The darkness consumed him once more, and Alex returned to the light of the barren expanse, the land of no stars, black earth stretching in every direction, drowning in its own kind of shadow.

It should have felt oppressive. Instead, after where he had just been, it felt almost like relief. Better, by an enormous margin, than the pitch-dark abyss he’d been dragged into moments ago.

Or days ago. He genuinely couldn’t say which.

Time inside that place had behaved strangely, compressed and stretched at once, the whole encounter feeling like the span of a few heartbeats and also like days spent standing beneath the weight of countless eyes.

Their nature remained a mystery to him. Their intent had no curiosity for him, nor did they carry disappointment or hunger. Just a cold, total indifference, vast enough that it hadn’t needed to be anything sharper to leave its mark.

Alex dropped his head and drew slow, careful breaths, letting his own body remind him it was still capable of the motion. His mind kept circling back to the gazes regardless, the memory of them still vivid, still present, filling his chest with something close to terror every time it resurfaced.

It wasn’t fear for his own life, because not for a single moment inside that darkness had he genuinely believed he was in danger of being harmed.

The terror came from somewhere else entirely. It stemmed from a single, inescapable truth of what resided within that abyss, the sheer thought that things of such nature existed was what frightened him.

It took him several minutes to fully gather himself. Then he looked down, silent, at the cold blade resting across his legs.

A weapon that housed things capable, he was somehow certain, of ending life as he understood it entirely.

He didn’t know how he knew that. He simply did. Whatever hid within that blade, if it was ever fully unleashed, would be the end of reality.

Alex drew in a deep breath, questioning if this thought was even his own ot put in his mind by this blade. But even after some time, he couldn’t conclude, not that he needed any certainty that the things that resided with the blade were dangerous.

A moment later, his fingers closed around the cold metal of the hilt, and in a slow, deliberate motion, he raised the blade upright before him, his eyes never once leaving its pitch-black surface.

He channeled mana into it, and to his delight, the blade accepted it without resistance, a thin line of darkness kindling along its edge and growing steadily denser with every passing second.

Alex finally smiled.

The terror hadn’t left his eyes entirely, it lingered there, faint but present. But relief had joined it now as well, because for a moment he truly believed that he would be rejected by the blade he worked so hard to acquire, requiring him to first prove his worth before he could even claim it.

"I don’t know what you want me to do," he murmured, low enough that the words barely carried past his own lips. "But I know you want to be wielded. So that’s what I will do."

He understood very little about the blade, if he was honest with himself. He knew it had belonged to the Dark Ancient. He suspected, from what he had glimpsed inside that abyss, that it might serve as some manner of prison, a container for things he had no name for and no framework to properly understand.

Beyond that, he knew only one other thing with any certainty: the blade had judged him unworthy, and it wanted him to prove otherwise.

The only path he knew toward proving worthiness to a weapon like this one was the oldest path there was. It was to wield it in battle.

Strength itself might be part of what it demanded of him too, since he was not even an Elemental Ruler yet, a mortal by every measure that mattered.

But that, at least, was a problem with an obvious solution. He planned to prove his worth through battles, and battles had a way of forcing one to grow.

And with the entire Ancestral Realm, after all, was already at war, God knows there was no shortage of battles waiting for him.

"What should I call you?" Alex said aloud, turning the blade slightly in the fading light. He considered it for a moment, then smiled. "The Blade has a nice ring to it. Calling you ’Dark’s Blade’ or a more conventional name like the ’Companion’ doesn’t quite fit."

’Pff.’ A snicker filled the air, soundless, and yet somehow unmistakable, arriving in the same instant as a wave of pure disgust that swept through his mind uninvited.

’What,’ Alex thought, wordless, turning his head up toward the sky as if the blade itself had a face to glare at. ’You had nothing to say when I asked how to prove my worthiness, but you care enough to weigh in on what I call you?’

"You are terrible at naming things," Zahra said, a small smile curling at the edge of her mouth.

Alex shrugged. "You two seem to agree on that, at least."

Zahra’s expression flickered with brief confusion before settling back into her usual composed, faintly disinterested calm.

Alex returned his attention to the blade.

It stood upright in his grip exactly as it had a moment ago, its weight unremarkable like truly great weapons, present enough to be felt, balanced enough to be forgotten entirely once the fighting actually began.

He turned the question of its name over properly this time, giving it the consideration it deserved. A blade of this nature, this age, this weight of history, deserved a name chosen with care.

Alex understood after seeing the clear display of emotion that naming it was the first real step toward earning whatever favor it demanded of him. The first move toward becoming someone it might one day consider its master rather than merely its bearer.

Nearly a full minute passed before he smiled again.

He raised one shoulder in a small shrug, half satisfaction, half uncertainty, the gesture of committing to something he wasn’t entirely sure was right, but liked anyway.

"The End."

-------------

The sun burned crimson.

It painted the sky, and the snow-covered earth below it in the same deep, saturated red, the two blending together at the horizon until there was no longer any clear line between where the ground ended and the heavens began.

Plumes of dark smoke rose in heavy columns against that bloody sky, their source unmistakable, a city, once magnificent, now fully consumed by flame.

Its architecture had stretched for kilometers in every direction, towers rising to touch the clouds. Now those towers lay broken, collapsed into rubble, their cobblestone streets running slick with blood and littered with the dead.

The corpses belonged to both sides in equal, terrible measure. Humans, young and old alike, and skaven, vile, long-snouted things with madness burning behind their eyes even in death, their sharp teeth still bared in expressions that had been carved by bloodlust and cruelty long before anything had managed to kill them.

At the heart of the ruined city, a once-grand palace stood gutted and unrecognizable, its courtyard reduced to a wasteland of shattered stone and drifting ash. And there, on ground carpeted in soot and the debris of everything that had burned above it, two figures remained standing.

One was a man.

He was tall, his frame encased in dark armor scarred by more blows than could easily be counted. Wounds marked him that should have ended any ordinary man several times over, long claw marks raked across his chest, still weeping blood freely down the ruined plate beneath.

His left arm was gone entirely, the shoulder with it, the wound cauterized black at its edges by whatever force had taken it. In his remaining hand, he loosely held a long, broad blade.

The thing across from him was terror given flesh.

A mountainous bulk of muscle and sinew, wings of cracked leather folding uselessly at its sides, its face a cruel, elongated snout twisted further by the fact that half its lower jaw had been torn away entirely.

What should have been a fatal disfigurement instead only added to the horror of it, green-stained teeth bared through the wound, a long tongue lolling loose where the jaw no longer held it properly in place.

The skaven commander raised its ruined head.

Its cold green eyes met the man’s abyssal black, and for a moment something in its expression twisted into a slow, grinding chuckle, a sound built from malice rather than genuine humor.

"We finally found you," it rasped, the words dragged up from somewhere deep and guttural, the laugh that followed booming out across the falling stones and the burning sky above them.

Then it stopped. Abruptly. Completely.

The eyes that had held so much cruel satisfaction a moment before went dull, all at once, the light behind them simply extinguished. And its head rolled from its shoulders before the sound of the blow that took it had even finished reaching the air.