Chapter 4: Echoes of Lysia

Chapter 4: Echoes of Lysia

The wind carried ash like falling snow — a mournful, grey cascade that blanketed the bones of Arcadia. Where once stood towers crowned in gold and streets echoing with laughter, now rose jagged ruins, their spires twisted into claws. The sky, a burnished veil of soot and fading embers, hung low over the city like a dying god’s final breath.

Kael Raikuro walked through the desolation, the obsidian armor clinging to his frame groaning softly with every motion. Hellsteel. A cursed fusion of metal and soul, bound by infernal rites he hadn't fully understood — only survived.

Each step echoed like a tolling bell through the ruins. Beneath his armored boots, mosaics that once depicted Arcadia’s saints and sovereigns cracked and splintered. His reflection stared back from a puddle of rain and blood — eyes glowing faint orange from within the horned helm, face forgotten behind the armor’s eternal mask.

In his palm, a soul shard pulsed.

Faint. Fragile. Alive.

It had survived the breach. Amid the firestorm and collapsing sanctums, Kael had found it glimmering in the wreckage of their home — the last remnant of Lysia. His wife.

He stopped beneath the broken arch of Lysian Cathedral, where the stars had once been painted across the ceiling in silver and lapis. Their daughter had taken her first steps here, stumbling across marble with arms outstretched. That moment — he remembered it vividly. The way Lysia had laughed, that bright, unguarded joy.

Now there was only silence.

The shard grew warm. His breath caught as the voice came — faint, flickering through the layers of memory.

> “Kael… if you hear this… if by some curse or miracle you survive… don’t become what they made you to be. Remember who you were. Who we were.”

Her voice was a thread of light in the suffocating dark. He knelt, fingers trembling inside the gauntlet. For a moment, he wasn’t a weapon. He was just a man. A widower. A father who had failed.

Then — a sound. Soft, wet, wrong.

He rose instinctively as a Blightbeast slithered from the shadows. A malformed creature born of demonic corruption — bone jutting through sagging muscle, skin seared black by brimstone. It moved like a spider dragged across fire, its eyes burning red from the pits of its skull.

It hissed, then lunged.

Hellsteel answered.

Raikuro’s arm morphed mid-motion, folding and tearing itself apart, reforming into a wicked glaive of soulmetal and serrated edge. The weapon screamed as it cut the air, trailing spectral fire. With a roar, Kael struck. One clean arc. The Blightbeast wailed, convulsed, and crumbled into soot and smoke.

Ash settled again. He stood in the silence, breathing heavily, blade humming with absorbed soul-echoes.

He looked at the glaive. A weapon forged not from steel, but the captured essence of demons — their fury, their pain, their hatred. The Soul Arsenal. Each kill fed it. Each soul absorbed made him stronger… and less himself.

That night, Raikuro camped amid the ruins of the Arbiter’s Hall, once a seat of judgment and peace. Now, only bones and black glass remained. He lit no fire. There was no need. The Hellsteel pulsed with warmth and malevolence. It fed off nearby traces of lingering demonic essence like a leech.

The soul shard pulsed again. But this time, it didn’t speak. It showed.

Images burned into his mind. Not memories of war or sorrow — but life.

Lysia dancing barefoot in the rain, soaked through and laughing. Her hair stuck to her skin, her smile radiant. Their daughter asleep beneath a quilt, hugging a plush drake toy. Himself, Kael Raikuro, smiling as he watched them. No armor. No weapons. Just Kael.

He gasped. The Hellsteel recoiled.

The suit rippled with agitation, molten lines crawling like veins across his skin.

> Too soft, it whispered.

Too weak.

Kill. Forget. Burn.

“No,” Kael growled, slamming his fist into the stone beside him. The armor buckled inward, struggling against his will — but it obeyed.

He sat there for hours, knees bent, staring into the glowing shard, forcing the memories to remain. He had to. If he forgot who Lysia was — who he was — then there was no point in surviving.

He wasn’t just fighting Dreadvorr’s legions. He was fighting himself.

And he was losing.

In the pale hours before dawn, as the sky lightened from coal to ash, Kael rose once more. The glaive receded, the Hellsteel adapting into its neutral form — a smooth, spined gauntlet glowing faintly along his forearm.

He stared at the horizon, where twisted towers speared the coming light. Arcadia would never rise again. But he would. And through him, so would Lysia.

She was his anchor. The shard, his guide.

The demons would learn what they had created — not a weapon to control, but a revenant forged from grief, wrath, and memory. One who would not stop.

One who would not forget.

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