Alex looked at Kaelen calmly, the blazing red uniform tailored to a build that was as much gifted by nature as it was earned through years of relentless effort, crimson hair catching the fortress light, eyes the stark red of burning embers set into a face carved with sharp, handsome lines that made his arrogance considerably easier to sell.

Kaelen was the son of Ignovar, the fourth seat of power. And though Alex held no particular fondness for the man standing in front of him, he owed something real to his father.

After all, the dragon had trained him for some time, not sharing any wisdom, exactly, and not carefully imparting technique either. Ignovar’s method of training had been simpler and considerably more brutal, pushing Alex relentlessly through fire in all its shifting forms.

Forcing him to fight without rest, forcing him to adapt without pause, shaping him one exhausting session at a time toward a confrontation with Zarach that, at the time, had felt impossibly large.

He owed the Dragon that debt, which was, in part, why Kaelen still walked around without a single scar to remember Alex by, despite over a year of near-constant provocation, ever since Alex had first returned to the Thirteenth Legion of the Magi Empire.

But that respect would need to take a back seat now.

He needed to find Ignovar. Needed to know, with certainty, whether the man who had trained him was also the man responsible for handing his secrets to the skaven. And the only direct thread leading anywhere near that answer ran through his son.

This was the reason why Alex had come to this particular stronghold. He had known Kaelen would be here, and even though the odds that Kaelen actually knew anything useful about his father’s current movements were slim, slim wasn’t nothing, and he intended to look for himself rather than trust an assumption.

"What..." Kaelen’s voice cracked across the small courtyard, twisted into a snarl as he closed the distance in a few long strides, stopping a hand’s width from Alex, standing a full head taller. "You have nothing to say now?"

His eyes burned with something more personal than simple anger.

"Good men died at that wedding. Because you attended it, knowing full well the skaven have been hunting you for months, for your head, for revenge, or for the glory you would buy them."

Alex exhaled a breath he realized he had been holding for longer than he had noticed, and looked up into those ember eyes, blazing with anger and pride in equal measure.

"Do you want to fight me?" he asked, his voice carrying none of the heat Kaelen’s did. "Prove to Faylen you’re more worthy of her than I am?" A faint smile touched his mouth.

"Let’s find somewhere quieter."

He turned his hand, and a scroll appeared in his palm, runes crawling across its surface within the space of a single breath. The courtyard blurred into gray and black around them, and when the world resolved again, the two of them stood within a rocky canyon, twin mountains rising on either side like the walls of some ancient stone corridor.

Kaelen jumped back immediately, putting distance between them, a grin spreading across his face that showed off teeth gone sharp and cold at the edges. A fiery aura kindled around him, thick enough that the air itself rippled visibly beneath its heat.

"Finally decided to fight me one-on-one." His voice had dropped an octave, roughened, deepening further with every word as deep red scales began climbing up his neck.

His ears reshaped themselves. His hands curled into clawed, elongated fingers, and his entire frame swelled outward, muscle and bone reorganizing themselves into something considerably less human.

Alex offered him no response. His silence was answer enough.

Kaelen lunged.

The earth melted beneath his feet as he crossed the distance in a single explosive burst of motion, faster than anything his size should have allowed.

In the same instant, Umbris was already moving, the pitch-black blade meeting Kaelen’s burning claws in a deafening crash, a shockwave of pure darkness colliding with blazing heat erupting outward from the point of impact.

The collision tore through the canyon floor, flattening rock and stone across a hundred meters in every direction, violent ripples of force racing outward across the land like something alive, reshaping the battlefield before either of them had thrown a second blow.

Steel screamed against claws honed as fine as any blade ever forged. Alex moved with the precision of a mind shaped by a thousand battles, his own blade tracing clean, deliberate arcs of darkness through the air, each stroke placed with the economy of someone who had stopped wasting motion a long time ago.

Kaelen answered every arc with a relentless storm of blazing strikes, a beast bound loosely in the shape of a man, each blow carrying enough heat and force to scorch and tear the stone beneath their feet.

Every exchange sent torrents of fire roaring across the canyon floor, only to be met and unmade by waves of abyssal energy rolling off Alex’s blade, darkness swallowing flame the moment the two forces collided.

