The wind howled across the Valley of Hollow Kings—a stretch of dead earth and forgotten monuments, where not even ghosts dared linger. Raikuro stood alone beneath a sky scoured raw by red lightning, the Hellsteel pulsing at his side like a second heart. The blade was heavier today. It whispered in a voice he couldn’t fully understand, a half-language of hunger and memory.

He didn’t need a guide to find the place. It pulled him.

Beneath the shattered bones of an ancient colossus, a stairwell led downward into the stone. Worn by time and sealed in shadow, it reeked of old power. The air thickened with every step, and Raikuro’s skin crawled as if the stone itself remembered pain.

At the bottom: a door made not of metal, but fused bone—charred, veined with dark sigils, and locked with blood-iron bands.

“This is it,” Ogrhul muttered, his voice ragged. The demon’s form had further eroded, his once-majestic wings now stunted, skin cracked with ember-lit veins. “The Forge-crypt. Where the Maker bled his dreams into iron.”

Raikuro laid his palm against the seal. The Hellsteel flared, drinking in his essence. The door sighed, then opened with a groan that echoed like a dying god.

Inside lay a chamber the size of a cathedral, filled with relics of a forgotten age. Black altars, shattered soul-crucibles, chains made for binding beings beyond time. At the center was the anvil—a jagged monolith of obsidian and marrow-stone. The Hellsteel vibrated violently, almost leaping from its scabbard.

A figure waited beside the anvil.

Not dead.

Not alive.

He wore no armor, only a robe of shadows and rusted chains. His face was human, but etched with runes so deep they bled light. His eyes glowed like twin eclipses.

“You came,” he said. His voice wasn’t loud, but the chamber trembled. “The blade remembers me. And through it… I remember you.”

Raikuro narrowed his eyes. “You’re the Maker.”

“Once. I was called Kaelthar. I forged the Hellsteel to slay gods—and became what I hunted. But divinity demands sacrifice. My soul split. My blood turned to pact-ink. My name was buried beneath ash.”

“Then you know how to destroy it.”

Kaelthar laughed, and it echoed like cracking mountains. “Destroy it? You are its final forge. Each bearer tempers it. Bleeds into it. But none claimed the blood that birthed it… until now.”

Raikuro gripped the blade. “I didn’t come to become you.”

“But you already are. You dream in fire. You speak in shadow. You wield a will that bends demons and scars heaven. That blade—my blade—feeds on truth. And yours is buried under guilt and flame.”

Ogrhul growled behind him. “Raikuro, this place is wrong. We should burn it, bury the past—”

Raikuro raised a hand to silence him. “What do you want, Kaelthar?”

The ancient warlock stepped forward, hands open. “A choice. You can take my blood, bind it to the Hellsteel, and claim its full power. You will have the strength to end Dreadvorr. To free Lysia. But you’ll carry what I carried. The blade doesn’t serve—it becomes you.”

Raikuro hesitated. He remembered Velgrim’s words, the Ash Priests’ warning, the way the Hellsteel pulsed when he killed. The way it liked it.

“I’ve already lost too much,” he whispered.

“And you’ll lose more,” Kaelthar said. “Unless you stop Dreadvorr. The Hellsteel is the only weapon that can sever the tether he’s building—to the world beyond. But it must be complete. My blood. Your will. A baptism in truth.”

Silence.

Then Raikuro stepped forward. He drew the blade—and drove it into his own palm.

Blood spilled across the stone.

The chamber reacted instantly. The anvil flared with runes, and Kaelthar’s form wavered, drawn into the rising storm of energy. Raikuro knelt, pain wracking his body. The Hellsteel drank from both sources—Kaelthar’s spectral essence and Raikuro’s blood.

Visions flooded him. A burning sky. A world where gods and demons once walked together. Kaelthar’s rebellion. The creation of the blade from shattered godbone and forbidden rites. A war that never truly ended.

And then—Lysia.

Her face. Her voice. The moment she died. Not in accident, not in chance—but by divine edict. A punishment. For him.

Raikuro screamed.

The blade flared black-red, then went still.

Kaelthar was gone.

Ogrhul stepped forward, hesitant. “You still you?”

Raikuro rose slowly, eyes burning with new clarity. “No. But I’m still mine.”

He looked at the Hellsteel. It no longer pulsed with hunger. It was silent.

Waiting.

“Dreadvorr doesn’t just want power,” Raikuro said. “He wants to unmake the walls between soul and void. And he’ll use Lysia to do it.”

He turned to Ogrhul, voice steady. “We end this. One way or another.”

From the forge of the forgotten, the last war began.