Chapter 1

  Gazer

  Immortality, it sounds like a dream come true, you can fulfil your every dream, you can live to see what comes after, its sounds like a boon that is needed by everyone, to live with your companions, with your loved one till the very end. But what everyone forgets is that after your loved ones die you still carry on, after your dreams are fulfilled you still carry on, you see death for what it really is.

  This is my story. I am Lucius, the second of the brotherhood, and as you can already guess I was blessed with this curse, that people so lovingly call immortality and this was the day that led me down the path of what philosophers call self destruction and what mercenaries call going out in glory.

  The capital square was a sea of humanity—beggars and common folk pressed shoulder to shoulder beneath the merciless sun. The air thrummed with the murmur of a thousand voices, a sound like bees trapped in a hive with no exit. Merchants hawked their wares. Children wove between legs. The crowd was alive with the desperate energy of those who had come to witness something momentous, though few understood what.

  A voice cut through the chaos like a blade.

  "Today we stand here to decide the fate of Lanze, the Fifth of the Brotherhood. Chyros, the Third of the Brotherhood. And Sable, the First of the Brotherhood."

  The crowd erupted instantly, as if a dam had broken. "Free them! Free them! Free them!" The chant rose, a desperate prayer spoken by thousands who understood what these men had done, what they had sacrificed.

  The speaker—a nobleman with a face carved from cruelty and ambition—raised his sword. The blade caught the sunlight, and in that glint lay a threat. The crowd fell silent, though displeasure rippled across every face like wind across water.

  "Today these traitors will die," the speaker continued, his voice cold and measured. "By the order and judgment of King Primus, they will be executed."

  The crowd erupted again, louder now, more desperate. "Free them! They are heroes! Free them!"

  The sword rose again. Silence fell like a guillotine.

  "Bring forth the accused."

  The guards emerged from the palace—knights clad in steel armor that shone like silver beneath the sun. Each wore a helmet crowned with horns that curved like a stag's antlers, symbols of the kingdom's power and pride. They carried swords—some katanas, some longswords, each blade honed to kill with absolute efficiency. Every guard had his preference, his style, but the agenda was always singular: death.

  Three prisoners were led forward, bound and broken.

  The first was tall, with long black hair that fell to his shoulders, black eyes that held an unsettling calmness, and a smile—a smile—playing at the corners of his mouth despite the chains. Sable. Even in bondage, there was something unbroken about him.

  The second was older, his hair and beard both white as bone, long and wild, his eyes a sharp, penetrating green that seemed to cut through the crowd. Chyros. Age had not diminished him; if anything, it had refined him into something harder, more dangerous.

  The third had black hair braided loosely, a goatee framing a jaw set in defiance. Lanze. He looked out at the crowd not with fear but with recognition, as if seeing old friends he had not expected to find.

  The nobleman pointed his sword toward Chyros. "Sir Chyros, you stand here accused of deceiving the king. How do you plead?"

  Before any answer could emerge, the nobleman moved on, as if the prisoners' voices were irrelevant. He turned to Lanze. "Sir Lanze, I'm afraid you share the same fate. How do you plead?"

  Again, no time for response. He moved to Sable, his sword now directed at the man with the unsettling smile. "And sir Sable, you too are accused of the same sin. How do all three of you plead?"

  Dead silence.

  It was the silence of men who understood that words were no longer currency, that explanations would fall on ears already deaf. It was the silence of acceptance, of a fate already written in stone.

  Then Sable spoke.

  His voice was quiet, yet it carried across the entire square, silencing even the crowd's desperate chanting. "I plead guilty."

  The crowd gasped as if struck.

  "I plead guilty," Sable continued, his black eyes fixed on the nobleman, "of not cutting off the head of Primus when I had the chance. I plead guilty of being unable to save most of the folks when I was fighting a war your king couldn't finish. I plead guilty of not being able to witness the life leave Primus's eyes when he dies."

  His voice grew stronger, each word a blow against the speaker's certainty.