Neither seemed able to gain real ground.

They traded blow after blow, and though the ground beneath them cratered and split with every collision, neither fighter carried a wound that would outlast the next few moments, let alone leave anything behind worth calling a scar. It was, by any measure, an even fight.

Then Alex simply stopped.

Darkness rolled outward from him, slow and deliberate, meeting the fiery shape looming above, Kaelen suspended mid-air now, draconic wings spread wide, casting a long shadow across the broken canyon floor despite the fire wreathing his entire body.

"Why did you stop?" Kaelen called down, something delighted creeping into his voice. "I was just about to turn up the heat. No reason to hold back if you are the one who ends up burned."

He savored the words as he said them, clearly enjoying the taste of his own cruelty.

"This should be enough," Alex murmured, mostly to himself, and raised one hand to his face.

A mask settled over his features.

Pitch black, its surface catching no light at all, shaped with a pointed mouth, a visage of a dragon, and had two long horns curling upward from its crown.

Kaelen’s expression shifted immediately, the delight draining out of it and something more careful taking its place. He had heard of this mask. Seen it, even, from a distance, Alex wearing it in battle, and apparently in the quieter stretches of ordinary life as well, a black dragon mask most people simply assumed carried some connection to House Drakaryx, given the shape of it.

Little else was known about what it actually did.

Kaelen made a mental note to be more careful, though not careful enough to be on the back foot. Not after finally getting the duel he had wanted for well over a year.

He moved with a low, building growl, fire kindling deep in his throat, and descended on Alex as a comet wreathed in flame.

A breath before he closed the final distance, darkness gushed outward and swallowed everything.

It drowned the canyon, drowned the fire, drowned Kaelen himself mid-strike, his senses erasing all at once before he had even registered the danger closing in around him.

His mind went blank before he could manage a single thought in response.

"Let’s see what hides in your memories," Alex said. His voice carried no heat at all, nothing of the anger that had followed him out of Ekran, nothing of the exhaustion still sitting behind his eyes.

The mask was called Reverie, an artifact that had once belonged to Aethelmir, a dragon whose command over time had reached a level few beings in any world had ever managed to replicate.

The mask carried only a single skill. Temporal Reflection. It let Alex look into the past of anything he chose to focus on. The cost of using it was that for every second spent looking into someone else’s life, it cost him a second of his own life, unwound backward, taken from his present and folded quietly into memory he would never get to keep.

On the surface, the skill sounded simple enough.

In practice, it had become one of the most valuable tools in his entire arsenal, rivaling his ability to raise autonomous clones of himself, rivaling even the Descent of the Ancient, the last resort he kept in reserve for the moments nothing else would suffice.

By de-aging himself through the skill’s use, Alex could restore his body to something close to perfect condition. Stamina replenished entirely. Skills reset to no cooldowns. Mental fatigue and physical injury, however severe, mended by the simple mechanism of rewinding the body’s clock far enough to erase them.

It made him functionally invincible across the length of any battle where he had the luxury of using it, provided he was willing to pay the toll the skill demanded in return.

That toll was memory.

Every time he de-aged himself this way, whatever context had brought him into that fight, whatever reasoning had led him to draw his blade in the first place, unraveled along with the time he gave up. He would emerge from the reset with a sharpened, restored body and absolutely no recollection of why any of it mattered.

Against most enemies, that would have been a weakness; however, in a war against the skaven, it barely registered as one at all. The war against them required very little context beyond the simple, standing fact of their existence. He didn’t need to remember why he was cutting through them.

He only needed to keep cutting.

The only real limitation was timing, he couldn’t use the skill to recover mid-fight in situations where a single second’s difference meant the gap between life and death, since the reset itself demanded a moment of total blindness to complete.

The weakness of the skill was also not a weakness, intruth it was the Mask’s truest use case.

Its true power lived in its other function entirely, the ability to look backward into the history of anything at all.

An ant. A stone. A single fallen leaf.

Or, if he chose, the world itself, stretching back further than any living record could reach. All it cost him was time equivalent to whatever stretch of history he chose to witness.

Temporal Reflection was behind his achievements against the Skaven, for having brought their carnage and relentless war to a halt, ruining many of their plans, saving countless millions from a fate that would have been death and worse.