Archmage Reborn: the path of shadows

Deep beneath Elmsfall, far below where any sane miner would ever dig, something ancient stirred.

The stone itself glowed in places—ribbons of crimson light running through it like veins under translucent skin. It wasn't mana. It wasn't even magic as people understood it. It was older. Raw. Alive. And with every pulse of red, the earth throbbed like it was keeping time with the heartbeat of some buried god that refused to die.

At the center of this abyss stood a monolith.

The Obelisk.

It loomed in silence—jet black, split down the middle by cracks that oozed light. It didn't just stand there. It breathed. It watched.

Old glyphs—some barely visible beneath layers of stone and rot—had begun to flicker. Not randomly, but in sequence. One after the other. Like nerves reawakening after a long sleep. Some of the runes leaked blood. Others… blinked.

At its peak, one symbol flared—a violet glow, soft but certain.

And the Warden stirred.

It had no flesh. No shape. No face to speak of. What it had was intention—heavy, creeping, impossible to ignore. It moved like smoke through leyline fractures and hollow roots, slithering between ancient wards and into places no priest had ever blessed.

Where fear lived, it fed.

Where sorrow lingered, it drank.

And it remembered.

The boy who stepped into my tomb.

The one who bled freely.

The one who didn't scream.

It didn't hate Kael.

It admired him.

"He is worthy," it whispered into the deep.

"He will kneel. Or he will burn."

But the time for silence was over.

The fire had returned.

The hunter had failed.

And the traitor—the one who broke the circle—was stirring.

The world was beginning to change again. Just like it had the day the towers fell.

So the Warden reached downward—past the glyphs, past the sleeping stones—into the Soul Tether Pits.

No one had spoken of the Pits in centuries. They weren't meant for the dead, but for those whose deaths were too dangerous to finish.

There, it found a shell.

The memory of a man. A soldier wrapped in broken armor, skin long burned away, name long forgotten. But still loyal. Still waiting.

You were the first to fall when the Archmage rose.

The Warden poured itself into the husk.

Metal screamed as it bent back into shape. Bone reformed around scorched iron. Ligaments pulled tight across cursed plate. And two eyes—dim at first—flared to life beneath a helm sealed by flame.

A voice rasped out of dry lungs.

"...Orders?"

"Find the fire.

Bind the soul.

Break the Root."

And the first Herald was born.

It wasn't Wraithborn.

It wasn't twisted.

It wasn't even truly alive.

It was woven—stitched together from purpose and memory. A relic of the empire that once was. The kind of thing people wrote legends about and then tried to forget.

It reached down and picked up its blade—old, scarred, still bearing the mark of the Velan Empire.

Then it turned.

And began to climb.

Out of the hollow.

Toward Elmsfall.

Toward the boy who wouldn't break.

Toward Kael.."...