  "I plead guilty that I never worked for the favor of the king. I worked for the favor of the kingdom itself. And lastly—" He paused, and in that pause lived all the rage of a man who had given everything only to be betrayed. "I plead guilty that I couldn't cut off the head of the snake that sits atop Primus when I had the chance."

  The crowd erupted.

  "We are guilty! We are guilty!" they chanted, their voices a thunderous declaration. "Free them! Free them! Free them!"

  The nobleman's face twisted with fury. His sword rose higher, but the crowd would not be silenced. Their voices only grew louder, more defiant, a tide that threatened to sweep away the carefully constructed theater of execution.

  "Enough!" the nobleman roared. "Executioner! Behead them all! Now!"

  In the chaos—the screaming crowd, the guards moving to contain the uprising, the swelling tide of desperation and defiance—Sable turned. His eyes swept across the sea of faces until they found one man in particular. A man standing at the edge of the crowd, partially hidden in shadow, watching with an intensity that made even the distance between them feel nonexistent.

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  Sable's lips moved. The words were barely audible, lost in the tumult, but they were spoken with absolute certainty, with the weight of a final command, a last will and testament spoken not to the crowd but to one man alone:

  "Give them hell, Lucius."

  The executioner's axe rose.

  And in that moment, a vow was made—not in words but in silence, not in the light of day but in the darkness that lived behind one man's black eyes.

  "By the will of King Primus," the speaker declared, his voice rising above the crowd's desperate chanting, "by the will of the three gods that prosper our lands, and by the will of the jury, I on behalf of King Primus now announce you as enemies of the kingdom."

  He turned to the executioner, his sword pointing downward like a condemning finger. "Behead these traitors."

  The executioner raised his axe.

  The blade was massive, a thing of iron and terrible purpose. It caught the sunlight and held it, as if refusing to let it go, as if demanding that everyone bear witness to what came next.

  The axe fell.

  It came down on Chyros first, the white-haired warrior whose green eyes had cut through crowds and battlefields alike. His head severed with a sound like thunder meeting earth. No scream. No struggle. Just the finality of impact and the sudden absence of a man who had lived.

  Then Lanze. The braided warrior, the man whose hands had held a sword with the grace of a dancer. The axe fell, and he too became silence.

  Finally, Sable. The one with the black hair and the unsettling smile. The one who had spoken the truth that shattered kingdoms. The blade fell on his nape, and the square erupted into a sound that was neither chant nor scream but something between—a lamentation, a wail, a cry of collective grief and rage.

  The crowd kept chanting: "We are guilty! We are guilty! We are guilty!"

  Bodies fell to the stone.

  Blood pooled beneath the execution platform, running between the cobblestones like a river finding its course. The three heads remained visible for a moment before the guards moved to remove them, displaying them on pikes as was custom—a warning to those who might consider defying the crown.

  In the shadows at the edge of the square, Lucius stood motionless.

  His body screamed. Every muscle trembled with the need to move, to act, to cross that distance and paint the square red with the blood of those responsible. His hands clenched into fists so tight that his nails drew crescents of blood from his palms. His breathing came ragged, barely controlled, as if something inside him was clawing to get out.

  But he did not move.

  A dying man had made a request—not a plea, not a desperate hope, but a command spoken with absolute authority. Sable's final words echoed in Lucius's mind like a bell that would not stop ringing: Give them hell.

  And so Lucius stood in the shadows, watching. Watching the guards celebrate their victory. Watching the crowd slowly disperse, their chanting fading into sobs. Watching the executioner wipe blood from his axe as if it were nothing more than morning dew.

  He stood there while the sun continued its arc across the sky, indifferent to the deaths below it. He stood there while the bodies were removed and the square was hosed clean, the blood flowing away like it had never existed at all.

  And in that standing, in that terrible, absolute restraint, a vow was being forged. Not spoken, not shouted, but carved into his very being—a promise made not to the dead but to the memory of them, to the weight of their final words.

  The hell they deserved would come. But it would come slowly. It would come with precision. It would come when the time was right, when every player was in place, when vengeance could be served not as passion but as inevitability.

