The City of Blood was silent.
It pulsed with life—crimson veins of energy coiling through its obsidian towers, bio-metallic spires weeping slow droplets of red light into canals that never overflowed. The sky above it was a void, colorless and cold, stars dimmed by the weight of another world.
And at the heart of it, on a throne carved from the skull of a forgotten god, sat Kiro.
Alone.
The six hundred who had survived the collapse of Velmora were scattered through the city's lower sanctums, huddled inside the breathing halls of the Blood Keep. They rested. Healed. Rebuilt.
But not Kiro.
He sat unmoving, hunched over his knees, his fingers curled into the armrest of the throne until his knuckles bled. The blood vanished into the chair, as though the city was always hungry for more.
Time didn't pass here. Or if it did, it passed cruelly.
"You've brought them here, Kiro," came Adim's voice, soft like rot. "They are alive because of you."
Kiro didn't respond.
Instead, his mind wandered—drifting through the open wounds of memory.
He remembered his home before the Empire. The way his mother laughed. The scent of rain on metal roofs. The small things. All of them lost when the Kargal fleet came and turned his village to ash.
He remembered the mines, where he broke stone for years under the Empire's heel. Where he watched friends starve. Where names became numbers.
He remembered Rhel's hounds, tearing through the jungle while he bled into ancient stone—only to awaken into something worse.
He remembered Velmora, and the girl who died cradling her brother's broken body. The man who begged for a medic that never came. The fire, the screams, the ash coating his skin like snow.
He remembered sacrifice—the price of escape. All the lives he ended to open the Gate.
They stared at him now.
The ones he killed.
The ones he failed.
Their faces were carved into the throne's shadow. Not literally—but he saw them, every time he blinked. They weren't angry. Just... disappointed.
"You sit among gods," Adim whispered. "Yet your heart is still chained to mortals."
"I never wanted a throne," Kiro muttered.
His voice cracked.
He looked at his hands—veins glowing faintly with red light. These were no longer human hands. They belonged to something else now. A vessel. A weapon. A monster.
"Then why do you sit on it?"
He didn't know.
Maybe he thought he could carry the weight.
Maybe he thought saving six hundred lives would quiet the ghosts.
It didn't.
The throne pulsed again, and with it, a new memory surfaced.
Pablo. Standing defiant before his family. Bleeding for him. Vowing to return.
Kiro's chest tightened.
He had left behind the one person who hadn't feared him. The one who had chosen to walk beside him.
And now... he was gone too.
The Blood Apostle sat in the City of Blood, the most powerful being in a world outside time and reach—and he had never felt more utterly alone.
"You were forged by suffering," Adim whispered. "Let it shape your kingdom."
But Kiro wasn't sure he wanted a kingdom.
He just wanted the pain to stop.
He closed his eyes—and the throne welcomed him with open wounds.