The screams reached him from the lower trenches in the Rinett camp.

  At first, he thought it was another dying skirmish — until he heard laughter mixed with the pain.

  He vaulted over the ridge, landing silently in the muck below. What he saw there stopped even him.

  A group of Rinnett soldiers had captured Rammaset medics — unarmed, their insignias still bright under the grime.

  They were laughing as they carved the wings from one soldier’s back — the small Wyrmbound sigil tattooed there marking him as “tainted.”

  Another man was half-buried in mud, pleading for mercy while a bayonet pressed into his mouth.

  Darwin felt something snap.

  The rain around him went still.

  Time itself seemed to hesitate.

  He took one step forward. The laughter stopped.

  The Rinnett captain turned, he saw the man standing there, eyes glowing faintly blue, sword drawn, his uniform soaked but spotless. “Who the hell—”

  The question never finished forming.

  Rainsong moved faster than sound —it was a blur of water and silver.

  By the time the first body fell, the others hadn’t even realised they were already cut.

  Darwin walked through them, silent. Each stroke of the blade was perfect, clean and precise there were no wasted motion, no hesitation. He didn’t roar. He didn’t curse. He simply killed.

  When the last one fell, he stood there — surrounded by corpses, the mud rippling faintly with every drop of rain.

  Then he saw one of the medics twitch — a young boy, maybe seventeen.

  He tried to speak, his lips trembling. “Why… why save us?”

  Darwin looked down at him, eyes distant.

  “I didn’t,” he said softly. “I am not sent here to save anyone.”

  He turned toward the horizon — where the battlefield still burned.

  The storm above him thickened. The sky went black.

  He closed his eyes and whispered something into the rain.

  Not a spell. Not an order. A plea.

  “Let it end.”

  The Veins answered. The Valley flooded with resonant energy.

  The world broke.

  The rain turned into sheets — not falling, but rising from the ground.

  Every droplet that had soaked into the soil began to glow, pulled upward by invisible force.

  Water surged through the trenches, tearing away fortifications, drowning cannons, swallowing screams.

  Soldier who tried to swim in those dark waters were pulled in by water currents.

  No one will be allowed to escape.

  Within minutes, the valley became an ocean — black and mirror-smooth, reflecting the fire of the setting sun.

  Darwin walked into its centre, sheathing his sword.

  The sigil on his sword burned bright, pulsing with each heartbeat.

  “Sleep,” he whispered again.

  The flood obeyed.

  Tens of thousands sank beneath the glass surface — soldiers, medics, monsters, heroes — all equal now, all silent.

  And then, as if ashamed, the water slowly receded, leaving nothing but stillness behind.

  Only Darwin remained, standing amid the ruins — a single man surrounded by the reflection of what he had undone.

  That day a myth was born. The tale of a soldier who cleansed the filth of a battlefeild.

  The Marine of Valen.

  ***

  That night, the Emperor’s council chamber was silent.

  No generals. No applause. Only the letter on the table, detailing the victory that no one would celebrate.

  Emperor Alaric Valen read it twice. Then three times.

  The handwriting trembled slightly when he wrote his response to Kohler:

  “Recall him immediately. No more deployments. If one man can end a war, he can end a world.”

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  Deep beneath the Academy, where the Veins glowed faint and ancient, Kohler stood before the shimmering vastness that was neither shadow nor flesh.

  A voice filled the chamber — calm, patient, old enough to remember when stars were still ideas.

  “You humans still think power must serve purpose.”

  Kohler bowed low. “Ankewelt, great one.”

  “You sought knowledge,” the dragon murmured, its shape half-seen in the light. “I gave it to you. And you still forged despair.”

  “The Emperor forced my hand,” Kohler said, his voice cracking.

  “The Emperor commands nations,” Ankewelt replied. “You command creation. Tell me, Magister — why are the Wyrmbound fighting a petty war?”

  Kohler had no answer.

  The dragon’s eyes dimmed, like dying stars.

  “The Veins remember what you forget, Kohler. And when they sing of the old times again, it will not be in a tongue you would like.”

  Then Ankewelt was gone — leaving behind only the faint hum of the world’s oldest memory, echoing through the stone.

  Kohler stood alone, staring at his trembling hands.

