Azran.
The word struck harder than the creature's claws.
For one frozen instant, battle vanished.
Only that name remained.
Ancient.
Buried.
Impossible.
Aran staggered as if memory itself had hit him.
The shadow-creature lunged again.
This time he met it.
The crimson blade born from his blood crashed against black root-limbs.
Sparks of red and void scattered across the chamber.
Tazruth roared and seized one of the creature's tendrils, tearing it free like ripping out living night.
Lena shouted,
"Focus!"
Useful advice.
Difficult timing.
The thing twisted unnaturally and whispered while fighting.
"Azran… heir of stone…"
Its voice sounded like many dead mouths speaking together.
Kalen slashed at its flank.
"Can we kill the talking nightmare first and do identity crises later?"
Reasonable.
The creature recoiled, then split into three moving shadows.
The blood lake churned violently.
Faces in its surface began rising.
Not reflections.
Shapes.
War-dead climbing from memory.
The guardian, wounded but standing, drove its sword into the floor.
Golden fire spread in a circle around them.
"Ash-ward!" it thundered.
The dead halted at the barrier.
Temporarily.
Aran kept staring at the creature.
"Why did you call me Azran?"
It laughed.
A horrible wet sound.
"Because Aran is the name of forgetting."
That cut too deep.
The mountain trembled.
Tazruth turned sharply.
"Do not listen!"
Too late.
Fragments stirred in Aran's mind.
A child walking among giant stone beings.
Blood rites beneath eclipsed suns.
A vow.
A betrayal.
Then pain.
Blinding pain.
He dropped to one knee.
Lena caught him.
"What's happening?"
Aran whispered,
"I've had another name before this life."
The creature smiled.
And suddenly dove not at Aran—
but into the blood lake.
The whole chamber convulsed.
The lake rose like a living tide.
A shape began forming from blood and memory.
Humanoid.
Crowned.
Terrible.
The guardian went pale beneath bone.
"No…"
Tazruth stepped back.
Actual fear.
Kalen noticed.
"That's not encouraging."
The blood figure completed itself.
A king formed from old war.
Its eyes opened.
Red suns.
It looked at Aran.
And spoke one word.
"Son."
Silence.
Even the mountain seemed to hold breath.
Aran felt the crimson blade shake in his hand.
The king stepped forward across the blood surface.
Each step birthed ripples of dead voices.
Lena moved protectively beside Aran.
"Tell me that is not your father."
Aran could not answer.
Because part of him knew.
The guardian whispered the name like prayer and terror together.
"Azrakar."
The Blood King.
The one erased from mountain history.
The chained king.
The father of the forgotten line.
And he was awake.
Azrakar lifted a hand toward Aran.
"Come," he said.
"Your inheritance waits below the Deep Root."
Tazruth roared and attacked.
The Blood King caught the giant's strike with one hand.
Stopped it.
Effortlessly.
Then threw Tazruth across the chamber.
Stone cracked.
Lena stared.
"We are very underprepared."
Accurate.
Azrakar looked only at Aran.
"You were hidden from me."
A pause.
"No longer."
Then the floor behind the seven thrones split open—
revealing a descending abyss wrapped in colossal chains.
The way to the Deep Root.
The Blood King smiled.
And beneath the mountain—
something answered him.