CHAPTER THIRTEEN - EMPTY GRAVE

The rain falling on the old cemetery on the outskirts of the Capital was merciless, as if it meant to wipe the names from the stones.

The man stood in his long, dark coat at the head of a patch of freshly dug earth. The earth was fresh, but the grave was empty. He had never managed to bring the body back within these borders — it had been lost in the hands of that damned cult. He slowly reached out to the cold headstone. Carved into it was that sentence, plain yet carrying all the weight in the world:

A light in the darkness. A selfless wife.

When the wet, cold surface of the stone met his fingertips, his mind tore him away from the Capital's bleak grey and carried him to those distant days when the sun burned the skin and the sands shone like gold.

He remembered that moment, the dead of night, when he had come back from a mission drenched in blood. His wife's hands hadn't trembled once as she cleaned his battered face with a warm cloth. "You didn't choose this life," the man had said that night, a heavy guilt in his voice. His wife only smiled faintly and tenderly stroked the deepest scar on her husband's face. "But I chose you. With every step you take, through every hardship you meet, you need someone to walk beside you."

In the man's chest sat a lump made of sand, blocking his breath. For years he had played dangerous games, told lies, and lived in the shadows, but this pain he felt was the most real thing he had ever known in his life. His wife had paid the price of his failure. It should have been me in this grave, he thought. Vengeance moved through his veins like acid.

On the gravel behind them, a faint, rhythmic crunch sounded.

The man opened his eyes. His tears had long since mixed with the rain and washed away. The shattered husband's expression on his face vanished within seconds; in its place descended a mask of stone, cold and unreadable.

The person approaching him wore the guise of an ordinary laborer, his flat cap pulled down over his eyes. Without looking at the man's face, he stood as though saying a prayer over some other grave.

"The Commander from the south has entered the city," the informant whispered, his voice blending into the sound of the rain. "His soldiers' armor was caked with mud and blood. There was no parade. Every head was bowed."

The man didn't take his eyes off the headstone. "Anything?"

"The moment the Commander entered the city — before the mud on his boots had even dried — he was summoned to a private audience by the Director of the Royal Intelligence," the informant went on. "The whole Capital's a hornet's nest. It seems the Sanctified Bloodlines, and the Inquisition wing too, have a great many questions for the Commander about what happened in Nihira. The next few days are going to be far too hectic, and bloody. In two or three days, when the storm dies down, we may learn what really happened out there."

In the brief instant the hem of the informant's coat brushed the man's, a small roll of paper changed hands. "The Commander's official report. A sealed statement that no one survived at the scene... And a list of the items collected from the wreckage and brought to the archive room."

The informant gave a slight nod and vanished as silently as he'd come.

The man clenched the little scrap of paper in his pocket. No one survived. Those three words were a death sentence echoing in his mind. Two or three days? He had no time to wait. He had to learn the truth now, tonight.

---

At midnight, in one of the back streets of the Capital's military quarter, a lone guard walking to his change of watch lost consciousness from a flawless, silent blow to the back of his neck.

The man dragged the guard's limp body into a dark, narrow dead-end. After quickly stripping the armor and helmet off the soldier, he drew two stones resembling thick crystals from the inner pocket of his own coat.

Inside the stone, energy rippled, glowing with a sickly, yellowish light even in the dark. Firedrop. Essence of Being.

With his fingertips, the man carefully memorized the unconscious soldier's features — the jut of his cheekbones, the curve of his jaw. Then, drawing a deep breath, he channeled the Essence of Being within the Firedrop into his own body.

The Essence was drawn inward through the pores of his skin like water into a sponge. The man clenched his teeth in pain; the veins on his forehead swelled as though they would burst. He pressed his palms to his own face. Beneath his bones, his cartilage, and his flesh, an incredible heat rose. The magic of Being worked his cellular structure like clay being shaped.

The man's jawbone shifted with a sickening crack. The cartilage of his nose reshaped itself. His skin lightened by a few shades, matching the complexion of the unconscious soldier on the ground. When the man pulled his hands from his face after those few seconds of indescribable torment, nothing remained of his own features. He stood there, a flawless copy of the soldier on the ground.

Leaving behind this transformation that no human could ever perform, one that defied the laws of nature, the man donned the soldier's armor and set off toward the Capital's enormous military records building.

The corridors descending to the lower floors of the records hall were thick with large patrol squads. But thanks to his new face and the watch route he had memorized, the man moved through without drawing anyone's attention. When he reached the heavy, iron-doored Archive Room, opening the locked mechanism on the door was only a few seconds' work of his nimble hands.

Inside was a vast, damp labyrinth that smelled of the past. Shelves stretching to the ceiling held the Capital's dirty history. Using a small light crystal augmented with Crownember, the man lit up the wooden crates in the room. He made his way toward the crates stamped "Southern Border — Nihira."

His hands were trembling. When he opened the crate, the smell that hit his face was the smell of the south's rusty, rotted earth.

The crates were full of spoils and evidence gathered from the battlefield. The man began to take the items out one by one, with heavy care. A burned Inquisition banner... The broken head of a partisan, caked in dried mud, belonging to some soldier he didn't recognize... A shattered piece of Inquisition armor worked with stained glass, its edges stiffened with bloodstains.

Each time he picked up an item his breath grew shorter, and whatever it was he was looking for, it made him think, I hope it's not here. The deeper he dug into the crate, the more his hope grew.

Then he saw the iron-locked box at the very bottom of the first crate.

The box hadn't been tossed in haphazardly like the other items; it had been placed with care. There was no name or mark on it. With a thin metal rod he took from his pocket, the man worked the lock open with a single click.

When he lifted the lid, he expected contracts belonging to the mercenaries in the forest, or route maps. But what he saw nailed him where he stood.

Inside the box lay parchments bearing thick wax seals. The familiar three-headed swallow emblem on the red wax gleamed under the faint light.

The Royal Intelligence. Even the face the man had altered with the Essence of Being could no longer hide the true horror he felt. His eyes went wide as saucers. The lump of sand in his chest tightened, and this time it choked off his breath.

The thing he hadn't wanted to find lay inside that box. For the Royal Intelligence's sealed, secret mission documents to come out of that wreckage, out of the very heart of that massacre, meant only one thing: they had been targeted. The informant's note came back to him. No one had been left alive.

This truth settled onto the man's shoulders like an enormous mountain. He couldn't breathe. His hands gripped the edges of the wooden box without his willing it. In that moment, the stone walls of the dark archive room melted away, and his mind carried him years back, to that irreversible day.

He had rested his head against the child's. "Don't make a sound until you see the sands," he said, trying to smother the worry in his voice. Even though he knew it was nearly impossible to hide his feelings from the child.

The child was running, his little feet frantic and quick, as though they'd sprouted wings of dust. He had looked back. The man, too, had shouted after the running child, his voice cracking in his throat:

"Don't stop until you see the sand! Do you hear me? Until you see the sand!"

The child hadn't stopped. In tears, he had run toward the sands, toward the horizon, until he was nothing but a small speck.

Now, in the darkness of this box, as he looked at the Intelligence's bloody seals, the man heard his own voice once more. Years later. Echoing in a bottomless void.

"Did you ever reach the sand, my boy?"