"My Lord? Why are you rolling in—oh gods, is that..."
The voice barely registered.
To Keiser, it arrived as though carried by the lingering echo of Aisha's sigils— distorted, crackling, sharp-edged like shrapnel tearing through skin and bone, ringing in his ears, dissonant and distant, nearly drowned beneath the roar of searing pain.
He could scarcely think.
He was too busy choking on his own blood—thick, warm, copper-laced. It coated his tongue, filled the gaps between his teeth, and poured down his throat in suffocating waves. Each breath scraped against raw tissue, obstructed by whatever viscous substance now surged from his lungs.
His body convulsed, trembling with the effort to remain upright. His limbs trembled, his chest burned, and every gasp was a desperate attempt not to drown on land.
The taste in his mouth was unbearable—rust and rot, filth and fire.
He tried to rise.
His hands braced against the ground, only to slip—palms sinking into something slick, warm, and yielding. There was a wet, sickening squelch. The stench confirmed what his senses could not yet process.
But he didn't care.
He was supposed to be dead.
Keiser should have died.
His vision blurred—shapes swam in the haze. Somewhere nearby, something snorted. Someone gagged—or was that him? And in the distance, faint but unmistakable, came laughter.
None of it mattered.
He was alive.
And he knew, with a clarity that pierced through the pain—He was never meant to be.
It was a feeling Keiser knew all too well—familiar, yet never something he could grow numb to.
He had believed, in his final moments, that hell would welcome him with open arms. That death would claim him swiftly, as it had so many before him. But it hadn't.
Instead, there was only the dulling ache, the numbing weight behind his eyes, as his vision blurred and his mind slipped. Through the haze, he watched the man he trusted most—his kingmaker,his companion, his friend—not only betray him in the final trial, but reveal a truth far crueler.
He had never been on Keiser's side to begin with.
A deeper ache bloomed in Keiser's chest—not from the wounds, but from the hollow where loyalty had once lived.
Even the sword—the one gift he believed was truly his. Unlike the armor, loaned by the kingdom, crafted from what the nobility deemed 'sufficient' for the expendable lives of knights, this blade had seemed different. It was his. A weapon he had carried with pride. A symbol of the bond he shared with the man he once trusted most.
But now, he knew the truth. The sword was not forged in honor, but in betrayal.
Its core, its strength, came not from some nameless beast—but from the bones of a dragon. Not just any dragon, but the one they had rescued together in their youth, when Keiser had first been assigned as the Fourth Prince's personal knight. He remembered it vividly. The sacred creature, trembling and wounded, bound in chains. He had cut down the poachers without hesitation. Men who showed no mercy deserved none. Their deaths had not been swift.
He had pleaded with the fourth prince to help return the young dragon to the sacred forest, where beings like it could live in peace. He had believed it had been done.
Months before the King's Gambit, on the occasion of Keiser's twenty-fifth birthday—a rare celebration, marking not just his age but a historic shift—Prince Gideon had made a bold declaration before the court. He would step down from candidacy and offer his knight, a commoner, as his champion for the throne. That day was hailed as a turning point, a moment of brotherhood and defiance, and the halls rang with wine, cheers, and false hope.
But it was also the day Keiser unknowingly met the dragon again—not in flesh, but in core reforged into the heart of the blade, in its bones polished and bleached to form the hilt he gripped in every battle since. The sword he had called salvation was, in truth, a grave.
He had carried its remains.
He had wielded a lie.
And now, that dragon's remains had been forged into the very weapon that ended him.
A strike not just of steel and spell, but of betrayal, sharpened over years of deceit.
And Keiser could not bring himself to believe that it had all been leading here.
An opportunity had come.
His hand shot to his chest—the very place where pain had once bloomed like fire, when his own sword was turned against him.
He remembered it vividly. How Gideon's sigils had coiled around the blade, moving with precision and ease, responding to his will as if born of it.
The pain had been excruciating, far before the blade pierced through the defensive enchantments of his armor. He had recognized the runes, familiar and brutal. Aisha's magic—the same that once protected him—was now the very force that shattered his defense. But something far more fragile had broken in that moment.
His trust.
He had watched, paralyzed, as one by one, his allies drifted not behind him—but beside Gideon.
His body had burned, skewered and suspended only by the blade that impaled him, preventing him from collapsing fully to the blood-slicked marble floor of the palace court.
But now…?
Now, his hands—sticky, warm, reeking of something foul—pressed against a chest that felt intact. There was no wound. No searing burns. No pain.
His breath caught in his throat.
His vision, long blurred by blood loss and unshed tears, began to clear.
He was no longer in the throne room.
No gleaming marble.
No towering arches.
No weeping royals.