  For now, Lucius simply waited in the shadows, his black eyes burning with a fire that would not be extinguished until kingdoms fell and the snake at the top of the hierarchy was finally, permanently, cut down.

  This was one of those days when I didn't know that I was immortal because if I had I would have razed the kingdom down on that day just to save my brothers. It was a place where I shouldn't have been present, it was a loss that I should not have mourned, it was a memory that I should have burned down, but because love as people call it more so of brotherly love was what pulled me in that place, it was the birthplace of an evil that is unknowingly unleashed on the world whose name you would come to know a little later.

  The blood continued to drip from the execution ledge.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Each drop fell like a metronome, marking time, marking the passage of moments that could never be reclaimed. Lucius stood unmoving, his black eyes fixed on that falling blood as the square gradually returned to its ordinary chaos. Merchants reopened their stalls. The crowd dispersed. Children played. Life resumed its indifferent march, as if three men had not just been severed from existence.

  But Lucius remained, etching every detail into his memory with the precision of a man carving stone. The angle of the sun. The sound of the crowd's final chants fading into whispers. The exact shade of red that pooled beneath the platform. The faces of the guards, the speaker, the executioner. He was burning it all into his eyes, into his very being, so that when the moment came—when he was finally ready to deliver judgment on those whose decisions had led to this—he would not hesitate.

  His hand would not shake. His resolve would not waver.

  A man appeared.

  He moved quickly through the crowd, his form obscured beneath a black cloak, his face hidden in shadow. But his eyes—his eyes were visible for just a moment, and they were brown, sharp, familiar. Eyes that Lucius recognized, though he could not place from where or when.

  The man bumped into Lucius, a collision that appeared accidental to any observer. In that brief contact, a chit was pressed into Lucius's palm. Then the man was gone, moving away into the crowd with the same casual urgency he had arrived with, leaving no trace, no connection, nothing that would suggest the exchange had ever occurred.

  Lucius pocketed the chit without looking at it.

  After some time had passed—long enough that suspicion would have faded, long enough that the memory of the collision would have dissolved into the crowd's noise—Lucius rose and left the square. His footsteps carried him through winding streets, past merchant stalls and begging children, until he found what he sought: a tavern.

  At first glance, it seemed anything but private. The common room was crowded, filled with voices and laughter and the clink of cups. Men sat hunched over games of chance, their eyes locked on cards or dice. Tavern girls moved between tables with practiced grace, their smiles and touches a commodity bought and sold like bread or wine. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of spilled ale.

  But this crowd was perfect precisely because everyone was absorbed in themselves. No one looked up when Lucius entered. No one marked his presence. In a room full of people, he was utterly anonymous—invisible not through absence but through the sheer indifference of those around him.

  He found a corner table, away from the light of the hearth, and sat with his back to the wall. His black eyes swept the room once—calculating, measuring, assessing—then settled into stillness.

  He withdrew the chit.

  The paper was worn, creased, as if it had been folded and unfolded many times. When he opened it, the single word burned against his vision:

  Gazer.

  The name hung in the air like a curse, like a summoning. This was what Sable had requested. This was the information that had cost a dying man his final words. Gazer. The name of the snake that sat atop Primus. The puppet master who had pulled the strings that led to the execution square. The force that held the entire kingdom of Morrowind in its grasp, squeezing slowly, methodically, ensuring that power remained concentrated in the hands of those who served it.

  Lucius stared at the single word until his vision blurred, until the letters seemed to writhe like living things.

  Gazer.

  Around him, the tavern continued its ordinary chaos. No one noticed the man in the corner with the chit in his trembling hands. No one saw the way his jaw clenched, the way his breathing deepened. No one understood that in that moment, the wheels of vengeance had been set in motion, and nothing—no force, no power, no god—could stop them now.

  The blood was still falling from the execution ledge. In his mind, it would never stop falling.

  And one day soon, it would be Gazer's blood that painted the stones.

  “ for when boon turns into curse, for when brothers lay waste,

  That is the time to act, to enforce, to make haste”