Days worth of memories flashed past him, his vast mind observing every small detail they carried, sorting through them with a tireless patience and then, finally, he found what he was looking for.

The memory ground to a slow, deliberate halt.

Alex settled into it fully, letting the rush of compressed hours fall away until only this single moment remained, stretched out before him in complete clarity.

Ignovar.

He looked exactly as Alex remembered, tall, red-scaled at the edges of his jaw, eyes the same burning ember shade as his son’s, though considerably colder, considerably more patient. He wasn’t dressed for war as he remembered the ancient warlord to be. He stood wearing a red cloak, his form hidden beneath its lose fabric.

Ignovar’s ember eyes stared ahead, meeting Alex gaze as if the two stood in a pressent moment.

Alex eyes roamed picking on every detail of their surroundings, the absence of the vast active volcanic rage, the Cinder Crucible domain that the man once was master of now replaced by a land drowning in white fog.

"Hidden One," He adressed calmly,

"This message will erase itself the moment someone enters my son’s mind," He paused, "Hopefully its you,"

"We have only a few moments, so forgive me if I cant present this any better and make it more convincing,"

"Boy, you have to leave the Ancestral real, today," He spoke and fror a moment ALex was left speechless, for Ignovar to be so forward and not try to present it any better.

However, the words of persuation or threat he expected next didnt come, rather he decided to go with a third option that had considered but to found dificult to be used against him

"That Man, the one that you see as your benefector, he is a monster, and I dont mean someone like me in a position of power, since few a trully kindred soul within the ancestral realm," He shook his head, "No, I mean a true monster,"

"He has done cruel things to escape this realm, his only hope was to find a body and restart a new life, but to find a vessel that could withstand his soul is near to impossible, so he began to work on creating one,"

"Soon, he discovered he could not create a perfect vessel, his consititution too vast to be housed by a soul without him loosing centuries of acomolated expierence, become no more a then a fading soul in a strong body,"

"So he decided to create two seprate specimens, one to house his body and the other one to facilitate the process without any error," He paused, figure burning colder withinin his eyes, almost pitching black.

"Lady Erda, she is his dauther sure, but she is one in the long string of experiments, and her only purpuess was to give birth to a child who could carry a specific trait, and she did," He growled the words, "Lady Zahra is that one specimen,"

"I am certain, you have wondered why, Lady Erda was left within the ancestral realm, while her dauther and husband left the realm, "I am sure, the answer felt simple, that she simply wished to stay,"

"You were mistaken,"

"Ten centuries ago, he had Lady Zahra to facilitate his perfect takeover using her Cosmic Dominance trait, but Lady Erda, betrayed him on the last moment, telling her husband the truth and forcing her husband to leave with their dauther, knowing staying meant death of her child,"

"For a thousand years he has been working to recreate it, but have failed," There was now a grim look on his face, voice growing cold, "Now, he no longer need to create perfect indiviuals to gain his freedom,"

Zahra has the means to make the mind trasfer possible," His ember eyes stared into Alex blacks, "You are the perfect specimen to house his imence mind,"

"I know you are questining with the realm being destroyed, why woudnt he join them in destroying it or just not help at all, and surely he could survvie it when the outsiders come,"

Alex narrowed his eyes, his mind already feeling quite burdened by what was revealed because though he belived it to be a lie, it felt true close to truth to be not true.

"He cant leave the realm as he is because outside only death awaits for him. WHy else do you think he stayed within the realm in the first place, the story he had made up is just a farse,"

’An answer for everything,’ Alex thought,

"I know it is hard to belive but I also know you are capable enough to reach a semblence of truth, and when you do that leave, or you never will, because you miht belive you are one thought away from exiting the realm and protected by the Realm Ruler, but only if you can muster that one thought out loud,"

"Boy I dont really care if you live or die," Ignovar grew seriues, "I only care for the young lady, Zahra,"

"The only reason I am sharing all this with you and not her is because between the two of you, you are the only who can learn the truth and not be instently found out by him, and even if he does he woudnt instently act against you, because you need to be an Elemental Ruler before you can of used to excute his plan,"

"So, I just hope that you either out of love or simply to save a life, take the Young Lady with you, because unlike you she dosnt cary the same protection, and also she had her mother to lose if she run away again,"

"Lady Erda will die, no mater the end of everything, weather through the coming realm destruction, or by his hands, because for what she did, he would never just leave her be not even if he suceeds,"

"So, save the Young Lady and yourself," Ignovarsaid with hardened look, and the memory faded away, returning Alex back into the ruiined canion.

Alex had expected to be threatned with the death of ll those he knew even remotely, those they knew and so on, if didnt stop messing with the Skaven war, or threateneted to be hunted down again and again,

He even expected to be persuated, offered rewards and benefits to just step away but certenly didnt expect them to

He had expected to be threatened — with the deaths of everyone he knew even remotely, or with being hunted endlessly for however long it took the skaven to finally take him down for good. He had even expected persuasion. Rewards. Benefits dangled in front of him if he simply agreed to step back and let the war run its course without him.

He certainly hadn’t expected this.

Alex stood motionless in the ruined canyon, Kaelen’s unconscious form still suspended in darkness a few feet away, and for a long moment he didn’t move at all — his mind caught somewhere between the memory he’d just witnessed and the reality he’d returned to, the two refusing to fully separate from each other.

A lie, he told himself first, because that was the safer conclusion, the one that asked less of him. It has to be a lie. Ignovar has every reason to want me gone from this war. Feeding me something this destabilizing costs him nothing and might buy him exactly what he wants — my attention pulled somewhere else entirely.

But the thought didn’t hold the way he needed it to.

Because if it was a lie, it was an extraordinarily specific one. Ignovar hadn’t reached for anything vague or easily dismissed — no talk of grand conspiracies, no unfalsifiable warnings about distant enemies. He’d given names. Lady Erda. Cosmic Dominance. A timeline stretching back ten centuries, details that would take real effort to fabricate convincingly and even more effort to fabricate for a message meant to erase itself the instant it was heard, with no way to verify a single word of it afterward.

Why go to that much trouble for a lie that costs him nothing to tell more simply.

Alex turned the thought over slowly, the way he turned over anything that threatened to reshape everything he thought he understood about his own situation. His benefactor. The man who had pulled him out of nothing, who had given him purpose and power and a war worth fighting, who had never once, in all the years since, given him concrete reason to doubt him.

Except reason wasn’t the same as proof. It never had been.

And the quieter, colder part of his mind — the part that had learned, across a decade of surviving in a realm that punished trust freely given, to hold even his closest allies at some careful distance — pointed out something he didn’t want to sit with.

Everything Ignovar described would explain things I’ve never had a satisfying answer for. Why my benefactor never once asks anything of me beyond growing stronger. Why Zahra was so insistent, so many times, that I leave the realm — long before she ever gave me a reason I could hold onto. Why she stopped pushing, so suddenly, right around the time I stopped asking questions of my own.

He didn’t want that thread to lead anywhere. He followed it anyway.

Alex closed his eyes, drawing a slow breath, forcing the spiral of thought to slow down enough that he could actually examine it rather than simply be carried by it.