  The first tears he had shed in decades slid down his face and vanished into the pulse of the Veins below.

  ***

  Darwin didn’t go to his quarters.

  He went straight to the Forge Hall, where the air was thick with heat and the smell of iron.

  Rhea was there — her sleeves rolled up, her once-white gloves blackened by soot.

  The forge’s light painted her face in gold and shadow, and when she looked up, she froze.

  “Will…” she whispered.

  Darwin didn’t answer.

  He stood in the doorway for a long moment, rainwater pooling at his feet. Then he stepped inside.

  The door shut behind him.

  Rhea watched him approach — step by step, slower than she’d ever seen him move.

  When he finally reached her, he stopped, staring at the anvil where a half-finished blade glowed faintly red.

  He set Rainsong beside it.

  The blade hissed against the hot metal — steam curling upward like breath from a dying god.

  For a heartbeat, neither spoke. The only sound was the quiet hum of molten iron.

  Then Darwin said, voice rough and thin, “I was ready, you know.”

  Rhea blinked. “For what?”

  “For the war we trained for.” He smiled faintly, bitterly. “The real one. The war against the dragons on Terra. The one that mattered.”

  He ran a trembling hand through his wet hair. “I’ve destroyed them before. You know that. The ones that turned feral after the Exodus. The ones that tore apart our first colonies. I’ve killed over a hundred. And I didn’t flinch.”

  He laughed softly — the sound breaking halfway through. “They were beasts with minds. They killed for ideals, for balance, for what they thought was the higher song of the world. I hated them, but I understood them.”

  Rhea stayed silent, only stepping closer, her eyes soft and afraid.

  “But this…” Darwin’s voice cracked. “This was different.”

  He looked at his hands — pale, shaking.

  “The Rinnett soldiers. The way they screamed. The way they looked at me when the flood rose — like I was something worse than the dragons I’d fought. Like I wasn’t even human.”

  He clenched his fists. The air around him shimmered, faint droplets rising off his skin before falling again. “I can still hear them, Rhea. The ones I killed, the ones I drowned, the ones I saved. They sound the same now.”

  Rhea stepped closer and laid a hand on his cheek — tentative, trembling. “You did what you were ordered to do.”

  “I did what I swore I’d never do.”

  He looked up, eyes bright with tears that refused to fall. “I killed men for the same reason the dragons killed us — for the sake of killing. For a throne. For a name that’s ruled for three generations and has forgotten what it means to bleed.”

  He sank to his knees, the strength finally leaving his body.

  The forge light flickered across his face as his voice fell to a whisper.

  “I could fight the dragons, I could fight the Vein Remembrances. I can’t fight this.”

  Rhea knelt with him, pulling him into her arms as his shoulders trembled.

  His breath hitched — one, two, three — before it broke entirely.

  “Will,” she whispered, using the name he’d once had before the army stripped it away. “You came back. That’s all that matters to me.”

  “No,” he murmured against her shoulder. “The man who left didn’t.”

  She said nothing — only held him tighter as the forge fire dimmed, its glow flickering like a dying heartbeat.

  ***

  Emperor Alaric Valen stood before the great map table, the candlelight casting long shadows across the silver veins engraved into its surface.

  He’d been staring at it for hours — not at the borders, not at the front-lines, but at the single name inked into the dispatch from the western command.

  Darwin.

  One man.

  Fifty thousand dead.

  Victory at the cost of silence.

  Cyran’s letter lay beside it, still laying open since the day it arrived from the front.

  The Emperor reached for it, then stopped.

  His hand trembled.

  “What have we created?” he whispered to the empty room.

  No one answered.

  Kohler sat in his study, the lights dim, a single report flickering on the holo-papers before him.

  Subject: Darwin Vahl.

  Status: Returned.

  Resonance levels — extremely stable.

  Emotional coherence — fractured.

  Recommendation: Isolation and observation. Cryosleep cycle initiation.

  He signed the paper, then set it aside — and poured himself a drink.

  The wine was older than the Academy itself, brought from the ruins of the first colony.

  It tasted like ash.

  Somewhere deep below, the Veins pulsed — slow, deliberate, as if remembering a time when power did not need purpose.