"Then show me what you are," the Hag taunted. "Bite, dog. Bite before I put you back in the ground."
Alaric didn't focus on defense. He focused on the memory of the chains. He focused on the three guards who had held him down. He focused on the lie.
He punched forward.
He didn't know what he was doing. It wasn't a technique; it was a spasm of hate.
The blood on his gauntlet didn't flow smoothly. It erupted violently, tearing through the metal of his own knuckles. It didn't form a beautiful sword. It hardened instantly into a crude, ugly spike of crystallized gore—jagged, uneven, and brutal. It looked like a shiv made of frozen scab.
It extended three feet, punching deep into the trunk of the weeping willow with a wet thud.
It was unrefined. It was self-destructive. But it was lethal.
Alaric stood there, breathing heavily, the jagged spike protruding from his fist. He felt the drain immediately—the weakness returning, the hunger gnawing at his gut. He was powerful, but he was inefficient. A child with a cannon.
The Hag looked at the ugly spike, then up at his visor. She didn't praise him. She simply stopped laughing.
"Crude," she spat, though her eyes glinted with a predator's satisfaction. "You bleed yourself to make a weapon. Sloppy. But... it will kill."
She reached into her robes and pulled out a scroll, wrapped in black velvet. She tossed it into the mud at his feet.
"You have teeth now. Dull, rotting teeth, but teeth nonetheless," she said, turning her back on him. "I am done feeding you scraps. If you want more blood to stop the shaking... go hunt for it."
Alaric looked down at the scroll. The "Iron Pillar" would have asked for orders. The "Iron Pillar" would have asked for justice.
The monster in the human body simply ripped the seal open.
Part 3: The Long Winter of Silence
The scroll the Blood Hag had thrown into the mud contained a name. It was not a high lord, nor a famous champion. It was a tax collector—a minor official who had signed the order to divert grain from the starving villages to the Royal granaries.
Alaric killed him three nights later.
It was a messy, loud affair. The "Lap Dog" was still learning to walk on his hind legs. He had smashed through the man's front door, triggering alarms, waking the neighbors. He had killed the guards with clumsy, brutal swings of his armored fists. When he finally cornered the official, Alaric didn't use magic; he used his hands, driven by a raw, unrefined rage.
He returned to the Grove covered in soot and gore, his armor groaning with the stress of his own fury.
"Sloppy," the Hag had whispered from the darkness of the willow. "You killed the man, but you woke the town. A dog that barks too much gets put down."
But as the weeks turned into months, the barking stopped.
The seasons began to turn. The leaves of the Copper Grove fell, replaced by a winter that froze the mud into iron-hard ridges. But Alaric did not feel the cold. He stood beneath the weeping willow, a sentinel of rust, while the snow piled up on his pauldrons.
The "Iron Pillar" was dying. In his place, the "Hound" was being born.
The transformation was agonizingly slow. The armor, which had initially just fused to his skin, began to invade his biology. The metal became porous, acting like a second, harder skin. The rivets that held his breastplate together became nerve clusters. The ventilation slits of his helm ceased to be air intakes and became exhaust ports for the Sanguine vapor that now replaced his breath.
He stopped sleeping. The concept of rest felt alien to a creature fueled by the stolen vitality of others.
He stopped speaking. Words were tools for men who negotiated, and Alaric no longer negotiated. He only executed.
Throughout the year, the Hag fed him scrolls.
A patrol captain who laughed at the funeral of the old guard.
A merchant selling "Blessed Charms" that were just painted rocks.
A squad of knights sent to investigate the rumors of a beast in the woods.
Alaric hunted them all.
He learned to move his thousand-pound frame through the forest with the silence of a falling leaf. He learned to dampen the red glow of his visor until the moment of the strike. He learned that he didn't need to bludgeon his enemies; he could simply drink the electrical impulses that kept their hearts beating.
He became a ghost story. The "Bandit of the East." The "Shadow of the Grove."
For twelve months, he watched from the distance as the Kingdom of Gaan celebrated. He saw the golden crops rise. He saw the clear rivers. He saw the fireworks celebrating the "Great Mercy."
He watched the King lie.
Every firework that exploded over the capital was a reminder of the betrayal. Every hymn sung to the "Martyr Alaric" was a shovel of dirt thrown on his grave. The Sanguine Void in his soul grew wider, colder, and hungrier. He stopped trying to remember Elara's voice. It hurt too much. Instead, he remembered the silence of her room. He remembered the smell of the lies.
Then, the winter melted. The "Year of the Gilded Leaf" reached its zenith.
It was the night of the Anniversary.
The Blood Hag slithered down from the branches of the willow. She looked stronger now. Every life Alaric had taken, every drop of hope he had extinguished, had fed her. Her skin was less like parchment, her movements more fluid.
She approached Alaric, who was sharpening his claws—literally honing the jagged, crystallized blood on his gauntlets against a stone.
"Do you smell it, my pet?" she purred, her eyes glowing with a terrible anticipation.
Alaric paused. He tilted his helmet.
He could smell it. Thirty miles away. Roast boar. Spiced wine. And the sickly, sweet scent of a man who believed he was a hero.
"The King celebrates your death tonight," the Hag whispered. "He is holding a feast at the Blackwood Estate. And the guest of honor is the boy who took your place. Sir Kaelen."
At the name, the red mist vented violently from Alaric's helm.
"He thinks he is the Sun," the Hag hissed. "He thinks he is the Shield. He is one of the Fifty, Alaric. One of the pillars holding up their false sky. If you break him... the sky gets a little lower. And I get a little stronger."
She reached out and tapped the chest plate of his armor, right over the defaced lion crest.
"Go," she commanded. "No more shadows. No more silent kills in the woods. Tonight, you do not hide. Tonight, you announce yourself."
Alaric stood up. The moss and dirt of the grove fell from his shoulders. He was a walking monolith of ruin.
"The message?" Alaric rasped. It was the first word he had spoken in six months.
"The Cross," the Hag smiled, revealing teeth that were too sharp for a human mouth. "Show them that their God is upside down."
Alaric turned. He didn't look back at the willow. He didn't look back at the cage that had been his home for a year.
He began to walk.
He walked out of the Copper Grove, leaving a trail of withered grass in his wake. He walked onto the King's road, ignoring the terrified peasants who fled at the sight of him. He walked with a singular, terrifying purpose toward the lights of the Blackwood Estate.
The year of silence was over. The Dog was coming to the party.