No nobles circling like wolves, baring gilded fangs.
No blood.
No pain.
Instead, he lay in something damp and fetid, staring up at rotting wooden beams and a few clumps of moldering hay. A weary-looking horse, standing not far from him, gave a long, nasal snort that sounded uncomfortably close to laughter.
Then came a very human laugh.
"What in the name of the gods were you doing your highness, lying in Sir McKenzy's royal dump spot?"
Keiser blinked.
A boy—perhaps a teen—stood a few paces away, dressed in worn, stained work clothes, a pitchfork slung casually over one shoulder and a smile tugging at his mouth.
Keiser glanced down at himself.
His own garments were worse—plain, filthy, and drenched in the unmistakable stench of manure.
What… is this?
Without warning, the boy upended a bucket of water over Keiser's head.
The shock hit like a slap—icy, bracing, and irrefutably real. Keiser gasped, the sudden chill cutting through the haze in his mind. He was no longer in the court. No throne loomed overhead. No crown rested on the fourth prince's brow.
And then—
"I think you need another bucket," the boy muttered. "Seriously, why were you rolling around in McKenzy's shit?"
Keiser's head snapped up. The boy had extended a hand in offering.
Keiser frowned and slapped it away.
"Who are you?" he rasped. His voice was raw, gravel-thick, almost unfamiliar to his own ears.
The boy rolled his eyes. "Alright, Your Highness. Should you really be lying here? Weren't you saying yesterday you were waiting on the royal decree for the King's Gambit on the proclamation bulletin?"
King's Gambit.
The words landed like a blow to the chest. Keiser flinched, staggering as he pushed himself upright. His legs trembled beneath him. Instinctively, he reached for the boy's shoulders for balance.
He was shorter than Keiser expected—only slightly, but it surprised him.
Their eyes met. The boy's face was unremarkable, save for the mixture of annoyance and faint concern.
"What do you mean… King's Gambit?" Keiser asked, his voice barely above a whisper, his heartbeat thundering.
The boy made a face of pure disgust and flicked at Keiser's sleeve.
"Ugh. You're still covered in crap."
Keiser gritted his teeth and shake the boy by the shoulders, seizing him.
"What do you mean, the King's Gambit? That already happened! The candidates were chosen! The crown's been claimed!"
The boy pulled back slightly, raising an eyebrow. "Whoa, okay. Calm down. I don't know what kind of head sickness you're dealing with again, but the Gambit hasn't started yet. The official notice is going out today, so folks in far lands can get some training in before the first trial kicks off."
He shrugged, unconcerned. "Not that anyone from this dump's making it past the first round."
Keiser stared at him, breath caught in his chest, heart pounding like a war drum. The boy's words rattled through him, clashing with everything he knew, everything he remembered.
And yet, none of it made sense.
The boy kept speaking, unaware of the storm behind Keiser's eyes.
"Funny, isn't it? The last King's Gambit was, what—forty years ago? And even though the current King was Crown Prince back then, he took forever to hold the next one. Like nothing ever satisfied him."
What?
Keiser froze.
The air turned heavy. Distant. Unreal.
The Crown Prince?
That wasn't right.
The man who took the throne… wasn't the heir.
He had been the fourth prince—a spare, a shadow behind gilded names. No one had expected him to rise, not until the candidates began to fall—to betray, to die.
Keiser, a knight of low birth, had risen through the trials. He had stood at the threshold of the crown.
And Gideon—the fourth prince, his friend, his kingmaker—had betrayed him.
He'd always been planning to.
And now this boy spoke of the Gambit as if it had yet to begin. As if a 'Crown Prince' had taken the throne without contest.
Something is wrong. Deeply wrong.
The boy sighed and shoved his hands into his pockets.
"Well, obviously the nobles have the advantage. They've been trained for this since they were in their hands and feet. The rest of the kingdom? We're just trying not to starve."
Then the boy squinted at him.
"Still don't get why you wanna try. We ran away to get out of there, didn't we, Muzio?"
Muzio?
That wasn't his name.
Keiser narrowed his eyes.
This couldn't be heaven. Heaven didn't smell like mildew and old piss.
Hell, maybe.
But where were the flames? The screams? The judgment?
All he could hear was the groaning of old wood and the soft neighing of a horse—whose rear end was, rather unfortunately, positioned directly at them.
His breath came slow, cautious. The air stung his nose—too real, too coarse for the afterlife. He flexed his fingers. They obeyed, barely.
Every movement felt too easy for a corpse.
Too painful for a dream.
His jaw tightened.
This wasn't death.
This was something else.
And whatever it was—whoever had done this—had made a mistake.
Because Keiser did not stay dead.
And he wouldn't—not until he dragged every last one of them down with him.