Kaelen’s mind lay stripped bare like a long stream running through the dark, and Alex’s awareness loomed over it, years’ worth of memory stretching out before him, moments so small and unremarkable that even Kaelen himself had likely forgotten most of them the moment they passed.

Alex hung there in the absent void of time, patient and observing without malice for whatever single thread might lead him back to Ignovar.

He reached into the stream carefully.

With his understanding of exactly how long a minute of memory represented within the flow of the skill, he selected a point roughly minutes removed from the present moment.

Even though Kaelen had been under watch for the better part of three days now, Ignovar was no minor figure to be tracked so easily. By any reasonable measure, he stood among the mightiest individuals in the entire realm, and a man of that stature had his own quiet ways of reaching a son under surveillance.

Or, more precisely, of reaching Alex through that son.

The only person who knew of Alex’s ability to see into the memories of people was Odysseus; after all, he was the one who helped him unlock this potential of the mask, and though he never shared it with anyone, the Inheritor did with three individuals.

The First, Second, and Fourth Seats of his clan, each one tasked personally with locating the True King, having given another means to find one of the three Hegemons, the figure who sat at the center of the chaos now consuming the realm.

Odysseus believed that there was a chance that Ignovar, now a traitor and loyal to the True King, left a message for Alex in the memories of his son, or more accurately, an offer.

The reason was simple: Alex was an immortal protected by the Realm Ruler, and someone under the protection of the Inheritor, so kidnapping or killing him was out of the question.

Taking away Reverie from him was also not possible, since Aethelmir designed it in a way that the only way to separate the mask from the holder was either through his death or his own willingness.

Which left messages. Quiet ones, buried where only Alex could easily reach, and be reasoned with since he was a reasonable threat to their master plan.

Alex dove deeper into Kaelen’s memories, moving through them at a speed no ordinary mind could have followed, hours of lived experience compressed into mere minutes of searching.

He could watch them slowly, to go through them thoroughly to not miss even a sign, but he coudnt because even though his mana supply held no limit while he was using the temporal reflection skill. The true cost lay elsewhere, in the toll of using the Descent of the Ancient, since borrowing even a fragment of the Ancient’s will for longer than a handful of minutes took a heavy price.

It was a price steep enough that he hesitated to pay it even in battles where his own life hung in the balance, possessing even a shred of Dark Ancient’s will ravaging body and soul alike; the sheer immensity of what he was housing was never designed to be carried by anything as small as a mortal frame.

But there was no alternative if he genuinely wanted to see into someone’s past with any real clarity.

Temporal Reflection’s ability to grant him a window into what had already happened was, without question, an enormous advantage, one that had reshaped many crucial battles into cruising victories for them.

But the skill in its normal form carried a real limitation, one he had learned to work around rather than escape. It only ever showed the past linearly. He couldn’t simply reach into a person’s memories and witness the one moment that mattered most.

This restriction meant the skill only ever offered real value on a small scale, incapable, on its own, of letting Alex meaningfully dig through the memories of the skaven, since doing so properly would cost him weeks of his own life, and with those weeks, all the experience and progress he had built toward becoming an Elemental Ruler.

As any individual with a sound mind, Alex knew that if he could pick the perfect target to see memories of, then the price of weeks and even a few months was worth it, as long as he didn’t lose any major progress.

So he had waited.

Months, after returning to the battlefield in earnest, patient enough to let the right opportunity present itself rather than spending the resource carelessly. Eventually, through Grand Arcanum Elara, he secured the chance to look into the memories held within the corpse of a skaven warlord, a major figure among the rat swarm.

That was when he discovered the flaw.

Certain individuals, it turned out, could fabricate their own memories deliberately, layering false recollections over the truth in a way that replaced the original the instant they died.

The mask couldn’t see past that kind of preparation any more than an ordinary interrogation could. Reverie failed the same way any other method of searching a dead mind would fail, faced with someone who had planned for exactly this contingency.

It was that failure that had first sent Alex to Odysseus.

He understood that it was not the mask itself which was limited in its ability, but rather his own strength hadn’t yet reached the level the skill demanded to function properly.

It was in his meeting with Odysseus that he learned Reverie couldn’t simply be taken from him by force, that transferring it to someone else required Alex first to reach a level of strength sufficient to sever its bond with him on his own terms.

Odysseus also taught him a way to solve the issues. The matter of raw strength resolved itself easily enough, using the mask immediately after invoking the Descent of the Ancient gave him access to power the mask’s function actually required.

The second problem, the linear nature of seeing memory stream itself, demanded a considerably harder workaround.

Error.

The Hegemon had taught him to introduce a deliberate flaw into the working of Temporal Reflection, a fracture in its logic that let him navigate the stream of time rather than simply drift along its current. Accomplishing that, too, proved impossible without channeling the will of the Dark Ancient to sustain it.

This was how Alex had come to possess the means to become the bane of the Rat King.

As Alex moved through Kaelen’s memories now, hour after hour spent in the training arena or out on the open battlefield blurring past him in rapid succession, the first two and a half days yielded nothing of particular interest.

It left him wondering, somewhere in the back of his mind even as the search continued, whether Ignovar had left anything for him to find at all.

Alex was a threat to the ratlings, certainly. But their war stretched vast, fought simultaneously across a hundred fronts, casualties absorbed and forgotten within hours regardless of whose blood had been spilled.

No doubt he had become a genuine thorn in their side, but clearly it hadn’t slowed their broader campaign in any meaningful way. Their purpose was still being served.

It didn’t matter, in the end, whether it was humans or ratlings who died in these endless numbers. Every death fed the same furnace the True King had built, fuel for a fire whose only real purpose was reaching an end goal which was simply death on a mass scale.

He was getting closer to the end of the third day’s memories, the limit Alex had already decided on before beginning the search, because he knew if he didn’t find anything in the time after Ignovar made his treachery known, there was no point in searching further.

He could choose which moment in someone’s memory to focus his attention on, yes, but the toll on his own life still flowed linearly, second for second, no matter how carefully he selected his targets.

Three days.

Because going any further would mean erasing his own memory of the dark day itself, the day the ratlings had taken so many people he had known. People he had liked. Fought beside. Soldiers he had personally sworn to protect, and alongside them, a million innocent souls who had never held a weapon in their lives.

He would not trade that memory away, not even if it would free him of the burden, because he wished to keep that burden alive, be the reason he would tear down the Ratlings, their masters, and be the end of the True King.

By the time Alex reached the end of three days’ worth of Kaelen’s life, he finally found something, a memory no longer than a minute, of a man addressing him, but unlike what he had expected, an offer to join the True King’s side or simply back off since he was simply an outsider and be rewarded for his understanding.

But what he found was something completely outside of his expectation.